From Scripting News, today:
A News.com article on the topic disputes Dave's numbers:
From a trusted correspondent, talking with a contact who works at the Netscape part of AOL/Time Warner. "He said they had decided that weblogs are the next killer app, and that most of the work at the Mountain View office was going into building a weblog component for AOL. He also mentioned that about 400 people are working on that software. This is in constrast to about 20 who are working on Mozilla."From me, in October, just after starting my blog:
So I'm talking with one of my colleagues about blogs, and explaining how only twice in my life have I had this sense that a technology was about to become really important. We're both reminiscing about the early days of post-BITNET e-mail, and the first wave of web sites (remember O'Reilly's Network Navigator?). And then the conversation turns to "what happened to all that promise"? I remind him of the day the AOL floodgates opened and usenet and e-mail were never the same. What's going to be the effect on blogging when/if the exponential curve takes its sharp turn upwards?Update, 9 May 03
A News.com article on the topic disputes Dave's numbers:
Could Winer's trust be misplaced? After news of AOL's plans broke on the site Good Experience, AOL confirmed it did have some kind of blogging application up its sleeve. AOL told Random Access that it would say more about it in June or July, but not before then. But those familiar with AOL's plans called the head count reported on Winer's blog implausible at best. "La-la land" is where one AOL insider placed the 400 number, pointing out that AOL has long had tools that let people post content of their own and making the leap from those tools to blogging software would not require anywhere near that amount of staff.
400 people?? What can they all be doing?
As Dave said, I hope they support existing standards (MetaWeblog API and RSS). FOAF would be nice too, but I'm not expecting that.
It aint AOL- but Earthlink unveiled a blogging tool today. I am not sure I am happy with it (no RSS files! No weblog API's! And apparently all entries are dated with Pacific time, unless I am missing an option somewhere), but It was a fairly painless process.
Here is what I managed to set up:
http://home.earthlink.net/~karchner/
If anyones interested, I'll put some screenshots together.
Earthlink subscribers can mess with it here:
http://www.earthlink.net/home/tools/trellix/login/