Not enough cup holders and too much cheap looking plastic
Despite all the improvements, it’s not quite the ultimate blog posting machine. Word has the advantage of being the market leading word processor for the past 15 years. And for the most part, its considerable text tweaking power converts well as a blog editing tool. Seamlessly integrating with other features of Office, “good enough” blog provider support and the removal of the MSO xml namespaced crap from the final HTML markup score big points in my evaluation.
Although, Word 2007 is a stellar first effort for Microsoft in the blog text editor space, I can’t help wonder if
Microsoft Expression Web would've been a better platform for Microsoft’s future blog editing tools. You can’t edit the raw HTML from Word. This is a blessing and curse. However, every once in a while, Word will get confused, add a colspan=2 in your table cell, or not let you remove a post category or do some other stupid thing to your mark-up that requires you to get your hands dirty. After all, Word was designed in the paper age and blogs are a web based medium.
I'm sure it doesn't help that SubText is an "unsupported" blog platform, and IIS is a poor excuse for an FTP server (oh well, it's free and it does rock as a web server). In my limited experience with Word 2007, it does play with WordPress better than it plays with SubText. Your mileage may vary, as they say.
Final Assessment
In short, it has most of the word processing features that you know and love (Spell check, Grammar check, Language Translation, AutoCorrect, Smart Quotes, etc…) and enough shortcomings which prevent it from competing with Expression or Dreamweaver in the HTML editing space. However, Word is not designed to compete with those tools. Just like it is not designed to compete with Microsoft Publisher, Quark Express or Adobe InDesign either.
Although, I have never used
Blogjet, I can say if I wasn’t using Word, that would probably be my first choice as a blog post editor. It has more fit and finish touches (such as tagging support, Flickr and YouTube Support, High-Quality Smileys, Blog Autodiscovery, to name the ones I know about) that separate the good from great. Perhaps Mr. Swann can discuss
Ecto some time and tell us why it's a great tool for blog writing or Mr. Cronin can chime in about Blogjet.
I think the best way of putting it is Blogjet & Ecto are better for bloggers who write. Word 2007 is better for writers who blog. They both have their strong points.
Regardless, if you like Microsoft Word or not. Microsoft adding blogging support to Word is a
BIG deal. It means within 12-24 months there will be tens of millions computers with desktop based blog publishing tools on them waiting to be discovered and used. (Or at least if Office 2007 turns out to be as big a success as
early results seem to indicate it will be).
At any rate, this compelling entry into the bloggers tool chest asks as many questions as it answers.
-
What blogging support will the next version of Word have?
-
Will Adobe and the other Office suites join the party?
-
Now that giants are in the neighborhood, what wil happen to BlogJet and Ecto?
-
How much fuel will this add to the blogging world's fire?
Needless to say, the future of the blogosphere got a LOT more interesting than it already was.
Print | posted on Saturday, April 28, 2007 8:10 PM