Improving blogging tools

Thinking about the different blogging tools that you use and have used, how do you think they could be improved?

What are the most significant areas in which blogging tools might improve in the next couple of years?

Here are my thoughts:

Content Management & Creation

As users are starting to get to grips with the idea of blogging they are starting to shift more than just their CV online. Blogging is becoming the medium by which we’re constructing our digital presence and this includes documents, presentations, essays, project plans and more. Both Drupal and WordPress have great CMS properties but what they don’t have is outstanding authoring potential, perhaps something like Qumana will change this?

Visual Representation & ‘Net ID’

Gravatars are having a serious impact but as long as they’re third party and non-standard there’s going to be limited use. However, this and anti-spam pro-convenience centralised and standards based digital identities are just over the horizon and blogs will make or break these systems… as well as being the first tools to truly use them. keep your eyes open for these.

Broadcast

Even the superb WordPress lags sadly behind some other tools in ‘ease of podcasting’ stakes. The same could be said of pretty much every tool available and this will have to change. Expect, ‘include podcast’ button soon.

Ease of use

This has been on the table for a loooong time and yet major development has really come from the userbase getting more savvy than the systems becoming particularly easier to use. There’s a visual metaphor missing here, a confusion of what blogging really is all about, which will… with time… make this as accessible a medium as the desktop. What blog designers need to do is to avoid falling into the ‘curse of the wiki’ and insisting on ‘blog-culture’ and ‘purity’ of approaches… there’s plenty of room for some pretty radical departures from the current ‘backend’ and I think, in the next couple of years, someone or some group is going to take serious advantage of this.

What do you think will and won’t change?