You know what they need? They need to make my sporadic, half-assed writing easier:
1. Suggested Links. It takes too much goddamn effort to go out and find links to news articles and other blog posts that pertain to whatever subject I am writing about. When I draft a post, it ought to come up with a list of such links (with an RSS feed so I can find out when new shit appears).
2. Predictions Tracker. For a political blogger, predictions of future events are pretty common and more commonly forgotten. If some asshole like me says, "Within 2 Friedmans, Iraqi troops will have Anbar pacified", then that prediction should be tracked automatically - either by the blogging software or by some technorati-type web app or both - so that when time is up, said asshole is publicly embarrassed.
3. Text Boxes. You know those chunks of text that appear in large bold font in the middle of a
newspaper story? They're there to keep the reader's attention on a long, potentially boring story. The parallel to blogging should be obvious. The virtue of this format is ease of reading, and even for someone like me whose average post is very short in length, you want to make it as simple as possible for the reader to determine if she is interested in reading the whole thing. Making those boxes should be automated. As far as I can tell, right now it's impossible for me to do it at all in typepad.
4. Footnotes. Come on, I'm a geek who thinks historical references, cultural allusions and wacky connections are fun. It's better for everyone if I can drop a footnote automatically so as to get the tangents out of the main flow.
Of course, there may be ways to do all of those things automatically already, but of course, I am too lazy to even go check first. If I had that kind of energy, then I wouldn't be on typepad, now would I? I would have just completed the latest update of wordpress on a server in my basement, whatever that means. And I think you know what it means. It means please dumb it down for me.
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