The Real Estate Tomato has an excellent post about the future of business blogs - specifically, real estate blogs. We have a bunch of real estate customers thanks to Real Estate Blogsites and the intersection of Jim Cronin's post, the real estate market, and technical requirements is worth a few observations.

The MyST Blogsite architecture was laid out what seems like decades ago - in Internet eons maybe it's been three. In 2002 we focused on the word "agility" because we knew that business requirements would continue to shift and perhaps the rate of change would accelerate it did of course - no surprise there. But we also knew that the shape of a business blog would (over time) create new business and technical requirements - video blogging is apparently one that will stick.

Our research into vlogging (or video-blogging) started when we were approached by Pfizer - a client that was spinning off a new blogsite called Health Commentary. Some people call this the "You-Tube of Health Care" because both blog authors and visitors are free to publish direct videos of their commentaries.

The video blogging/commenting idea is all made possible through a component architecture called Captyx. Components make it possible to create objects that embellish the fundamental construct known as a blog post. Without this capability, you are confined to HTML and javascript when attempting to integrate video. Captyx provides the framework for component integration while eliminating the need for extensive use or knowledge about javascript and HTML. Professional bloggers are ok with these technical details, but business people (and those just stopping by to comment) are not interested in and have no time to fabricate HTML widgets every time they want to say something.

At MyST we've always been concerned with providing an infrastructure capable of including additional information - whatever it may be - to enable new features to emerge that blends with the content . Video blogging uses precisely these agile systems to create a seamless user experience for capture and presentation.

The quote embedded in this post from Jim Cronin was created, styled, positioned, and linked in just 9 seconds with the help of a Captyx "quote" component. I agree with Jim - widgets (another name for components) is a key success factor for future business blogs. Widgets will become the fundamental value-trigger of future publishing models.

If you don't have a framework that provides easy access, creation, and management of publishing widgets that integrate with external web services while embracing SEO requirements, your future visibility and readership will suffer.