Maybe you’d like to have a sleek, attractive blog or website for yourself or your business. Maybe you’ve looked around at some of the free blogging or lifestreaming platforms like Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, TypePad, and WordPress.com and you’ve been underwhelmed by the cookie-cutter sameness of the sites you see there. If either of those things are true, today’s column is for you.

The free platforms used to be the only way for a beginning blogger to take advantage of Web publishing technology. But it’s now possible to set up a good-looking, full-featured, highly personalized blog, simply by buying a customizable site template and setting it up on an independent hosting service. It’s much easier and cheaper than it sounds. In fact, I did it last weekend, and I’m going to walk you through it.

First, though, a word about the pluses and minuses of the free platforms. I’ve used quite a few of them. What’s great about them, of course, is that they’re free, and that they let you set up an account and start blogging instantly. Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and TypePad all make it extremely easy to create posts—in most cases all you have to do is write an e-mail. And they let you post several kinds of material, including text, photos, videos, and audio.

What’s most dismaying to me about the free blogging platforms, though, is that all of their blogs tend to look alike, with a style that’s curiously Web 1.0. Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.com are the worst offenders: you can pick from a range of templates or “themes,” but most of them look like they’re straight out of 2004. Innovation is much more alive at Posterous and especially Tumblr, which allow more customization, but those platforms lack many of the extra features—such as integration with photo-sharing or messaging tools—that bloggers need to keep up with today’s social media explosion.

If you want a full-featured blog with a spiffy, up-to-date design, the truth is that you need professionally designed theme running on top of a powerful content management system like WordPress. The good news is that you can get these things quickly and easily. I saw a bumper sticker on I-93 yesterday that said “Websites designed for $500.” Buying a WordPress theme and setting it up on a hosting service yourself will cost you far less than that.

A quick but important distinction: WordPress is a free, customizable, open-source Web publishing software system, created by San Francisco-based Automattic, that anyone can download from WordPress.org and run on their own Web server (that’s what Xconomy does); WordPress.com is Automattic’s hosting service, where you can start a bare-bones WordPress blog and the company will host it on their servers for free. Xconomy, FYI, is built on a WordPress theme that we designed from scratch.

Last weekend I relaunched my personal blog, Travels with Rhody, using a “store-bought” WordPress theme and an independent hosting service. The whole process took less than 12 hours and cost me $70 (plus moderate hosting fees down the road). Here are the simple steps I followed.

1. I went shopping at WooThemes. Stumbling across this super-cool South African Web design company a few weeks ago was what started me thinking about replacing my old Tumblr blog. The specialty of the house at WooThemes is premium WordPress themes. They’ve got dozens to …Next Page »

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If you feel it’s time to share something online but can’t think of anything to say, it might be a sign that you’re dull. If you try too hard to craft a bon mot for your blog or some table talk for your Twitter stream, in other words, you might just be inflicting your insipidness on the rest of us.

Or it could mean that you just need a little inspiration.

The folks at Lafayette, CA-based Plinky, a Web startup led by ex-Googler Jason Shellen, have chosen the latter, more charitable interpretation. On January 22, they went public with an online “content encouragement” service designed to supply the dusty nuclei for little snowflakes of confession, insight, or humor.

Every day, Plinky supplies a “prompt”—a provocative question or challenge—and then helps users craft multimedia-enhanced answers that are posted both on the Plinky site and on the social-media services of the user’s choosing. (Currently, Plinky can send posts to Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad, WordPress, and Xanga.) The prompt for February 16, for example, was “Name a book that changed your mind or opened your eyes.” The question elicited as many different answers as there were answerers, from Naked Lunch, the 1959 novel by William S. Burroughs, to Harold and the Purple Crayon, the classic children’s book by Crockett Johnson; Plinky illustrated the answers with a picture of each book’s cover, grabbed from Amazon.com.

Other prompts lead to answers that might contain Google maps, Flickr photos, or Amazon CD covers. The service is designed, in other words, to take advantage of the Web 2.0-style open interfaces that allow data such as product thumbnails to be shared and repackaged across many sites. It also encourages conversation, by allowing people to subscribe to and comment upon other users’ answers—the same way they might on Facebook or Twitter, but with a prefabricated topic. “People want to connect through content,” Shellen told me by phone last week. (Our full interview appears below.)

