ROBERT SCOBLE, MILLBRAE, JAN 10, 2002: I can finally talk about what UserLand has been doing the past few months. Yah!
First, I have to tell you where I'm writing from: I'm on CalTrain #53 riding from Santa Clara to Millbrae. This is reason #1 I love Radio UserLand 8.0: I can write offline on the train.
See, I +hate+ centralized services. Someone recently asked why I moved my Scobleizer weblog from Manila to Radio. It's cause I'm a pragmatist. After watching those two airliners go into the World Trade Center I realize all my data is vulnerable. Hell, I'm vulnerable.
So, I want more control of my data. Radio UserLand 8.0 gives it to me. My entire Website sits on my local drive. I have it backed up to CDRs. Every day I publish my local drive up to the UserLand servers, which is how you're seeing my weblog now.
I always carry my website with me. Everywhere I go. Even when I went on vacation to Las Vegas, I had my website with me. Seriously. Anywhere I go, my website goes. I can publish anytime I find an 802.11b network. Starbucks, here we come! (I publish a lot from Starbucks -- my Starbucks ISP bill last month was more than my home ISP bill).
So, now I'm in control of my data. That rocks.
#2: I can publish many different weblogs all from the same interface. And I can "post once, but publish to many places."
OK, let me explain how that works. I type into Radio's Desktop Website (Radio makes a Website that works on your machine. I get to it at http://127.0.0.1. Don't try that at home, it won't work for you unless you have Radio UserLand 8.0 working and then you'll see your weblog, not mine. Confused? I was at first until I figured it out).
Anyway, I'm sitting on the train completely not connected to the Internet, and I am typing into a Web page. See, Radio UserLand is a web server that sits on your desktop. You type into a Web page.
Beneath where I'm typing I have category choices (when you get Radio 8.0 you'll need to visit your "prefs" page to turn them on). Let's see, I have three weblogs that I'm keeping:
1) Radio UserLand 8.0 Weblog 2) Scobleizer 3) Windows XP News
OK, let's say I want to post to all of them. Then I just check all three of the boxes next to their names. Voila, my post goes to all three with one click. This is so freaking cool you can't even imagine.
Or I can post to only one. I choose.
#3: It builds XML/RSS channels automatically. Now, home users might be saying "so what?" But I think this is the most important thing about a 2002 Web community (and Radio UserLand is a community too). What does that let me do? Well, you can subscribe to one, or all, of my weblogs and use my content in new innovative ways. Microsoft's FoxPro Product Manager, for instance, wrote 15 lines of FoxPro code to import my RSS channel and bring it into FoxPro where he can do really interesting database searches on my content that would be impossible on the Web.
You can also add my site to Radio 8.0's News Aggregator. That gets me to #4.
#4: The News Aggregator. Every hour Radio visits 269 Web sites and scans their RSS/XML feed. It then builds me a "all-in-one-page" news site that contains sites that I picked! If a site gets boring, I pull it off the list. This is finally the newspaper I dreamed of back in Journalism School when I was attending San Jose State University.
Imagine how much work it is to visit 269 Web sites every day and see if something has changed. No more. This feature alone has radically changed how I get the news. I used to visit news.com and msnbc.com every few hours. I only visit those sites now if something big is happening.
#5: One button publishing. It's so easy my eight-year-old son published his first weblog without any help. You type. You click Post.
Oh, the beta testers are now having contests to see who can download, install Radio 8.0, and get a post up the fastest. So far that whole process takes about three minutes. Do you have three minutes? Try Radio at http://radio.userland.com when it's released next week.
#6: Control. I can change any of the templates. I can change themes and instantly my look and feel changes. It's a new way of publishing and I'm finding I'm using my Dreamweaver and FrontPage less and less. Really those tools will soon be relegated to just doing templates for content management systems like Radio anyway. If you're a Web designer you'll love tools like Radio UserLand 8.0. They let you build awesome user interfaces for your users without having those users be able to screw them up. Your content is completely separated from design here. Don't believe me? See the RSS/XML feature again. That feature would be impossible if Radio didn't separate design from content completely.
#7: Hosting. When I signed up with Radio 8.0 I got a usernum. You know, a number. Mine is 0001011. No one else in the history of Radio will ever have that number. It's my number damn it. Just like ICQ gave me 163561. Now, that might seem pretty lame, right? Especially in a world that gives you the ability to have domains like http://www.scoble.com (which, sadly, I do not own).
But, the usernum is cool. Think about it for a while. Everyone who uses Radio has the same style URL:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/
Replace my usernum with someone else's and you'll find their weblog. It'll be really easy to build "rings" of Radio users, for instance. I plan on doing one. Can you think of an algorithm that'd find all current Radio users? I can.
OK, back to the hosting. You get 10MB of space up on UserLand's server included in the $39.95 a year price. Where else can you get a Web site with no third-party advertising for $39.95 a year? OK, there might be a few out there, but can your kids or parents publish to them? Mine never could until Radio 8.0 came along.
#8: I can use my own server. Maybe my boss wants me to publish a weblog to his corporate server and not to UserLand's server. Or, maybe, I want to do a news page that'll have a URL that is in this style: http://www.scobleizer.com instead of http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/
Well, just visit "prefs" again and give Radio your server name and you'll be able to publish your weblog to any FTP server.
#9: it's fast. Why? cause the entire system is stored locally on my hard drive. Remember, I'm typing this on the train. No Internet connection. Everything is local. Running on my 1GHz Pentium III laptop with Windows XP (my Mac friends say it's awesome on a PowerBook running OS X, by the way). Oh, that brings me to #10.
#10: it's cross platform. I've come to believe that your operating system of choice shouldn't matter. If you're a corporate team leader, why should you chose software that leaves 1/10th of your team out to lunch? With Radio UserLand 8.0 your Mac and Mac OS X users will have pretty much the same functionality as your Windows users. I think that rocks. Especially since I'm saving up for a Mac PowerBook.
#11: The upstreaming folder. OK, this one is magic. I think I'll save this for a whole new topic later on. But, try something. Drop a .JPG or a .GIF into your WWW folder. Then visit your events page. You'll notice that Radio automatically published it without you even needing to do anything. Awesome!
OK, the train ride is coming to an end. More on tomorrow's train ride.
