Doc is moderating. Great set of panelists. Doc asks where tools are going.

Jason Shellen of Blogger: Blogger is playing catchup. They were building a tool for web designers originally. They now have 1.5M registered users. So, they’re doing a major code revision. He agrees with Tim Appnel on the previous panel that the tools will fade away; you won’t notice them or recognize them as blogging tools.

Bob Frankston: We need to try out many more ideas. We need more people to do experimental development

Dan Bricklin: 1. You have to integrate your blog with the rest of your web site. 2. The current generation of blog tools take care of the housekeeping. This is like VisiCalc and 1-2-3. We’re not yet at the level of Excel. One of the important new capacities will be multimedia. But we don’t know what will be invented.

Anil Dash of Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type. The immediate future for them is a service for beginning bloggers. More generally, MT thinks that “the anatomy of the weblog has been decided,” e.g., blogroll, permalink, TrackBack, etc. The goal should be to work backwards from what people are doing with blogs to provide them with the tools they need.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter: You shoudn’t have to blog only from your PC. Their research shows that we want at least two bloggable devices.

John Robb of Userland: They’re getting ready to release Frontier 9 with spiffy new features. On the Radio side, they’re looking forward to synching up with multiple desktops. There will be continuing need for desktop clients as more multimedia gets included.

Jason tells us to check QLogger.com, whose creator is in the audience.

Anil: We can broaden publishing so that you can present a much fuller picture of yourself, including potentially all the audio you hear all day. But then we’ll probably want to control who sees/hears what, he says.

Bob says we’ll get very good at creating “synthetic personalities.”

Doc is now dinging the panelists for features. Dave has just promised to add the ability to add a link within Radio without having to go to a menu.

Kerfuffle about what to call MovableType’s code: Open Source? Nah. Editable source? Yeah. The panel did not go off the rails on this the way it wanted to.

Doc wants to be able to serve up photos from his desktop. Dan says that that is unlikely to come through blogging since blogging is too complex; people will want to dump their photos onto the machine and have magic happen. (Major paraphrasing.) Anil wants to be able to store it in The Cloud rather than having to connect up at home.

Bob says the real innovation is going to come out of Japan.

Categories: Uncategorized dw