Shellen was famous even before he joined Google for being part of the team at San Francisco-based Pyra Labs that built Blogger, the first popular blogging platform. (Another Pyra/Google alum, Evan Williams, went on to co-found Twitter.) So it’s no surprise that Shellen’s seven-employee startup has pulled in seed money from big-name investors like Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners. In fact, Polaris general partner Sim Simeonov, who first tipped me off about Plinky, is the company’s interim chief technology officer.

Shellen says the company will go after more venture money soon. And it’s safe to say that the Plinky you see right now will evolve over time. For one thing, the company hasn’t rolled out any services, beyond the occasional advertisement, that it can actually charge money for. And Shellen says users are already clamoring for more frequent and more varied prompts—it wouldn’t be too hard to generate prompts  just for sports fans or political junkies, for example.

I’ve been playing around with Plinky for a few days; you can see my collected answers here and at my personal blog. I’m not one of those people has a shortage of things to say, so I’m probably not at the center of Plinky’s targeted user base. But even so, I find the tool far more inviting than Twitter or Facebook, and I’m sure it’s already becoming a hotspot for many interesting online conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise. As Shellen and his developers find more ways to integrate Plinky with existing publishing platforms, it will doubtless become even more useful. Personally, I think I would be more likely to use Plinky regularly if I could view and answer each day’s Plinky prompt directly from my Tumblr or Wordpress dashboard, from my desktop Twitter client (Twhirl), or from an app on my iPhone.

Some of those capabilities may be on the way—but to hear Shellen tell it, the company is even more excited about finding ways to mine the information that users share over Plinky. As the user base grows, the answers could coalesce into a vast, ongoing consumer survey that supplements review sites like Yelp or Angie’s List. Looking for a good place to meet an old friend for a drink? Just check out the answers to yesterday’s prompt.

Here’s the (edited) text of my interview with Shellen.

Wade Roush: How did the idea for Plinky come about?

Jason Shellen: When I left Google I had a bunch of ideas percolating. Initially I thought I was going to take the approach of something like IdeaLab—raise a little money and get an incubator going, since the amount of money needed to start a company these days is so much smaller. But as is usual with these things, one idea captivated me. It was this idea that you could encourage people to create content in a more directed fashion—that you could end up with a win-win where the content looks better, is easier to create, is a little bit more inspired, and that potentially there would be a business model.

I was on the Blogger team before we sold the company to Google, in a business development and product strategy role. We really struggled with how to make the tool understandable to people, because at the time people didn’t even know what blogging was. Once we had the resources at Google to explain really well what blogging was, people started signing up in droves. But many of them were no longer blogging—they were doing something else like sharing stories, posting photographs. They weren’t blogging for blogging’s sake—they had very directed activities in mind. But there were still enough people signing up every day and then facing this big white text box and realizing they didn’t know what they were going to write. That really got me thinking.

You can look at any of the blogging or social networking services and they’ll tell you that the abandon rate is pretty high. You need some reason to contribute. I really felt like the tools needed some attention again. Blogging software is great, but maybe there can be something that other services can add as a layer, making use of all the great APIs [application programming interfaces] out there—not trying to start another Blogger or Wordpress. But we do see that with things like Tumblr and Twitter and a lot of Facebook applications, people do want to connect through content, and they want to be inspired and challenged in new and different ways.

WR: So how would you describe what Plinky does, at its core?

JS: The core of it is the prompts—that spark that drives you to create. But just as important is the fact that you’re not confronted with a big white text area. For instance, today’s prompt is “Share the longest road trip you’ve ever taken.” Now, the standalone prompt idea has been tried before. Six Apart has a question of the day, for example. But we decided to take a novel approach and …Next Page »

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Smith Energy, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of wind, solar, and energy storage projects, today launched a news and opinion blog called Build Baby Build. The blog is focused mainly on helping community members organize distributed generation projects such as wind farms. “Time and time again, important renewable energy projects fail because of a small but well-organized opposition,” the blog’s co-editor, Jeff Rosenberg, said in a statement. “It’s a lot harder to organize in support of something than it is to organize against it, but that’s just what we need to do.”

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This past summer, I had a great time at the Y Combinator Demo Day, schmoozing with guests and watching some altogether fascinating demos from the incubator’s latest batch of startup companies. One of those that made my list of favorite demos was Posterous, which today announced a $750,000 funding round from a group of high profile investors that include Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj, Eric Hahn, former CTO of Netscape, Guy Kawasaki, and New England’s own Mitch Kapor. Posterous also announced a cool new product: group blogs.

