One of the things about the whole blog trend that I find so exciting for business is effectiveness and power of these simple publishing tools to accomplish a great degree of what “content management systems” such as Interwoven and Vignette have required tens of thousands of dollars and months of training to match. Of course, give us an inch and we’ll take a mile, and with that in mind, I am taking notes on a long list of features I’d like to see introduced to the next generation of blog tools to make them that much more effective (risking contradicting, perhaps, the beauty of their simplicity today, but I’m willing to take that risk).

Meanwhile, the movement towards powerfully simple and cheap tools continues apace. The folks from 37Signals have now released Basecamp, a web-based project management tool with “blog simplicity” that includes features such as scheduling, to-do lists, file sharing, RSS, iCal, and Mozilla Calendar integration, among other features. Priced at $19/month.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

37Signals, a fantastic web-dev company, has produced a new project-management app called Basecamp that looks like a winner. Not only is it extremely pretty and easy-to-follow — I’d expect no less from the usability wonks at 37Signals — but it’s also open: information flows out of the app as RSS and can be bulk-exported in XML, so none of your precious project-management material becomes a lever to lock you into paying the (surprisingly reasonable) monthly rates.

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