A propos of my previous post. . . In a funny twist of timing, Jonathan Weber, my former employer at New West, just wrote a column in the Times of London in which he reflects on exactly the issue of Expression Engine vs. other publishing tools that I touched on in my welcome post.

I am somewhat amused by his wondering whether he made the right choice in building on EE — I sure hope he’s happy enough with it, since I was a primary driver of that call — but I think his results so far speak for themselves. And ultimately he comes to the right conclusions, which are that these things are still way too hard to use and “way” not good enough for non-developers to really customize.

Though he refers to Yahoo! and Google as wanting to own this space (and we certainly have pounded a few collective stakes in the ground there), I still see lots of room for innovation from the edges. Last weekend at Gnomedex, I got a demo and met the founder of a product called Wetpaint, which is a really easy-to-use, pretty, WYSIWYG version of Typepad, and its getting easier to blend 3rd-party developer tools with many platforms due to entries from PostApp (aka WidgetBox), Ning, and the like. Just a couple of examples among many; I look forward to seeing more emerge.

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As you can see, I’ve finally decided to launch a dedicated blog. Those who know me will be aware I’ve been experimenting with blogging long enough to have developed a taste for the habit, but I’ve found myself wanting to express more thoughts along the way than have been suitable to a blog about social cause marketing. I’ve also had a hankering to test-drive Wordpress. While I’ve been a happy user of pmachine/expression engine and have found it flexible enough to launch a successful business on, it is not always convenient for personal use. Plus I want to play around with some of the new tricked-out blog tools that are in the marketplace.

I’ll use this space primarily for thoughts that emerge via my work in the web/publishing 2.0 space, along with personal news and musings that I’d like to share with my community. (You can read my first cut at a charter here.)

Hopefully you’ll become part of my community if you aren’t already, but either way, welcome!