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July 06, 2003
AOL Journals: "It doesn't suck."
The weblog world always wondered when the sleeping giants would wake up and take notice. Well, at least one giant has awakened: AOL is rolling out weblogs. Jeff Jarvis writes about "AOL Journals" in BuzzMachine. Jarvis was one of a few A-List bloggers invited to preview AOL Journals (others were Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Nick Denton, and Clay Shirky. Highlighted features of the "AOL Journals" include blogging from AIM and support for RSS 2.0. The general consensus: "It doesn't suck."
Both Jarvis and Shirky (writing about AOL Journals in Corante's Many-to-many social software weblog) make note of the challenge that faces AOL: will AOL Journals be a community tool (a la LiveJournal) or a lightweight publishing tool (a la Movable Type). Shirky has a spot-on analysis of this in his post. He says, in part:
Community conversation vs Lightweight publishing platform is not a zero-sum set of choices, but there is a spectrum of offerings, from LiveJournal's hyper-sociability, to Blogger, which still doesn't support comments, and the choice of features has a significant effect on patterns of use.LiveJournal simply isn't much fun, unless your friends are using it, too. I suspect, as Shirky suggests, that AOL will lean more toward the LiveJournal model than an independent weblog model -- AOL's insularity is part and parcel of its success.
If that turns out to be the case, I expect AOL Journals to have little significant impact on the world of weblogs that I imagine you and I participate in, dear reader. I mean, how many LiveJournal sites do you read regularly?
Update at 9:27am: Oh, and one more thing -- how long now before MSN incorporates a weblog tool? :-)
Posted July 6, 2003 09:13 AM