(Here's the first in some semi-random thoughts that have been running around in my head since BloggerCon.)
The blogging world has many different levels of technical expertise. You've got bloggers who are programmers, teachers, lawyers, writers, kids and doctors. The only thing they really have in common is that they feel like writing things and just throwing them out to the world to read. Unfortunately, the tools aren't always the easiest for people to work with. I was talking to Jenny Levine during the sunday's aggregator session and showed her I was using NetNewsWire and she mentioned that her mom (I think) had tried to use it and had a hard time with it. At first I was a bit confused by this. I've been using NNW for a while and find it quite easy and intuitive. But then again, I know how all this stuff works. I know what a news feed is, I know what to look for to find it. For people who don't use this stuff as much a lot of this may be a mystery.
I think one big issue is that blogging comes from from the technical world. As a result, many of the tools are functional but not necessarily user friendly. I've found that I am much more willing to deal with slightly kludgy ways of doing things when a technology still isn't that mainstream. Take RSS for instance. If a person who is new to blogging sees a page with the orange xml icon they're not going to have any idea what it is. If they click on it, they may or may not see something useful depending on the browser they are using. Some aggregators require you to put in the url to the RSS feed, some will look for a link to the feed in the home page if a web site's URL is used. Radio offers a mechanism to subscribe to feeds that have the little xml coffee cup icon. Less technically savvy people tend to get confused when having all these options. I actually like the way Radio handles it a lot. And I think it wouldn't be difficult to code support for something like that into most aggregators, if you can get the various developers to agree that this is a good idea (and that's a whole other topic for later). For me I think that a lot of these tools are quite good, but I do realize that they aren't always that obvious to other people who aren't as into computers as I am.
I'll give one more quick example. Radio Userland. For the beginner, it isn't too hard to set up. You run the program, register, and you've got your own blog that is hosted at Userland. The problem comes when you decide you want to personalize your page more. I think Radio's biggest weakness is how it handles blog templates. You end up needing to work on a number of different files to change your home page. There's the main template, that is used for everything but the home page. Then there's the Home page template. Then within each of those templates you have day templates. And then there are item templates which format the individual posts. Radio is quite powerful, at its heart is a pretty neat CMS system. But I think it is just too much for most people. Most would get a lot more out of something more simple.
One thing I'm always afraid to do is underestimate users. I've been a sysadmin and done user support for ages and they constantly surprise me. So I'm also wondering: Is this really a big deal? Are things good enough as they are?
