Foreign Perspectives

You’d think that the big guys like blogger.com and the like would have the market for hosted blogs all sewn up but thanks to the open source nature of a number of blogging platforms that’s not the case.

Although they could have gone down the simplistic route and just replicated the features of some of the offerings available in this market, jrnl.com have chosen to add a few additional features of their own and see themselves as more of a blogging platform cum social network rather than a straight blogging platform. Opening things to mobile blogging they’ve an app for the iPhone too.

The blogging platform itself is powered by WordPress so you get all the features that you’d expect from major league blogging software. However, it’s a very new platform so there are some teething troubles eg go to members and you’ll find that the software fails when you try to access the blogs of the individual members (you can access them via other screens though). They need to work on the algorithm selecting the “featured members” as it currently seems to select from ALL of those blogging on the jrnl network which, of course, includes those who’ve merely registered and not actually written any blog posts at all.

Signing up is a doddle as you’d expect so it’s easy enough to give the platform a spin as apparently a fair number of people have done going by the percentage of effectively abandoned blogs although you’d expect abandoned blogs as that happens on all blogging platforms and this one being so new relatively speaking more people will be in the trial phase at the moment.

Overall, a few rough edges at the moment but it’s nice to see another option to the major platforms.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Blogging, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.