Dan's Diner: Free Blogs for Everyone in Bakersfield

More will be coming out about this over the coming weeks, but here's a little innocent scoop for those who read my personal blog.

Today, we launched Bakomatic-powered blogs on Bakersfield.com! The easiest way to showcase them is to send you to my new blog on Bakersfield.com.

About 6 weeks ago, we launched user profiles. Now every profile has an optional blog attached to it, and we will be offering more add-ons to the profiles over time.

We're launching blogs first on Bakersfield.com, but soon they will also roll out on all the rest of the sites that use this platform -- such as Bakotopia and The Northwest Voice. Blogs will also be one of the features that will be available to licensees through Participata, The Bakersfield Californian's new licensing venture.

This is our best designed, best tested and most feature-rich enhancement yet. Here are just a few of the cool things the Bakomatic blogs can do:

Every blog is tied to a user profile. You must have a profile to have a blog, and vice-versa, which we make easy through a smart setup wizard. We also show a "badge" across your user profile and blog, with consistent buttons that let people navigate between each of them.
Tools to showcase new content. Our dynamic content markup language has new tags that let site managers create queries that automatically display recent posts, comments, and even profile photos along with new posts. See examples of that on the new People tab on Bakersfield.com.
Simple editing tool that requires no HTML or technical knowhow. If you can write an e-mail, you can set up and post to a blog.

Comments on posts

Optional topic tags on every blog post, which make those posts accessible from tag clouds like this one. One of the cool things on the tag pages is that you can click a "Blog About This" button on any blog topic page. When you sign in, the blog editor pops up with that tag pre-filled. This is similar to what we've done with Interests.
Upload any file to a post, including photos, audio and documents.
MP3s appear in a streaming player, allowing anyone to hear your music or Podcast right from your blog.
Every blog is an automatic Podcast! Our developers know I'm obsessive about this, and they may be right, but I think this is one of the coolest things ever because it required almost no work. The RSS feed for your blog includes MP3s in a multimedia enclosure. That means that if you go to iTunes and add the feed manually (Advanced menu > Subscribe to Podcast), iTunes will check for and dowload any new MP3 you add in a post. We can make this easier and would probably need to market it, but the important thing is that technically, the hardest part is done!
Photos appear in an embedded viewer. The viewer lets readers page through photos right within your post without having to go into the post itself. They can also open it in a new window to view photos larger.
Repost files without re-uploading. Let's say you upload a photo of a mountain scene in a post a year ago. The next year you're writing about mountains and you want to add that photo too, but you can't find it on your computer. No worries! We let you "Add from My Media", which shows you everything you uploaded in the past so you can select it and re-attach it to a blog post. You can even give it a completely new title and caption if you want, although we prepopulate the old stuff in there for you.

Since our little team accomplishes more with each release, it should be no surprise that I'm more proud of this release than any in the past. And we'll keep creating (and now selling) new stuff as time goes on. Let us know what you think, and especially let us know if you have any ideas or constructive feedback.

Technorati Tags: Bakomatic, The Bakersfield Californian, Participata, Bakersfield, Community, Newspaper industry, Newspapers