Posterous’ shtick is “dead simple blogging.” Its software automatically converts anything you e-mail into your Posterous account—be it a video clip, text snippet, photos, PowerPoint, Word document, or virtually any other type of attachment—into a downloadable blog post. As Michael Arrington wrote in TechCrunch today: “Just start emailing text and files (images, video, whatever) to post@posterous.com and you’ve got a site where it all goes. And they’ve steadily added features. You can, for example, repost all the stuff you email in to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or wherever.”

I caught up with Garry Tan, one of the Posterous co-founders, this morning around 8 am EST, when he was just about to go to sleep in San Francisco, where the company has moved. Tan says they’d been up all night with the launch (at midnight West Coast time), Arrington’s interview, and so on. “Just a regular night,” he quips.

Tan says that Dharmaraj and Hahn led the new round, Posterous’s first aside from the typical small Y Combinator infusion. Also joining was XG Ventures, an angel group formed by a bunch of ex-Googlers, as well as the likes of Bill Lee, Tim Ferriss (of “Four-Hour Workweek” fame), David Sloo, Aydin Senkut, Peter Barrett, Kapor and Kawasaki (who’s involved in a blog-aggregation venture called AllTop). Another New England investor is Bill Warner, who founded Avid Technology.

Tan had nothing but good things to say about his Y Combinator experience here in Cambridge this summer. “A really amazing experience. Definitely prepared us well for raising money and iterating on the product and growing the user base,” he told me. Compete lists Posterous as having about 130,000 unique visitors per month already. “That’s U.S.” Tan points out, though he would not confirm any numbers.

The group blogs feature announced today takes Posterous’s ease of use to a wider context—your friends, family, softball team (in my case, it would be fantasy team), and the like. “You don’t even have to create an account for people,” says Tan. “All you have to do is enter their email address, which is one field.”

For example, my family site might be buderisite.posterous.com. So family members would e-mail whatever they wanted posted to post@buderisite.posterous.com. “It really is as easy as telling your mom to e-mail this thing, and you could have a family blog,” says Tan. (Posterous isn’t the first blogging tool to take a retro, back-to-basics approach—that’s also the pitch at Tumblr, which raised a $4.5 million B round two weeks ago led by Boston’s Spark Capital.)

If you want to learn more about Posterous’ new group blogging feature, here is the company’s own post about it, with examples.

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Boston’s Spark Capital and New York’s Union Square Ventures are the lead co-investors in a $4.5 million Series B financing round for Tumblr, a tiny New York-based startup that offers a stripped down, extremely user-friendly “microblogging” platform.

The investment, announced this morning, is a huge boost over the startup’s $775,000 initial financing, led last year by Spark and Union Square. Up to now, the core team at Tumblr has consisted of just three people, counting its 22-year-old founder, programmer-entrepreneur David Karp. But the investment has already allowed the company to hire a real executive team, starting with its new president John Maloney, a veteran of CNET and UrbanBaby.com.

While there are plenty of free or low-cost blogging platforms such as WordPress, LiveJournal, and Vox, Tumblr has set itself apart by making it easy for users to create short, media-rich posts, often simply by uploading a single quote, link, photograph, song, or video. There’s also a social-networking element to the system: from the main Tumblr dashboard (pictured here), users can browse new posts from their Tumblr friends, and can re-blog the posts they like. (Full disclosure: I’ve been using Tumblr for my own personal blog since late 2007.)

Before founding Tumblr, Karp worked with Maloney for three years at UrbanBaby, a New York-focused discussion site for parents of young children that’s part of CBS’s CNET division. “John’s focus on operations and business frees me to lead product development and scale our platform,” Karp said in a statement. The company plans to launch premium services next year that will start bringing in revenue.

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The Kraft Group in Foxborough, MA—which not only owns the New England Patriots but invests heavily in technology ventures such as the Matchmine recommendation engine and the Patriots’ own media-rich website—is the lead investor in a $4.6 million Series A funding round announced yesterday for New York-based social media site BlogTalkRadio.

BlogTalkRadio’s Web-based software allows users to conduct their own free, live, call-in talk shows. The shows are also automatically archived and published as podcasts. The company says that 3.2 million people listened to its shows in May, and that users launch 400 new shows every day.

“This round of financing further validates BlogTalkRadio as a powerful, new platform,” Alan Levy, CEO and co-founder of BlogTalkRadio, said in a statement. “Given the broad number of opportunities our platform presents to marketers and advertisers, and those who are already using BlogTalkRadio, such as Sun Microsystems, Hachette Book Group, J. Wiley and Sons, Intel and the Department of Defense, we believe this is the right time to strengthen our capital base.”

