A few days ago, 901am.com got the scoop that Blogsmith was going to be released to the public early in 2007. It’s aimed at taking on blogging sites like WordPress.com, Blogger and TypePad. Details are still sketchy, but Blogsmith already has a good start.
Blogsmith is is owned by AOL / Time Warner and it powers some of the largest blogs on the net including Engadget, TV Squad, Download Squad and my favorite TUAW. With Blogsmith powering these blogs, they’ve had time to work out the bugs, optimize the code and make sure that everything runs at peek permanence for tons of visitors. Even with all that testing though, giving any service to the general public will render issues.
All the details are not yet known, but Brian Alvey writes that Blogsmith would be hosted application much like Blogger or TypePad. You have the option to have your own domain, but you won’t get the option to download the code like you can with WordPress.
So at this point, Blogsmith’s effect is to early to speculate. There is no official word on the details, if it’s free or what the backend looks like. However, it could be a big player in the blog software area in 2007.
“There is no official word on the details, if it
Good points Chris. I’m eager to see how it works with publishing to other sites. Since I can’t find good (and easy to install) ASP blogging software, this might be a nice, professional alternative.
I’m not sure how much I agree that Blogsmith will be more successful with larger blogs. Since it’s hosted, I’m guessing that the content will be on another company’s site (though I could be wrong, I haven’t found/read enough to know for sure), and many (most?) business/blog owners want to control every aspect of their IP; and rightly so… that content is the lifeblood of their blog.
What I do know is that it will be very interesting to see a new competitor step into the hosted blog software scene and watch what the current players do to continue to attract and retain users.
Excellent point Jon, especially with the ‘control’ mention. It’ll be interesting to see how it unfolds.
Great Stuff, I like it.
If they throw enough money into BlogSmith I’m sure it will be a success. Competition with blogger and wordpress is a good thing.
I wanted to use blogsmith as my personal blog platform but couldn’t find an installation package for myself. If they remain a hosted solution they will hardly ever become as popular as wordpress.
Its 2008 and this haven’t happened. Blogsmith looks like a modified version of WordPress to me.
Visited blogsmith, there are nothing but random posts on the site and no link to sign up for the service. Even the people who run the site are a bunch of smart @ss’s with cheeky remarks about their jobs.