Sounds a bit silly, but an email services firm called WhatCounts has launched a new blog system, dubiously named BlogUnit, complete with proprietary hardware. MarketingVox reports "Called the BlogUnit, the rack-mountable server includes security,
monitoring, integration and collaboration features. WhatCounts claims
the unit can be up and running within 15 minutes, allowing business
bloggers to publish, measure, manage versions and syndicate content
feeds."
Ironically, I don’t even see the press release about this new product or any relevant product information on WhatCounts’s site, much less a blog…
Corporations demand security, ease-of-use, inter-operability and support — and that’s what we’re offering. By providing our platform as an appliance we’ve enabled them to have a solution that’s very easy to setup and deploy – much more so than, say, grabbing a popular open source version, finding some hardware, getting someone to install the software, tuning it, etc. And, that software probably wouldn’t have the publishing features we think companies want/demand – such as workflow and versioning. We’ve also built in features designed expresly to handle large loads and waves of RSS/Atom requests. We ran some back of the napkin numbers against some other very popular (fee-based) ASP solutions. For even an average sized business their costs could easily exceed the price of our appliance in a short period of time. Regarding our not having a company blog – there’s a link to it on the top of our page on the main navigation bar. However, truth be told, it wasn’t there the day you posted your note. The cobbler’s son went shoeless (at least for a day or two).
Comment by David Geller — February 18, 2005 @ 11:19 am
Sorry for the sarcasm. I’ve since accepted your PR representative’s invitation for a briefing and dinner. “BlogUnit” just sounded a bit naughty to me, somehow. Anyway, I look forward to learning more.
Comment by Rick Bruner — February 21, 2005 @ 9:29 am
Okay, here’s a bit more sarcasm. Why when I click the link to the blog do I get a pre-blog page telling me to click another link to see the actual blog? Why not just link straight to the blog?
Also, please tell me that soon you’ll be blogging about things other than product features and other self-promotional topics. Because no one is going to come back and read a blog like that regularly.
Comment by Rick Bruner — February 21, 2005 @ 9:34 am
we’re planning on having several blogs for the company – not just from me. I’d like our blog page to be a jumping off point for blogs driven by other groups within our tiny (but nimble) firm: marketing, events, customer service, automated data collection, etc. That’s really the beauty behind the web and syndication. Marketing and event data, and other topics, belongs in distinctly different places than missives written by me.
Comment by David Geller — February 22, 2005 @ 11:02 pm