Wow. 2008. I've been using digital communications for 25 years now. One time, I was using a terminal to draft a letter that I was going to print when the mainframe rebooted. Somehow, my personal letter went out to
all commands in NATO on top secret secured routes.
That was a fun day (not).
I can imagine that some European intelligence agencies spent time trying to figure out who "Debbie" was and what new sensitive compartmented information code words were in that cryptic communication.
While I've sucked on the internozzle for personal use since 1200 baud modems and typed a million ascii characters over the years, I've only been publishing a blog for about 1600 days out of the 9125 days spent online. While popular wisdom says you can't teach an old dog new tricks, I learn new things everyday because I am not a dog. I am a digital dinosaur. I am the J-fuzz-o-saur.
1. Blogdrive
On a technical level, I think I like the fact that the Blogdrive service has found a nice balance between ease of use for casual users and raw capability for more advanced users. Your grandmother can blog if she can type and click a mouse. Hardcore datasmiths and pixel monkeys can also use the same service to professionally publish. Their built-in tag board was integrated before social networking became a tech industry buzzword.
2. Project Playlist
I've really become attached to this free service. I listen to music playlists daily now. There are other great music apps available, but I think Playlist jumps ahead of the pack. In my mind, they win because they score high on ease of use, application of widgets, and social networking.
3. Photobucket
Another free service, Photobucket hosts your images. I think I have several hundred images there. While I have a Flickr account, it seems to load slowly and lacks easy blog widgets. The fact that Blogdrive was way ahead of the curve in their colloboration with Photobucket to integrate their service into the Blogdrive entry editor makes this a vital thing to have.
4. YouTube
YouTube is the top free video hosting service. I am a great fan of the pioneering work of Atom Films, but they had to follow YouTube in the social networking era of the web. Now there are a growing number of video sites that incorporate the fundamentals of YouTube. Good times we live in.
5. Feedburner
Feedburner is so flexible and user friendly, but it would be useless if Blogdrive didn't give all free blogs the XML and ATOM syndication data that Feedburner uses as the raw ingredients for its blog widget cupcakes. Feedburner is your digital megaphone.
There are another dozen services and applications that a person new to web publishing should investigate and use. However, I just pondered my own 1600 days of experience in order to list my top 5 must-have favorites for someone starting a blog in 2008.
All 5 are free, but some also offer expanded services for a small fee. All 5 are user-friendly and easy to use. All 5 are flexible in their use and have widgets transportable and usable (embed code) on other web sites.
Content and Design are still the King and Queen of publishing information on the web, even including your personal blog. For some people, a dictionary might be far more useful than a free Feedburner account — but if you're willing to learn a little something new, you'll have even more fun blogging in 2008.
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