Blogging tools

At the most basic level, a blog is simply a collection of writing that's publicly available on the World Wide Web. The tools we use to write blogs are pretty basic too, a blog post may have a title and some text, and that text can point to other pages. Beyond that a blog might have a calendar, a blogroll, comments, trackbacks and what else? And what else would you like?

And what would be the point of a blog if no one read them? And then what if you could only read a few blogs? Luckily, we have powerful tools for reading blogs, and aggregating them, cross-referencing, finding out what's related, what's most popular, what's most in agreement with our point of view and what might jar us into thinking of something new.

Most technology conferences are about technology (duh) but the technologists tell us what we want, and that often leaves us feeling cold. This is a user's conference, so we start from the other end -- what do we like about the tools we have for writing and reading, and what dont't we like? What do you think of the various blogging tools? How could they work better? Do you use RSS tools, or blog search engines? If you could get a message to the developers of the blogging world, what would you say to them?

Dave Winer, editor of the Scripting News weblog, and a developer of blogging tools and RSS aggregators, will lead the discussion.