Knallgrau, Austrian creators of blogging software twoday, have now released Blogr, a new multimedia blogging tool.
The tool supports a whole lot of languages already, and is also available in quite a few top level domains. So, if you don’t mind a Spanish interface, why not set up an account with Blogr.com.mx? (There is a section in the settings area of an account that’s called “language”, but there’s nothing there yet…so until that’s fixed, language seems to be tied to TLD.)
The name already suggests what niche the service is supposed to fill (and I mentioned it in the intro paragraph, so…): multimedia blogging. Which I understand to be spicing up a normal blog with photos and videos (and they do too). They offer rather basic functionality, for both blogging and their multimedia features, but in Knallgrau tradition, everything is very tidy and polished.
Once signed up, your content can be accessed via a subdomain, in my case richard.
Since it’s all about multimedia, the first thing to look at is their uploading mechanism:
It’s basic browser uploading, but gives you more uploading slots if you need them. There’s also the tried and tested upload per email, which I think will come in handy for those who like uploading from their cameraphones. And there’s a desktop client available, but it’s Windows only, and I couldn’t be bothered to try it out.
Their blogging back-end is quite easy to use, and although it appears to be basic, it incorporates cool stuff like automatic tag suggestions:
The heart of the service is their mediastream, from which you can choose what to put where. They divide the files into videocasts and photos, which shows that they are really out looking for those videocasters. I wasn’t able to find out what their storage-limit looks like, but I guess if they want to attract serious vloggers, the limit shouldn’t be too low.
The interface to the whole thing is very web2.0, including rounded corners, giant fonts and an apparent allusion to Flickr, prototypical and insanely successful web2.0 photo service. Fortunately, that stuff will take a long time to get old.
For the front-end, i.e. the area visible to people visiting your Blogr area, there are three different designs available. There’s a very simple default Blogr layout, the second one is the famous and oft-used Kubrick template, and the third one is one of the default layouts for their twoday.net blogging service. Switching between those is as easy as checking a box:
Overall, Blogr is an already very polished product (although still in alpha), and looks like the perfect solution for people who want to jump right into multimedia blogging without having to worry about setting up a blog themselves.
But Blogr is not alone, as there are quite a few companies who are pushing into that market (most notably lifelogger, or blinklife), but none of them with such a dedicated videocasting angle like Blogr.