Two slight disturbances in the blogging world today.

One, there was the announcement of an "invisible" blog (Invisablog). Basically you can make anonymous posts ...

Now does anyone see what's wrong with this? The point of blogging is to tell people about YOUR life ... specific to YOUR experiences. Whether you use an alias an not post much information about yourself (Mad Dog) or you tell people about your personal life (this blog!), there's still a level of accountability.

Now, anyone can register one of these invisiablogs, claim to be a Chinese dissident, and no one can deny it. This undermines the credibility of the blog ...

In more credible news, the Movable Type team announced that they're going to take Movable Type and make it turnkey ... basically meaning it's exactly what I'm trying to do with Tabulas. Their new site is TypePad. This poses a HUGE threat to me because it's _exactly_ what I'm trying to do.

Knowing MT's track record of making great scripts with good features, this has me slightly worried. They also are very standards compliant, which is something I should be striving to do but I ultimately ignore because of my own laziness.

In all honesty, I'm worried. I cannot compete against MT, a paid venture with people experienced in development by myself. But I'll be damned if I roll over and die. I think ultimately I can match Xanga and Blogger (I honestly don't think those two are all that great), and I might be able to match LiveJournal ... but if TypePad is everything it's hyped to be, I might have trouble on that front.

This is, of course, good and bad news. The good news is now there's a sense of urgency and something really pushing me to make this site much better.

The bad news is ... there's more competition in the increasingly crowded weblog community. There are only a limited number of people who want to post blogs ... sigh.

In any case, I have a few exciting developments coming along for Tabulas. First, of course, is the development of increased security as well as cookes for extended logins. I know the issue with being logged out is annoying (to say the least)...

But the most exciting development for me, at least, is going to be the ability to cross-post into your Xanga and LiveJournal accounts whenever you post here. WoooO! Due to the general way the Internet works, you can post to forms that aren't on your site. This is of course somewhat a pain if you're a server administrator and someone is using your form to send e-mails ... but on other hand it's really useful.

And I do plan on making a WYSIWYG editor. I think I'll do that once I get logins working ... so that all you non-HTML literate people can make cool little entries filled with font tags and such!