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August 18, 2005
Blogger Plugin for MS Word
In an attempt to retain their title as the font of all free widgets on the web Google has released a plugin for MS Word that allows authors to post directly into their Blogger blogs. This cross system functionality is, IMHO, very valuable. In this case it allows authors to work in their preferred environment and still post to Google's blogging community, in a general case it breaks content creation out from presentation. And as all information architects (read as: tech weenies) know, separating content from presentation is the first step in creating re-usable, re-brandable world dominating content.
Okay, not really 'world dominating' but there are tangible benefits to be gained by increasing the granularity of control that authors possess. Of course, by composing in Word style sheet support is being sacrificed unless the author is a Power User capable of creating complementary style sheets for both applications. What I'd like to see in Word is the ability to reference an online repository of style sheets so that no matter who's computer I'm using if I fire up Word I can dynamically load my personal formatting so long as there is Internet access.
So we have an increase in flexibility for authors who would rather compose their posts in Word and a potential decrease in the separation of content from presentation due to style sheet issues. Overall I'd say the Word plug in is beneficial to authors (who can adjust the style sheet on their blog to match Word's preferred class id's) and beneficial to Google who now have the only blogging tool that plugs into Word. Apparently developing MS Office plugins is hard (why else don't more companies do it?) so this may give Google's Blogger service a defensible competitive advantage over other blogging tools.
Posted by ashusta at August 18, 2005 10:19 AM