Former hedge fund manager Scott Sipprelle and other private investor joined the financing round, which the company says it will use to hire sales and marketing staff, strengthen brand awareness, and develop new content.

In a post yesterday, New York Times blogger Brad Stone used BlogTalkRadio’s own platform to interview Levy. “What blogs have done to newspapers and magazines, I think companies like BlogTalkRadio can do to talk radio,” Levy told Stone.

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The Cluetrain Manifesto, the classic book on how the Internet has changed the way consumers relate to corporations, was published in 1999. The word “blog” appears nowhere in it. (While the term “weblog” had been coined a couple of years earlier, it wasn’t until late 1999 that the short form “blog” caught on as a noun and a verb.) But if you had to boil down the “95 Theses” offered to corporate marketers by Cluetrain authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinberger, the summary might be: “Get a blog, and keep it real.”

Consider some of these gems from the manifesto:

• “Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.”
• “Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.”
• “Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.”
• “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.”
• “If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.”
• “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”

The idea that companies need to communicate with their existing customers and potential customers in authentic, human voices—crystallized so clearly in Cluetrain—has now had plenty of time to sink in. At many firms, the natural response has been to launch a CEO blog, and/or to allow lower-level employees with the blogging bug to publish their own views. And here in Boston, quite a few corporate execs have come out to play.

A few of these writers still don’t get it—they want to hawk all that’s good about their company or its products. They don’t communicate when they screw up, and they sound too much like their own PR firms. But there are also some who seem to take to the medium naturally—who understand that a blog is more like a conversation than a lecture.

Some of the best business bloggers find ways to focus consistently but not nauseatingly on their own companies, using their blogs largely to give readers a look under the hood. In this category, one of the most worthwhile local weblogs is Chuck’s Blog, written by EMC vice president of technology alliances Chuck Hollis. In his frequent, very conversational posts, Hollis shares revealing insights into EMC’s short- and long-term corporate strategies—blogging recently, for example, about the company’s intentions in the cloud computing space.

Other local executive bloggers write more about their industries than about their own organizations—Paul Levy and John Halamka, the CEO and CIO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, respectively, are prime examples, frequently writing about the big issues that affect healthcare. And still others write about whatever new product or service happens to catch their fancy, even if it’s from a competing company. Here, The Next Big Thing from Don Dodge of Microsoft’s Cambridge outpost is one of the grooviest local examples.

Though the Boston Business Journal declared in a March article that “The Corporate Blog’s Dying Off,” there’s little real evidence of a dropoff in executive blogging. It’s true, as the article pointed out, that blogging takes more time and commitment than many executives have to give. But if anything, with mainstream media readership and viewership continuing to drop, it’s clear that companies have to engage with their markets through other channels, including the blogosphere. That’s especially true in the high-tech world, whose customers dwell largely online and have learned from high-profile corporate bloggers like Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble to look for human faces inside the companies shaping the computer and Internet industries.

“Blogs allow corporate bloggers to converse with their audience directly,” writes Arlington, MA-based marketer John Cass in his 2007 book Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging. “Such online conversation can demonstrate a company’s ideas, abilities, and, in the final analysis, brand to customers and the world.”

[Click to the next page for our list of Boston-area executive bloggers.] …Next Page »

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Xconomy is all about hyperlocal coverage of the innovation community in greater Boston and New England. But we also know that our readers have many interests that reach far beyond our geography. For the most part, we leave writing about such matters to others. But, starting today, we are making an exception—and that exception is Wade.

Today marks the debut of World Wide Wade, a weekly, largely consumer-oriented column by Xconomy chief correspondent Wade Roush. As many of you know and have already remarked, there are few people anywhere more knowledgeable about new technology happenings than Wade. So we decided to tap this local resource in a new way.

The column will appear each Friday and will highlight new consumer technologies, such as Web services and electronic gadgets, that are making our lives more interesting.

I feel sure you’ll enjoy it. Welcome to Wade’s world.

Today’s column

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The party was pretty geeky—people were actually sitting around writing code. Mike Hirshland, who’d played football at Harvard (earning him an Honorable Mention on Xconomy’s VC Varsity roster), was having a hard time finding a beer. That’s when he gazed around the small San Francisco apartment and saw the laptop sitting on a counter—and on its screen was a clicker tallying downloads of the latest version of WordPress’s blogging software. “This thing was whizzing around like a race car,” Hirshland relates. “It was amazing.”

