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Weblogs
For The Masses: Trellix Enters The Weblog Market
We
were enchanted when we first saw Dan Bricklin’s Trellix product
in 1997 and the idea behind it that there should be a product for
creating, editing, and formatting documents that were intended to
live an electronic life rather than to be printed on paper.
The initial emphasis was on creative formats and incredible
flexibility in navigation choices. But
the web had other ideas in mind.
Fortunately for Trellix, so did they and the product became
the basis of a very popular OEM web site creation tool.
You can’t buy it (unless you’re a Service Provider),
except as a user of one of their OEM customers.
Over 1 million of those customers use Trellix to create web
sites for nearly anything you might imagine.
They are, of course, mainly individuals and small
businesses. But
it’s mainly a static world – they update their web sites on
average 2.5 times per month. In
the meantime, another very important web phenomenon has arrived
– blogging. Those
of you who read this newsletter or my weblog at http://amywohl.weblogger.com
know how excited I am by this new medium. Today
these are essentially used as separate media.
Even folks like me (and there are thousands of us) who have
both weblogs and web sites may link them together, but they are
managed separately, came up by separate development paths, and use
different tools. Once
I got into the simplicity of blogging (it’s gratifyingly
immediate and requires no technical skills at all), I kept wishing
that my web site and my Blogger were all in one. But
although there are Bloggers who are clearly non-techies, blogging
today requires that (1) you know about it as a separate idea and
(2) you go to a site that offers blogging and go through a sign-up
process. (It is
possible to implement blogging on your own site, for yourself
and/or others, but this is much less common.)
That means it isn’t yet a mainstream activity.
(Or as I like to put it, Grandma isn’t doing it.) “We’re
so early.” said Don Bulens, Trellix CEO.
“This is not just about alternative methods of reporting
news. It’s also for
the Soccer League or the Boy Scout Troop to have a private blog
with their members. Or
for a family or a small business for status reporting.” We’d
agree. We have no
idea just where this might end.
I have a wonderful time blogging with my pals in high tech,
but who know what community Bloggers or groups of vertical markets
might do? Starting
August 15, Trellix will be making a version of their software
available to their partners that adds blogging to their web site
development tools. Depending
on when and how those partners choose to offer this new feature,
we’d expect that mainstream users may suddenly discover blogging
as soon as later this year... In
the Trellix offering, Weblogs will be together with the web site
and Weblogging will be a feature of the web site.
Trellix
will also offer their new Weblog features as a separate weblog
tool. Trellix
is not the first to offer weblogs to other communities.
For example, Dave Winer recently made arrangements to
provide his blogging software, Radio Userland, to Salon, which has
now established a blogging opportunity for its readers and is
growing its own blogging community. My
friend Dave Winer, of Userland introduced me to blogging. He is a
pioneer in the blogging software community (as both a developer
and a Very Important Blogger).
Dave points out that it’s possible to create a web site
in Manila (the software his firm created which is behind my blog).
At first I wondered if I should be embarrassed that I
didn’t know that. Then
I wondered how you sell a product to the mainstream market if they
don’t know about its features.
And, as we’ve said, so far web sites and blogs are just
separate things. This
is a good example of the difference between an excellent product
with robust features which requires time and skills to use and a
product with fewer choices which assumes its users don’t want to
know how the car works – they just want to take it for a ride.
Developers, technical users, and professionals within a
field love (and need) the former.
Consumers simply don’t know what to do with it – unless
they decide that whatever it does is going to be their passion;
they prefer buying a Walkman to buying a kit in Radio Shack or a
fully featured all-bands radio from a specialty shop. So
my company site, www.wohl.com
is managed by a professional web design firm that uses Dreamweaver
(their tool of preference) and I have to wait for them to post
content and make changes. In
a perfect world I could go to the wohl.com web site and add or
change something as easily as Dave’s software lets me write a
new blog. I can’t
do that today. Even
if I moved everything to one of Trellix’s partners I couldn’t
do that, because their partner distribution paradigm doesn’t
today support sites of my size and complexity.
But someday, someone will.
And we may change our minds about the relationship between
web sites and weblogs. www.Trellix.com Comments or Questions: Send Email to
opinions@wohl.com
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