Reminiscing re: Qumana ... It's Always Nice To hear Someone Likes Something You Were Involved In Doing

One of the things I don't blog much about is the ride I have been on over the past 3+ years as co-founder of Qumana, the blog editing tool.

It's not perfect.  Many people prefer Ecto or Scribefire or Marsedit or BlogJet.  But we also have some people who appreciate some of the clean design and usability we believe we offered with Qumana.

I still think that there is much that can be done with such tools .. particularly as blogging and bookmarking and linking and posting things to places to share with people continues to redefine knowledge work (yes, I still believe that we'll see many different forms and features of social software creep or explode into the knowledge workplace over the next decade.  Witness the growing attention on what is called Enterprise 2.0 (the FastForward blog is dedicated to it).

We couldn't make enough money from Qumana before the money we had ran out ... we felt we had to offer the basic tool for free, though a number of the others charge for their tool.  Also, we needed to provide users with better adverts, basically .. or enable the Google Adsense service inside the editor.  Even if we had done that, I am still not sure (and was not wild about) adverts in blog posts, though I note that many many people now have figured out how to festoon their blogs (and blog posts) with ads - above, below, beside, in - you get the picture.

There are clear uses for such an editing and posting tool .. for example we could have had an RSS aggregator embedded in the tool, so as to reduce even further the clicks should one want to post about something they are reading from the RSS aggregator.  We prototyped that, by having the Qumana editor embedded in Lektora (an RSS aggregator and reader) above each feed.  I believed then, and still believe, that this would be useful and powerful in enterprise settings, where the flow of information with which one is dealing is often constant.

It was also a real challenge building the editor so that it could be used with Macs, with windows and with Linux (though we never got around to the full monty with Linux, which required a tar.gz file)

At any rate ...  MacApper is an online magazine / blog that obviously focuses on Mac applications.  the review excerpted below is current - september 13, 2007 - and obviously at least one professional blogger likes it well enough to rate it 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it as well-designed and easy to use.  He or she even includes  screen shots in the review!

Thanks to Ianiv Schweber for his yeoman programming work, and Fred Giasson for support along the way.

Read the full review here.

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Qumana: Powerful Blogging Software

Indra Masribani

As a blogger, I’m always interested in better managing my time. I am all for tools that will make blogging more efficient and interesting, as well as removing the boring steps. Enter Qumana, an all-in-one tool for all your blogging needs.

Blogging has evolved from how it began. It is not limited to one’s personal expression anymore, but it has become a powerful online tool to create, manage, and maintain a constant flow of information, product reviews, opinions, marketing and even rich media. The word blogger has become an official job description, among many others, such as web designer, programmer, and other online professions. As a professional blogger, it is crucial to use your time efficiently, while maintaining high quality content. Qumana is the tool that helped me to do just that.

[ Snip ... ]

I have been using Qumana along with my Wordpress based blogs for a while now and it has never disappointed me. The menus are straight forward and very user friendly. Qumana is available as freeware.

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Tags: Qumana, MacApper, blog editing, blog editor

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