July 05, 2003
The Sleeping Goliath Awakes!

Man, I’ve always wanted to be able to write a headline like that :-)

Joi Ito has posted a link to an item on Jeff Jarvis’ blog that’s worth paying attention to. (Jarvis is a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner.) Jarvis, along with a few other well-placed individuals, has been given a sneak peek at the next big push from AOL: integrating blogging tools into their software.

And when they say integrate, they apparently mean it. They’re not just talking about adding a “Blog” keyword to the AOL client software. They want you to be able to blog from everything. Example: the next revision of the AIM client software will allow you to post via AIM!

It sounds like AOL Journals (that’s the official name for the initiative) is also taking care to play nice with the rest of the community; for example, Journals will automatically publish in both HTML and RSS, making the process of becoming a content syndicator painless. That’s especially important given that most users of the service will probably be newbies to the blogging world. The nightmare everybody’s had about AOL entering this space has been that they’d do it in a ham-fisted way and repeat The September That Never Ended, but it looks like that’s not gonna be the case. Whew!

So prepare for the world of microjournalism to get a whole lot more interesting real soon. Hmm, if AOL is into blogs, I wonder how long it will be until Big Red jumps in…

Posted by Jason Lefkowitz at July 05, 2003
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Ant's Eye View is edited by Jason Lefkowitz, a consultant and Web developer in Alexandria, Virginia. Got a question, comment, or concern? Let me hear it!

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