Stuff-a-blog…a cool ‘proof of concept’ product for bloggers

I often get tips about web applications that are innovative, but cannot be counted as true blood commercial products as yet. One of Webyantra’s stated objectives is to promote people who are striving to innovate; hence I am starting a series for ‘proof of concept’ products (these reviews will be tagged as ‘proof of concept’). I request Webyantra’s readers to give their frank and insightful feedback to help improve these products.

Stuff-a-blog is a web application that makes it easy for a blogger to create content-rich blog posts. Bloggers often feel the need to enrich their plain vanilla blog-posts with relevant content available on the web. The only way of doing this is to systematically ferret out content from the internet and include it in the post. SAB does exactly that and in a very simple way. Just type in your keywords, select your content, and get the HTML in a snap.

The application has been created by this bubbly Indian techie, whose blog reflects his infectious enthusiasm. He conceptualized the product when he himself felt the need for something of this kind. He wants to develop this into a full fledged web2.0 product and the current webapp is his first move in that direction. He feels that apart from creating content rich blog posts in a jiffy, SAB can improve the quality of your out-bound links (and hence improve your page-rank). SAB works by using several mashup APIs to generate high quality content relevant to the keywords. You can write your blog post in the webapp and then specify a few keywords that are related to the post. The application pulls in related content from the following applications and displays it as in shown in the image to the left-

Yahoo Map Image - embed a Yahoo Map in the post
Flickr Pics – include Flickr images in the post
Yahoo News - append the latest news related to the subject in hand
Yahoo Answers - support discussions with Yahoo answers (questions)
Amazon Product Details - To help write a review of a recent purchase, include the pic & details of the product from Amazon
Opinion Icons - express your feelings using icons
Site Search - add a list of previous related blog posts
Tags - extract the tags/ keywords automatically from the blog-post

You can generate the HTML and insert it into your blog post.

I tried out the application and while it generally works, it needs lots to improvements to make it work as smoothly as intended. My one (usual) crib is about the lack of India related content that flows in through the APIs, though there’s little SAB can do about that. But the concept behind the product is innovative and in a way, quite powerful. What it needs is solid, rigorous implementation.