BlogMailr: Moblogging for all

10Nov06

This week, Telligent (the company behind Community Server) unveiled BlogMailr, a free service that lets you turn e-mails into blog posts. When you set up a BlogMailr account, they tell you a special e-mail address that will take any e-mail you send it and post it up to your blog as a new entry. You send an e-mail there, they post it up, and then send back a confirmation indicating success.

Now, the capability to send e-mails to a blogging service is not new—Spaces has let you do this for as long as I can remember. But BlogMailr is a generic service that works for any blog that supports MetaWeblog (which is most of them, minus most of the pure social networking sites like MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook). It also supports interesting features like tagging and image uploads.

BlogMailr enables a lot of interesting scenarios* such as blogging from your phone; offline composing (if you use a desktop e-mail client); or sending an announcement out over e-mail and blog simultaneously.

Drawbacks? Well, the free version doesn’t support categories (it’s $2.99/month if you want it), so category-happy bloggers will have to set them the old fashioned way. There’s also no way to edit posts through BlogMailr—it’s strictly for new entries. And of course your editing abilities are going to be determined by how good your e-mail client is (for example, some clients do a better job with automatically resizing images than others).

It looks like they’re going to offer the service for free for most users, and then charge varying amounts for “commercial” accounts. That’s an obvious business model, but I think a more interesting tack would be if the confirmation e-mails came back with ads, possibly using the contents of your blog post (or blog history) for targeted marketing.

Anyway, I wish the Telligent guys the best of luck; I have corresponded with them a bit while debugging Windows Live Writer interop issues and they seem like bright guys who want the best for their customers.

* Did I say “enables a lot of interesting scenarios”? Sheesh… it’s only been seven months and already I’ve been at Microsoft too long.

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