Spiral Bound

Robert Scoble on Traction

Traction claims to have the best Enterprise Weblog software. One problem: the price. Enterprises aren't ready yet for wholesale weblogs. They need to be evangelized. I can't afford $250 to put something in place for myself inside Microsoft (and I don't think I'd get that approved cause there are already good free tools available). Plus, what happens if I'm successful at evangelizing this? Oh, then you gotta spend $5000 (actually more). Oh, wait, UserLand's Manila costs $900 (and you can create an unlimited number of sites with that). Moveable Type is free (well, once you buy a server). And if I'm gonna spend $5000 why not buy Sharepoint, which is a product from a huge company (er, Microsoft) with known support?

Not to mention, I visited the product page and can't figure out whether or not the product supports "the five pillars of conversational software" that I laid out the other day? You know, is it: easy to use, discoverable, expose community behavior, build permalinks automatically, and build RSS syndication services?

OK, looks like it has ease of publishing, permalinking, and syndication. Doesn't look like it has a discoverability system. (ie, if I'm Bill Gates, how can I see when every weblog inside Microsoft's firewall has published?) I'm not sure it has a community system either. For instance, can I tell who is linking to my weblog? Can I see how much traffic they are sending me? Anything else? These features are very important for weblogs inside your corporation.

Hint: my "internal blog" inside Microsoft's firewall doesn't have these features either, and that's one reason I don't use my internal blog. Any blog software that doesn't have these five things built in really isn't blogging software. At least not blogging software that'll be useful in 2004.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]