I”m in San Francisco for about 36 hours, getting ready to give a talk to the Grantmakers in Health conference on social software. (I’m ignoring all the Friends of a Friend stuff and focusing on the stuff I think is most interesting for the social change sector: wikis, weblogs and folksonomy.) Then it’s back to the east coast, where the Global Voices gang is doing a workshop on blogging for a group visiting from Jamaica. So I’m busily trying to put together an introduction to blogging for a group of musicians, activists and prison administrators from our island neighbor to the south.
In the process, I discovered Blogsome, a blog hosting service that makes me very, very happy. In the workshops I’ve been offering in Africa, India and other far-flung corners of the globe, I’ve been pushing novice bloggers to Blogger.com, for the simple reason that it’s free (as in free beer, which is very important for African friends who don’t have credit cards, for instance.) But Blogger speaks Atom, not RSS, which makes it hard for me to aggregate these blogs, and handles comments oddly (only registered users can comment.)
Blogsome, on the other hand, gives away free accounts on a WordPress server. WordPress has become my platform of choice these days – open source, easy to use, elegantly designed. So now I’m able to give workshops where participants get RSS-compliant, comment-ready, professional looking blogs.. for free. If anyone has any insight on who the Blogsome folks are and how they plan to keep this service running, please do let me know.