[Sorry for the overuse of quoted words and phrases in the following entry, however it is used where text is conceptually, but not literally, true]

For my blogging software I chose Radio Userland. While it uses a web interface to create and edit entries, practically it's a fat client application - I have the pseudo-service running, indicating its presence in my system tray, and I only ever modify entries "on" this one PC. Radio has its own database, and it streams static updates via the local service to the FTP server at my web host whenever I change content.

Pretty straightforward, and it works admirably for my needs.

One of the hesitations I had going this route, however, was that it would limit my portability - many of the hosted tools allow you to author and edit online against remote services running in some large datacenter, from any browser, from anywhere. Of course I could sort-of gain the physical "from anywhere" advantage by installing Radio on a laptop and bringing the laptop with me wherever I went. While that would also give me the ability to work offline (something many of the hosted services don't allow), it still wouldn't help me when working on foreign PCs.

So basically I had to choose between the always available hosted thin-client route, or the isolated thick-client route. Right?

Of course it's never that simple.

Through the magic of VPN and Remote Desktop, I can access this desktop through appropriate "thin clients" throughout the world (appropriate simply meaning "running Windows". Actually, given that there are L2TP and RDP clients for other platforms, pretty much any modern system can act as a "thin client" to this "web service" of sorts, but the easiest and most straightforward are Windows PCs). As my home is connected via an always on, very reliable, credibly high speed wired connection, like millions of others nowadays, it's virtually always accessible. Just as accessible as Wordpress or Moveable Type, in fact.

Well that's only partially true - many locations, sometimes even including coffee shop hotspots, limit you to HTTP(S), presuming that everything that you'd ever want in the world should be available over that protocol. This is obviously a hindrance to VPNing to a remote PC, and it's pretty much the only differentiation between my home "server" and the hosted blog services. Even that is fairly easily surmountable problem however.

I only mention this because many people still have a consciousness gap about the advantages that an always on, high speed connection brings. It really is a great equalizer. I can access and update my blog virtually anywhere (though thus far I've only ever really used remote connectivity to hit publish on an already created entry when I needed to stagger output a bit - I just find home a comfortable place to author entries)

Aside: I mentioned previously that I envision RDP, or something similar, becoming a potential widely-used thin client protocol for "web" services (services from the human perspective rather than the W3C perspective). It would be interesting to see what sort of accessible tools someone like Google could create with such a malleable and fine grained interface technology.

How in the world is Weblogs.com worth $2.3 million dollars? Being a default ping destination for a lot of blog services and clients certainly holds some value, but as it is Weblogs.com is primarily a spam amplifier.

I am a huge fan of Flickr.

I love the Lemonade-out-of-Lemons domain name - you just know that they sat there with Godaddy, punching in every combination until a misspelling finally came back as available: Nowadays people don't decide upon a business name and then try to find a correlating domain. Instead they check out random or loosely correlated domain availability and compromise. yafla had just such an origin (though it has really grown on me since).

I love the simple interface design of the Flickr website. I love the features (intuitive "Web 2.0" features like in-place edits of titles, captions, and so on, coupled with massive capacity and bandwidth with a remarkably liberal usage policy. Even on the desktop Flickr is a winner, with a simple yet powerful resize & upload utility that makes incrementally populating one's online photo archive a breeze).

I love occasionally browsing through some of the beautiful photos uploaded by other users for a bit of entertainment and inspiration. I love the ability to combine photos into sets. I love the distributed keyword method of loosely categorizing photos.

I especially love the way that you can set relationships to other people, allowing me to limit certain photos (such as those of my children) to family, other photos to friends, and so on. While I don't use it to build new cyber-relationship networks, I do find it worthwhile as real-world friends and family join the service (mostly at my incessant urging. I don't spam out emails full of pictures of my kids anymore, but instead upload to Flickr and provide access for the appropriate people. If they're interested, they can look. If they're not then at least I haven't filled their inbox quota).

If Flickr keeps going with the current philosophies and designs, it will continue to be a winner. Its competitors will have a really tough time doing something better, unless they start sending out cheques to users for using their services. If there was one possible weakness in Flickr's armour, it is that its competitors could use feature-rich desktop photo indexing software to kickstart their web venture.

I am not Flickr's optimal customer, however.

A large selection of llama inspired gifts, jewelry, art, collectibles and stuffed animals from Nose-N-Toes. Com.

While I use it to store and share my photos, I never click on ads (not only are they something I naturally tune out anyways, the keyword correlations makes for some really ridiculous impressions. I recently uploaded a picture of a llama at a country fair I visited. Now I'm getting ads selling llama goods and services), and the stickiness of the site is limited for me. Instead of uploading my photos and then participating in late night discussions with other amateur photographers, oohing and ahhing about each of their photos and hoping for the same in return, I'm very utilitarian in the way I use the site. My relationship network is not built in Flickr, or on the online world, but instead I crystallize my real-world network in Flickr.

This interests me because the business model of a large number of sites, particularly "Web 2.0" sites, rely upon a considerable amount of stickiness - Not only will you visit, but you'll hang around. Just like television, these sites hope to draw you in for a period of time under the premise that not only are you more likely to see some revenue generation that interests you (e.g. ads), but you're also more tightly bound to that community.

Time is finite, however. I've discarded countless web ideas because while the services might be utilitarian and useful for some needs of some people, they were too marginal to realistically charge a fee, yet there was no way I could rationally establish enough stickiness (you can only create discussion groups about so many things).