Dave Winer, a man who was key to the creation and growth of blogging, RSS, podcasting, OPML and several more technical standards that helped social media become what it is today, announced this morning that he's working on a new technology, a simple blogging tool that keeps an archival copy of your content on your servers, but pushes it out onto whatever other publishing platform you choose, whether that be Tumblr, Twitter or "whatever new corporate blogging silo is popular next year or the year after."

"The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure," Winer wrote in a blog post today. "You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place." This is very good news. It appears that the tool will live first at My.ReallySimple.org (password protected).



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The technical implementation of this vision appears relatively straightforward, thanks to Winer's frustration with the Blogger.com API 10 years ago, creation of the MetaWeblog API in 2002 and subsequent spread of that technology for porting content from site to site, now widely adopted.

Below: Screenshot of a ReallySimple prototype.

Throughout the past decade of massive media disruption, the only people who have played a bigger role in democratizing publishing technology than Winer may be Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams. Winer's work, though, has been technical enough, embedded enough in larger technical communities, so focused on the distributed Web instead of on building up one corporate brand, and so wide-ranging that he's gained far less public recognition than other major players. His near-absolute disinterest in visual design, his chronically caustic personality and his apparently principle-driven burning of bridges haven't helped either.

None the less, Winer has stepped into the breach of profit-driven companies failing to serve the interests of users time and time again to create platforms that have touched an incalculable number of lives.

Can he do it again? User-facing technologies have never been Winer's strength; he's been much more successful revolutionizing the world of content delivery on the back-end. Can he make distributed publishing, by publishers acting as independent entities instead of sharecroppers for platforms enriching their shareholders, a part of peoples' everyday experiences the same way he helped bring us feed reading and listening to podcasts?

Unless we've all been Farmville-zombified too deeply to care anymore, My.ReallySimple is something we all ought to be cheering for.

There's more to come, too. "This is a piece," Winer writes, "of the loosely-coupled system I envision booting up over the next months and years."

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Fans of Red Sweater Software's blog publishing tool MarsEdit got a surprise Tuesday morning with the release of MarsEdit 3. The most significant update to the software is the addition of a rich text editor, though those who fiddle with the HTML for their blog posts got an updated syntax highlighter. A new media manager rounds out this solid update, one that the company hopes will attract new users and get old ones writing again. 

According to Red Sweater founder and developer Daniel Jalkut, some of the features in MarsEdit 3 have been in the works for roughly 2.5 years—basically since MarsEdit 2 was released. Many of the enhancements in the new version respond to long-standing requests from users, Jalkut told Ars, particularly rich text editing. "Most of the [blog] Web interfaces and desktop competitors have a rich mode but, until now, MarsEdit has focused exclusively on HTML/markdown source," Jalkut said.





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Posterous, one of our favorite light blogging services, started out as a very minimalist blogging and media sharing platform. In its earliest days, the only way to actually post a story to Posterous was by email. Today, however, Posterous announced the next version of its blog editor, which takes Posterous away from its minimalist origins. Posterous now allows users to upload images, videos and documents directly from the web editor, for example. In addition, Posterous now also features a full rich text editor.

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"We Aint No Stinking Microblog"

As Posterous's co-founder Garry Tan notes in the announcement, the company doesn't want to be seen as a microblogging service.

New Features

The service still puts a lot of emphasis on sharing media files. The updated editor now allows users to upload multiple images, audio files, videos and documents in parallel. In addition, Posterous users can now rotate images and reorder image galleries by simply dragging and dropping files. Starting today, Posterous users can also finally combine and ungroup galleries - a feature that comes in handy if you want to combine all the images from a recent trip, for example.

Posterous Grows Up

Today's update is yet another step in Posterous' march towards becoming a fully featured blogging platform and away from Posterous' minimalist origins. One of the few features that are still missing for this to happen is support for offline blogging clients like Windows Live Writer or MarsEdit. We wouldn't be surprised to hear that this is already on Posterous' roadmap, however.

How We Use Posterous and Co.

If you want to see how we use Posterous and similar services here at ReadWriteWeb, have a look at this post from earlier today.

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Link blogs, light blogs, blogs on the side; found treasures and half-formed thoughts - it turns out that many members of the ReadWriteWeb team are also publishing on Posterous, Tumblr and other casual blogging platforms.

These are the places you can learn about the people behind the news and analysis here at ReadWriteWeb. Where you can find cool little videos and images that we want to share but that don't cross the thresh-hold for full-scale RWW blogging. Publishing and reading on these platforms is a lot of fun. We've listed some of the fun blogs published by members of our team below. We'd love for our readers to share links to your sites like this if you have them.

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Richard MacManus, our Founder and Editor, writes about his travels outside his home in New Zealand, music, books and art using the Soup.io platform at VelvetsFan.com.

I, Marshall Kirkpatrick, maintain a Posterous blog at Marshallk.posterous.com. I post a lot from my phone there, I post images and random thoughts about life in Portland, Oregon, my chickens and the tech news industry.

Morning writer in Florida Sarah Perez uses Tumblr at sarahintampa.tumblr.com to post "random pictures, videos and infographics I come across on the web," she says.

Portland based morning news writer Frederic Lardinois scored the cool domain DishWasherOnMars and uses it to post "stuff I don't get to blog about and that I want to share with my Twitter followers."

Morning news writer Mike Melanson records his experiences as a hyper-mobile blogger in Austin, Texas on his Posterous blog.

RWW's webmaster Jared Smith shares "(hopefully) useful tidbits about Web development, UX, and other geeky pursuits" on his Posterous from Charleston, South Carolina.

Portland based Enterprise and ReadWriteCloud writer Alex Williams uses Tumblr at AlexHWilliams.com. "Hazard is my middle name," he says and he's not kidding, it really is. He calls it "my place to feed my personal interests."

Production Editor Abraham Hyatt is in Portland, too and publishes "just your run-of-the-mill photo blog" on his Posterous.

Eugene, Oregon based research team member and ReadWriteStart contributor Audrey Watters uses Posterous too. She says it's "where I post my ideas too long for twitter and too malformed for my blog."

Portland-based Justin Houk, a member of the research team here as well, calls GeoPDX.net his "say anything, speak my mind, and voices in my head blog."

How about you, dear readers? Where is the ReadWriteWeb community posting their found items, fleeting thoughts and other curated digital ephemera? We'd love to know, so share your link in comments below. We'd love to know what these services mean to you, too.

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