A few days ago, 901am.com got the scoop that Blogsmith was going to be released to the public early in 2007. It’s aimed at taking on blogging sites like WordPress.com, Blogger and TypePad. Details are still sketchy, but Blogsmith already has a good start.
Blogsmith is is owned by AOL / Time Warner and it powers some of the largest blogs on the net including Engadget, TV Squad, Download Squad and my favorite TUAW. With Blogsmith powering these blogs, they’ve had time to work out the bugs, optimize the code and make sure that everything runs at peek permanence for tons of visitors. Even with all that testing though, giving any service to the general public will render issues.
All the details are not yet known, but Brian Alvey writes that Blogsmith would be hosted application much like Blogger or TypePad. You have the option to have your own domain, but you won’t get the option to download the code like you can with WordPress.
So at this point, Blogsmith’s effect is to early to speculate. There is no official word on the details, if it’s free or what the backend looks like. However, it could be a big player in the blog software area in 2007.
