Out with autonomous blogging. In with Democratic blogging ! Well atleast thats what I can think of after seeing BlogEverywhere after reading about it for 10 minutes. Idea of Sabeer Bhatia, who struck gold with Hotmail in 1995.
The idea is simple. To allow readers to blog about a site, article or a blog post. Basically anything that is identifiable by a URL. The small download (yes there is a download) installs a Browser Helper Object (IE only at the moment) that enables a small window at the bottom of the browser, where you can add comments about a URL currently active in the browser. These comments are actually stored on the BlogEverywhere site, with a reference to the URL. Users can later on search for a URL and see if someone has a comment posted about the URL. Other users can again write comments on that URL and everything is aggregated around that URL. It is good in the sense that it will allow for more user views revoloving around a static URL, and that too in a centralized fashion. Apart from that, what is the real usability, I am not able to decipher at the moment.
When you browse to a URL in the browser, the BlogEverywhere BHO senses the URL and detects if anyone has already made any comments on this URL. It then shows the number of comments on this URL as a alert in the BHO toolbar as shown below:
The BHO has a built in Ticker for RSS feeds that you have subscribed to. Here is a screen shot showing posts from my blog:
The service also claims to have a built in Hotmail enhnacer, which I guess at the moment logs into your Hotmail account and caches the e-mail messages on your PC, for faster access. More screenshots when I use that.
What could be the business model for this service? Guess we need to wait and watch, if there is any.
BlogEverywhere was developed by KPIT systems, Pune, India.
BlogEverywhere, Sabeer Bhatia
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