AOL gets blogging

Christian Crumlish

Jeff Jarvis reports on a sneak preview of AOL's upcoming weblogging entrant, saying "They've done a good job."

Jeff was invited along with Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, and Clay Shirky to preview the service, called AOL Journals. Discussing the meeting from the AOL perspective, an AOL employee named Kevin writes in his blog,

AOL Journals is different. No one thinks of blogging as a new "space" to conquer. Most of the people involved in the project realize that AOL’s coming into an established meta-community who are wary of any large corporate involvement in their space. I think we did a good job of explaining to the folks there, and explaining to people at AOL, that we’re here with a great measure of humility (I know, it's rare for AOL, but it's true). We’re trying to play nice with the larger blogging community by supporting open standards like RSS feeds for blogs. We’re trying to talk to folks in the community to see where we should work with them. It’s unique in my involvement in AOL products, which is a great step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned.

Both Kevin and Jeff mention a phone-enabled post-from-AIM bot and support for RSS.

Jeff cautions experienced bloggers not to write off AOL as a source of new blood in the blogosphere, saying "to be successful, AOL's blogs need to be part of the larger blog world. ... For us to be successful, we also need AOL's blogs to be part of our world."

Then (hey, it's the value-add!) Jarvis itemizes some of the ways blogs are used today, including as tools for Community (he thinks AOL is following a LiveJournal model), Content: (nanopublishing ventures), Marketing (self-promotion), Personal space (organizing your stuff).

He goes on to predict, surely not for the first time, that soon, everyone will have a weblog. Not simply because of the growing popularity of blogging, but because the weblog structure makes entering content and keeping track of things chronologically so easy, which will lead to a rearchitecting of our information spaces as logs. (OK, I'm paraphrasing here and possibly screwing up Jeff's point.)

He notes something that I just heard elsewhere, that About.com is relaunching itself with every columnist a blogger, using MT on the backend.

Finally, so you have a reason to click through to Jeff's site (beyond clarifying my oversimplification of a long detailed post), I'll mention that he and Anil offered AOL a killer "synergy" concept, somewhat similar to the deal Dave Winer brokered with the New York Times to enable webloggers to link to content behind the subscription wall.