In My Experience... | Testing AOL Journals. (1722)

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Testing AOL Journals.
[ Posted by Dan on July 17, 2003 | 6 Comments ]

Internal beta testing of AOL Journals opened up yesterday, and I have dutifully started an AOL Journals blog and posted my suggestions and comments to the appropriate forums. It's no secret that AOL is doing this, but I didn't know any real details until yesterday. Also, I re-read the note about not leaking details, so this post is pretty restrained.

Here's a few tidbits that I think are not embargoed, but aren't really that juicy...

The set up was stupid easy. I mean, my daughter could do it, and she's 9 weeks old.
NetNewsWire can read my Journal's RSS file.
The instant messaging conduit works pretty well, and I think IM blogging is a good thing.
There's one thing about commenting that I like and hate at the same time. I'll rant and rave about this when the product goes public.

It's a good start, and it's not a "premium" service (as in, I don't have to pay extra dollars to have an AOL Journal) so I'm pretty hopeful that this thing will take off. The basics are there and it's pretty solid.

[Disclaimer: I do not work on the Journals product. It should be assumed that any product still under development will change, so don't expect anything I say here to be true when this thing goes live. Be sure to read around for a lot more info that I can provide.]

From what I've heard, AOL is doing a great job with their Journals. It even sounds like it's going to be much better than Blogger. It'll be interesting to see how this affects Blogger's usage.

-Posted by milbertus on July 17, 2003 12:11 PM

believe it or not, the new AOL journals idea will make me want to login to my uncle's AOL account (once it's public) with him, just to check it out, and then hopefully, to recommend to him that he publish a journal online...

i'm just hoping non-AOL subscribers will be able to read them.

-Posted by john on July 17, 2003 08:53 PM

Yep, they can.

-Posted by Dan on July 18, 2003 09:20 AM

(I wonder if I can convince my mom to try it, if it's really that easy ... )

I think AOL Journals is a good thing, mostly because the more people entering the blogging community, the better. I'm not saying that it'll increase the overall quality of the community, and I'm sure the percentage of quality blogs will drop dramatically, but I still like the idea of allowing people easy ways to let their voices be heard. With the (apparently) easy interface, there should be a low enough barrier to entry that even my mom can start blogging.

(Of course, I wonder how the addition of people who are accustomed to the simplified AOL Journals will affect blogging interfaces in the future.)

-Posted by Lee on July 24, 2003 04:19 PM

I love AOL journals. I use it everyday.

-Posted by Nikki Malena on September 7, 2003 03:47 PM

Well, I'm hoping keeping a journal on line and letting other people read my secret ravings is worthwhile. Maybe the little men in White coats won't catch up to me. That is unless one of you guys snitch on me.

-Posted by Caroline on October 28, 2003 02:50 AM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).