It has been an extremely busy week on Blogwareland. The project is really firing on all cylinders and I'm starting to get pretty excited about the upcoming release. Most of my time has been devoted to staff training. We took 30 or so staffers through hands-on with the service in a lab environment and the feedback has been great. I really enjoyed taking everyone through the in's and out's of Blogware and the weblog market and it is great to see the rest of the team over here finally starting to understand why I'm so excited by Blogware and the weblog opportunity. If you think that wrapping your own head around the blogosphere was tough to grok - try and get 150 people on the same page about it ;)
This bout of training gave me the excuse I needed to try out a page out of Doc Searls presentation playbook - going outside of the "bullet-snore-click-snore" structure that Powerpoint forces on Office users, aka "Death by PowerPoint". I've had the pleasure of seeing Doc "present" a few times and he's really taught me that 60 slides in 60 minutes is only bad if the content is bad...
The Blogware dev team is also totally in the zone. A bunch of new features coming out this week and a few bug fixes as well. I can see v1.0 just over the horizon...
Something old, something new, something boring and nothing blue...
Something Old...
Comment Notifications v2.0! Weblog publishers getting comment notifications is old hat. Now, authenticated readers can also choose to receive comment notifications on a per article, per category or on a site-wide basis. Publishers also get to choose whether or not this feature is even available to their readers.
Something New...
Import/Export. Publishers can now get the important content out of their old weblogs and into their shiny new Blogware weblog. Also, the Export feature makes your Blogware content just that much more portable - great peace of mind. Import initially supports only MT imports with support for the Blogger, Radio and other formats shortly.
Something Boring...
Bug fixes. Yawn. ;) Publishers will notice that the webstats are much snappier now - we realized a ton of performance increases with some of these new fixes.
Nothing Blue...
No, I meant it - there was nothing blue. Well, just this. Literally.
So what's the big take away? It has been impossible for me to keep up with my email this week. If you've sent me a message and I haven't gotten back to you, rest assured, I still love you - its just that I'm currently 300 messages behind where I should be - and that's after 4 hours of catch up. Problem is, I'm not going to get through it all today - marketing needs sign-off on virtually everything that they've been working on for Blogware this afternoon and unless I wade into it, they are going to hunt me down and kill me - probably with a bad PowerPoint presentation or something ;)
Coming soon to a Blogware near you: Dancing paperclips, handcuffs and satanic verses...
