New Blogging Platform Coming Soon

Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad (what I use), and recently-acquired Livejournal has just announced a new blogging platform, dubbed Project Comet. With a planned launch date sometime in early 2006, Project Comet promises to "combine the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered from Movable Type." One new feature on the Comet website is called "Community Aggregation," which will let you create blogs and share sections of them with other users. I imagine this is a takeoff on the "guest blogging" and "Free-for-all-Fridays" (aka FFAF) that are popular with bloggers today.

Another new feature is "Multiple Streams," which makes the lofty promise to "provide a single place to keep everything that is important to you." I think that may be a bit of an over-exaggeration, and since I haven’t heard of them buying Gmail, I don’t think that will be true for me. However, it does purport to be "a record of your life is created by incorporating streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single customized blog with an identity of its own." I’m not sure how this goes beyond what Typepad offers me today, since you can make photo albums, "what I’m reading/listening to" lists, etc. Maybe they mean to make it easier to post rich media like Bubbler does, which would be great. I’m interested to see what they mean by that.

The final feature mentioned is privacy, which, again, is already incorporated into Typepad, with password-protect options for entire sites or just specific blogs. The best part of all these promised changes is that they will be offered to current Typepad members at no extra charge. (Yes!)

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Over at Engadget, there was a post about the possibility of Google TV. The talk has been all over the net this week because Google had posted an ad for a "Google TV Project Manager." (They’ve since taken down the ad.) The person they were looking for should be knowledgeable about “the intersection of Internet and Television technologies, Video-On-Demand, Personal Video Recorders and emergence of next generation set-top-boxes with IP connectivity,” according to that now-deleted post.

Speculation is rampant. Let’s begin: Google buys up dark fiber. Google launches Video Search. Google hires TV Project Manager. Hmmm. I think Google is planning an ISP. In my neighborhood, Brighthouse delivers high-speed internet and cable TV; Verizon FIOS just became available, which is only internet access for now, but in the future, they plan on offering all the TV channels in HDTV. Maybe this is where Google wants to compete. The Google ISP where you surf the net via free Wi-Fi and watch TV over the Google OS using the Google browser. It could happen.