Innovation Gospel

To innovate or not to innovate. It's interesting to read some of the comments to my post about free weblogs.

I'm seeing the same trend also here in Italy where the most popular provider of free weblogging tools does not provide some basic features such as ping to weblogs.com, RSS feed or trackback.

People is asking "Why should we care? We don't even understand what you are talking about!". New features are often perceived as unnecessary "bells and whistles".

I think that there's still plenty of room to improve todays' tools, but with the audience growing every day at a steady pace and consequently having a lower average technical culture, it becomes very important to effectively communicate what these improvements are about and why they are needed. We must be able to explain why something is important (if it is).

Otherwise we can all sit back, relax, move to a free blogging app and wait for the next wave because this game is over.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

The word that comes to mind is EVANGELIZE. Dave Winer may be quirky & tempermental, but he has done one hell of a job singing the praises of weblogs, and seeking to recognize community participants and contributers (think the makers of k-collector or special fields of knowledge, the shifted librarian). Then repeating the message for the new users. I imaging the MoveableType people and others have done this too, of course.

I find this impressive because I imagine it being exhausting at times. I wonder if this is something that's harder to accomplish with free software vs. commercial. Don't know.

6:48:45 AM    comment []  - See Also:  Weblogs