Personal Blogging With Logdit

At one time when blogs were new, you could privately blog your thoughts and feelings on the web and be pretty sure that no one was reading them unless you gave them a URL. But today, blogging is all about openness and transparency: this is me and this is what I think. That’s an issue Logdit wants to address. Logdit is a new service that aims to be a place where you can privately blog without worry. In fact, the whole point of the service is to be a platform for private blogging. Unlike LJ or Vox, you don’t need to remember to set this entry or that entry to "friends only" - at Logdit, privacy is the whole point. If you set up an individual blog, it’s just for you to see. No one else.

What kind of things might you like to privately blog? Well, diary-like entries come to mind, obviously. Not every want to share their most personal thoughts - even if it is with friends. But you could also use the service to make lists, keep records of a personal nature - like your passwords to various services (if you trust the company that much), a diet log, etc. etc.

Alternately, a small group could use Logdit in the same way. Lodgit suggests it could be used for "neighborhood watch, recording nuisance, opinions, and events." For some reason, I’m picturing the modern-day equivalent of a teen girl clique’s slambook, but that’s just me.

You can blog on Logdit via the web site, a desktop widget, or SMS. There is a free service at the basic level, but the price increases from there for more features like the removal of watermarks from printed documents (???). They also say that the download of the blogging widget is "$X". OK, then. One of their big features is the ability to print out blog entries. I felt like I time-warped just reading that. Print them out. On paper….made of trees. With optional borders…..Wow, just use Microsoft Word then! It’s private, too.

While in theory, the idea of creating a really private platform for blogging is a good one, Lodgit has some stiff competition. Both LJ and Vox do this already, as does TypePad, and they do it much better. Although there may be more settings to tweak on those platforms, anyone wanting to blog should be able to figure them out pretty easily. Heck, even my own sister, who is not always the savviest of computer users, mastered Vox without any training…Well, I hope she meant for that blog to be public. Hmmm. (*Removing link*).

Additionally, the Lodgit web site looks…decidedly un-modern. For example, where on earth did they get those buttons on the right? My Geocities blog from 1998? I hate to judge a book by its cover here, but, boy, that could that use some work.

All that being said, I would love it if someone would build this sort of platform. There are many great features in Vox to make it easy on new bloggers, but when you desperately need a feature (like the ability to export your book collection for example - grr!!), you realize that there are still a lot of things lacking.

But Logdit doesn’t want to compete with Vox, or LJ, or anyone else - instead they’re offering very few features, seemingly intentionally. I just have to wonder…who’s going to use this?

*Note - found via #twitpitch.