Today, August 31 marks the soft beta launch of an application a couple of colleagues and me have been working on for the past year and a half or so. Lots of work, almost all for free … learning how to be an entrepreneur.
It is basically a tool for gathering, assembling and publishing microcontent. We have been paying a lot of attention to what a lot of fairly advanced bloggers have been saying about what they want in terms of ease-of-use, WYSIWYG and other full-blown editing features, and both structured and user-defined metadata.
It has also been designed to be an “information pivot”, so to speak … one can gather, just by drag and drop, virtually any type of microcontent, including:
– text (from blogs and web sites and MS Word)
– pictures
– links
– audio files
– video files
The microcontent that is gathered is stitched together automatically in the sequence in which it was collected (the items can be moved around at will, or deleted or more can be added).
This assembled microcontent can be viewed in a Preview window as it is being gathered (or not – as you wish) and then “click” – the content appears in a full-blown WYSIWYG Editor, which includes spell-check 😉
Customized style sheets can be built, that will appear in both the Preview window and the Editor (we will be building a range of templates, for those who are technically challenged).
The content can be published from the Editor to a range of blogs via a pull-down menu. It can (at the moment) be saved to RTF or HTML. Within the next several weeks we will add publishing destinations such as email, RSS and Atom feeds, PDFs and (I hope) wikis. Eventually, we will also add integrated systems such as ERP, CRM and LMS systems to this list.
It is lightweight, robust and essentially bug-free, as far as we can tell.
If anyone out there is interested in being a beta tester/user, and I haven’t invited you, please let me know in my Comments section below.
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