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!)