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Blogging comes to Demo@15
By Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld

Blogging got its share of attention at Demo@15, as the conference that highlights future products brought to its stage companies that are taking blogging in new directions.

In one of the fastest presentations ever seen at Demo, Five Across demonstrated its Bubbler blog application in two minutes, making its point that Bubbler is a rapid-fire blogging tool.

As he entered the stage, CEO Glenn Reid recorded a short message while his partner, David Aune, vice president of marketing, took a picture of the audience. Arriving at the computer set up on stage, Aune preceded to type in text on his blog that went live as he typed. In the meantime, the recording and the photo were sent wirelessly to the computer and the audience watched the screen as the blog was updated almost immediately with audio and photos.

iUpload may get business users of blogs flushed with excitement as well.

Leveraging the current popularity of blogging, iUpload's Perspectives is a blogging application that allows portions of any blog to be password-protected. As such, while a blog site might have content for a general audience, only part of that audience would be able to log in to a special marketing campaign or promotional offer.

A tool called Authoritative Perspectives allows users to target blogs to any uniquely defined group or even a single user.

Pluck, a personal Web information tool, allows users to save text in folders from numerous sources, such as Web links, RSS feeds, and downloaded PDF files. Once stored in a folder, users can publish any part of the content of a folder on a blog by using what it calls publicly available Web folders.

Bloggers can determine what part of their private folders they wish to publish, and with the click of the publish button it will be posted to the blog.

WhatCounts demonstrated BlogUnit Series, a 1U hardware device plus software that manages corporate blogs before they are published.

The blog software is centrally controlled and can be linked to both LDAP and Radius servers to control approvals before publishing, content viewing, and broadcasting.

Versioning and workflow control also allows content managers to roll back to previous versions of a post and maintain an audit trail of all versions.

Posted February 15, 2005 10:08 PM |