Not A Dollarshort

Design Tweaks

Refresh your web browser to see some minor tweaks I made to the design of this weblog.

Promise of Content

If I didn't spend most of my waking hours talking about weblogs or working on ways to improve the tools that produce them, I'd probably feel a bit more guilty about neglecting my own weblog. However, even with that said, I have to admit that I do feel extremely guilty whenever I see someone linking to my weblog in their sidebar. I know that they know that I can do better.

I'm going to post more often, if not for myself, then for those who use Six Apart products. Afterall, if I use our own tools more regularly then I'll be better equipped to judge how they should be improved.

AOL Journals

While in Washington DC, I had the opportunity to visit AOL, see a demo of AOL Journals and meet the team developing the product. Many of my initial impressions were similar to those of Jeff and Clay -- actually, most of my initial impressions were shaped by these write-ups and a briefing from Anil on what I was going to see. Not that this was a bad thing: I'd rather go into a product demo believing that the development team has gotten things right rather than expecting that the product to be utter garbage. Without the New York demos from a couple weeks ago, I would have certainly guessed that the product would have been closer to the latter.

The fact of the matter is that fundamentally, they hit the core weblogging elements on the mark. What they are doing -- whether called journals or weblogs -- is in fact weblogging. The elements are there, the output is familiar and the user behavior resembles all that us "real webloggers" would recognize. This isn't just some message board with a blogging label slapped on -- the AOL Journals team is taking the time and effort to get this right and that's highly commendable. Within a company the size of AOL, this is an amazing feat.