Backed: Typed, a new blogging platform

Competition is good. For far too long WordPress has had too little competition as a blogging platform. This is no knock on WordPress: I’m a big fan. But competition drives innovation, and I’m always keen to see new ideas flourish, especially in blogging and publishing platforms. That’s why I was an early backer of Ghost, and remain a keen user and observer as it develops towards the 1.0 release.

And it’s also why I just backed Typed:

I’m a big fan of their Markdown writing app of the same name, which is great for getting long-form writing done in a distraction-free way. Plus, they’re a local business to me, and I like supporting local businesses, as the coffee shop I’m writing this in can attest:

I have a friend working at RealMac, whom I’ve spent some time in the past discussing blogging platforms with. (I’m now wondering if there was an…agenda…behind those chats. 😉 ) He gave me a heads-up about this a couple of hours ago, which is why I’m right in there at the beginning.

Mobile era blogging

I’m doing increasing amounts of blogging directly from mobile, and that’s almost certainly the future for many people, as mobile switches to being our default mode of accessing the internet. Typed is designed to be mobile-friendly from the outset, which is one of the reason I’m so interested in new blog platforms. The mobile interfaces for existing platforms, including Movable Type, which is what lurks under here, and retrofits on top of platforms that emerged long before mobile become a thing. They’re good, but not as intuitive as they could be.

I’m really interested to see what kind of UI ideas emerge in platforms built for the mobile age, both with my blogger and journalist hats on. The mobile phone is one of the most profoundly useful tools to emerge for journalism, and I’m really excited to see what happens when our publishing platforms start supporting it as their centre, not an add-on.

Backing Typed

Full details of what Realmac have planned for Typed are on their Typed Indiegogo page. It’s a flexible funding project – which means that it will go ahead, however much funding they get. But there’s some pretty good deals there on access to the platform for periods of time, so take a look, if it sounds like something you’d like to publish with.