Blogging Is Still Primitive

I had decided some time ago that I wanted to write up the Dopplr case study from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, which I finally completed yesterday (see here). What a pain it turned out to be!

I thought it would be straightforward: convert the 20 or so slides into graphics, upload them, write down more-or-less the words that I said at the workshop.

The conversion was easy. Everything else was a hassle.

First, uploading the graphics. I like to keep all my graphics on Flickr, so I have a single repository, and one that is independent of blogging platform, so I could move in the future if I want to. Flickr has a really nice Flash-based batch upload capability, which I can’t get to work in Safari. So I uploaded the files using Firefox.

Flickr also supports posting an image to your blog, but not a batch of images. And cutting and pasting the URLs of a long series of images seemed like a drag. Principally because Flickr does not sequentially number the images being uploaded: they are randomly (for all intents and purposes) named.

Instead I bailed on the Flickr images, and manually uploaded the file in Typepad. I copied and pasted a single “img” link to one of the files and changed the number manually: they ranged from slide21 to slide42.

Anyway: one of the most obvious things to do on a blog, I would think, would be to embed a series of images (a vacation, a powerpoint, pictures of your flower bed, whatever) and comment on them. It turned out to be a pain in the neck.

The blog companies have a long way to go. Companies like Flickr have a long way to go supporting indigenous content like mine being distributed in some way aside from the basic models they now support.