Jack William Bell's Journal: AOL gets on the blogtrain

Apparently AOL is getting set to do for blogs what they have done to Usenet, chat and everything else they touch... They are launching a new blogging tool called AOL Journals and have talked several A-list bloggers into checking it out -- the consensus is that it doesn't suck. AOL Journals includes tools to blog from IM and even your telephone!

I have a hard time believing this is a good thing except, well, they have signed up John Scalzi as their resident 'pro' blogger. With him to guide all the neophyte AOL bloggers along this might turn out OK. Or it might result in ten-thousand blog entries consisting of a malformed link and the words "ME TOO!"

I know which way I am betting...

Update: Dammit! I thought maybe I had beat Instapudit to the punch for once. But it seems I was ten minutes slow.

aol journals

[anitar]

This aol journal plan has been talked about among the weblog people for a while now.

It won't do the damage that the usenet invasion did -- weblogs are far more easy to ignore. We are ingnoring a bunch of them already!

I do think any AOL journalers will have to work hard to get noticed.

Check what Ralph of There Is No Cat [thereisnocat.com] had to say.

Re:aol journals

[Jack William Bell]

I don't know about that. No one seems to be thinking about the possibility of RSS pollution if AOL sets up RSS feeds to the aggregators as a 'default'. Suddenly things like Metafilter and Technorati may either fold under the pressure or the search results will take on less meaning.

And I am sure there will be other bad effects. Mostly I expect we will be ignoring a whole lot of really bad weblogs, but that isn't new...