CNN is reporting that Netcraft is claiming we’re now at 100 million websites online. Wowee! This is an amazing thing given how much of a pain it is to get a website up and running. True enough, the era of the lightweight personal CMS has drastically lowered the barrier to creating websites (3 clicks in some cases), but we’ve got a long way to go still. After all, how many people do you know that both put up a website and then keep updating it?

Think of blogs for a moment: they solve the constant update problem by giving you a very rigid template to pour your content into: the reverse chronological diary. New services like Vox may spice this up with glitzy styles but underneath the paint job, it’s still the same car. Which runs on the same gas— namely, the brief text entry with a title and a date.

To get to the next 100 million sites our bet at Tabblo is that the publishing was not only going to have to get easier but also support different kinds of content forms. The “tabblo” is our best guess at what one such form may look like— part photo gallery and part blog entry it tries to achieve three things: use the type of content most regular folks have and want to share (digital photos), do it with enough creative freedom to make the authoring experience rewarding (the Tabblo editor), and do it in a “web native” way (i.e., scrollable pages, permalinks, and RSS).

So that is a little bit on our reasons for making up this wacky new format and giving it a name. It has many offline cousins: the scrapbook and the collage are just two that we hear about a lot when our members describe Tabblo.

With respect helping to get to the next 100 million sites— how are we doing?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 9:45 pm and is filed under from the trenches, corporate info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.