Blogging Roller

Steven Vore points out that TopStyle is one of the first products he's seen that has a weblog built into it. Here's the Weblog . Update: here's a picture of how it looks inside TopStyle [ Raible Designs, Built-in Blog] .

When I read Matt's post earlier today, I assumed that TopStyle is an HTML editor that now has weblog publishing features. On closer inspection, it appears that is not the case?

Anyway, this made me start thinking about weblogging software as a commodity. If it is a commodity that means you can't really make money selling weblogging software. You might be able to make money selling weblogging related services as weblogger.com does, or you might be able to make your existing software more valuable by adding weblogging features to it. Seems to me that weblogging features would make sense in an HTML editor/publisher, portal software, or even an e-Commerce suite. I wonder what other categories of software would benefit from weblogging features.

UPDATE: Russell commented on this post.

Reading more on Skribe in the Noumenauts Yahoo Group, I found an interesting email exhange about revenue schemes. Apparently, one idea is to build blogging software that allows bloggers to establish different categories of blog posts and then charge money to readers who wish to read premium categories. Then Noumenauts takes a cut of that money. Apparently, they hope to appeal to celebrities (they mention luring Wil Wheaton away from Movable Type as an example) who want to make money off of blogging.

Hey Russell, this might be the ticket! Pull an all-nighter, add premium categories to MiniBlog, and fund your trip to Esther Dyson's big-blowout in Berlin. "Want to know how I feel about lawyers? Just enter your credit card number and hit the submit button."

This " competitors" document keeps on showing up in my referrers logs and finally piqued my interest enought to get me googling. Apparently Anna and friends are working on Skribe , an "Open Source, Java-based, robust, flexible, dynamic web journaling application" developed using a modified RUP process. Hey guys, why re-invent the wheel? You all ought to sign up as developers on the Roller project. You are looking for an architect, right? I'll be happy to tell you what to do ;-)

I don't like having comments on my Web log because I believe if you want to comment then you should do so on your own Web log. If I'd wanted to host a discussion forum, I'd have installed discussion forum software, not Web logging software! [ Hixie's Natural Log, Whitepaper: Pingback vs. Trackback found via diveintomark]

I still think comments are a nice feature, if only for those hapless folks who have no weblog.