Weblogging interfaces

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According to MacMinute, Six Apart has just upgraded their online weblogging service TypePad to a new version 1.4 and Nokia announced yesterday that their Lifeblog moblogging service will be compatible with TypePad, making it their preferred support. Christian Lindholm from Nokia offers some reflections about this move.

This kind of move is key to the weblogging software/service editors, as by pursuing towards the simplification of the interface they will attract more and more people. One deals with interfaces, not technology, and the simplicity of their "user interface" -- compared to, say, using FrontPage and FTP to publish a "personal page" -- was what lifted them off the ground. Now, with a phone and in a couple of clicks, you can publish photos on the web. You can call a phone number and as easily as leaving a voicemail get an audioblog post published on your site. (Yes, I know about the Audioblogging Manifesto, and love it, but my point is about simplicity of interfaces.) I hear that better WYSIWYG editing is coming to TypePad and Movable Type (it's about time). There are probably lots of ground for new ideas in the UI field, and not just what can render in a web browser.

On a side note, I think that mobile phones operators will just love moblogging wrapped like Nokia does with Lifeblog, as it might finally give some reason to their punters for using the awfully expensive MMS feature on their camera-phone. That's almost a symbiosis.