A click went off in Hirshland’s brain, too. In a cartoon, $$$ signs might have slot-machined in his eyeballs. Inventors have their Eureka moments, and so do investors like Hirshland, who’s a partner at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, MA. “That’s when I knew I somehow needed to find a way to invest with Matt,” he says.

Matt was Matt Mullenweg, the then-20-year-old whiz kid behind WordPress, a nascent open-source blogging platform—and the party was being held to celebrate an early release of the software. This was the spring of 2005. And, as the saying goes, it was the beginning (well, near beginning) of a beautiful friendship.

If you’ve been following the blogosphere at all, you’ll know WordPress has been phenomenally successful. The WordPress.com service now hosts more than 2 million blogs and last year claimed some 100 million unique users per month. With 42 million of those “uniques” coming from the United States each month, WordPress.com also claims to be the 12th-ranked site in the nation, ahead of Wikipedia and Facebook—and that doesn’t count the teeming multitudes of other blogs (including Xconomy) that use the software but are hosted elsewhere.

In January, ramping up to monetize the business, WordPress’s parent company, San Francisco-based Automattic, took in an eye-popping $29.5 million in financing, led by Hirshland and Polaris, and including strategic investor The New York Times Company. In the world of blogging, it doesn’t get any hotter—or better financed—than WordPress and Automattic.

This, then, is a story of how the not-so-hip Boston venture community claimed a front row seat at a trend-setting West Coast startup. It’s the sort of thing that isn’t supposed to happen. After all, when it comes to recognizing revolutionary Internet plays, Beantown investors are either a) hopelessly myopic and clueless, b) still saddled by Yankee conservatism, c) too gray to understand the Web, or most likely, d) all of the above. It’s also the story of a very smart 20-year-old who ran a business very, very cautiously and almost cashed it in and sold everything—until at the eleventh hour he decided to take the plunge and go after creating something really huge. Thinking big is another thing East Coast VCs aren’t supposed to be good at helping entrepreneurs do. But guess who helped push things in that direction? (By the way, if Hirshland’s bet helps us stop talking about Facebook, I’ll enshrine him in the VC Varsity Hall of Fame.)

Matt and Mike met in San Francisco back around Christmas of 2004. Hirshland was hanging out with folks like early superstar blogger Om Malik and Tony Conrad, now the CEO of Sphere, trying to figure out what blogging was all about and whether guys like him should be interested in it. As Hirshland relates, Malik and Conrad introduced him to Mullenweg, noting that the young developer was this super-smart guy doing interesting things.

“It doesn’t take too long to figure out that there’s something special going on,” says Hirshland, who has written on his own WordPress blog about some of what I’m describing. Beyond his great musicianship …Next Page »

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Boston-area bloggers met up to celebrate their craft and watch Game 2 of the World Series (or rather, the endless pre-game show) last night in The Pour House’s basement “dungeon” on Boylston Street. It was the second annual Boston Blogtoberfest, expertly organized by local Web designer Jenny Frazier. From culture pundits to experts on identify-theft protection, this was the place for bloggers to be.

Judging from the variety of volume of conversations I overheard or engaged in, the Boston area is home to a healthy population of smart, young, funny, enthusiastic bloggers. One is Frazier herself, a multitalented twenty-something entrepreneur who writes a really fun blog and is a super photographer and an expert self-marketer—she was even handing out cool little campaign-like pins with her personal “JF” logo.

Many of the people I met at Blogtoberbest (Xconomy helped to sponsor the event, along with about 12 other local blogs and businesses) have technology-related day jobs and not-so-secret alter egos as compasses to online and offline culture. A case in point is Jonathan Feeley, a marketing associate at Digitas who runs a personal blog about Web 2.0 culture called Digital Interactif. Feeley told me that he blogs because it’s the only way he knows to take charge of the overwhelming flow of important interesting information he finds on the Web. Then there was Nathan Burke, “Web Community Evangelist” for Matchmine (profiled here in September), who publishes Blogstring, a clever, colorful group blog that covers social media, public relations, and startups in the Boston area.

I even met two bloggers intent on drawing the best from the worst. George Jenkins, who runs a blog called I’ve Been Mugged, is a former Lotus Development employee (pre-IBM takeover) who learned in May that IBM had lost data tapes containing personal information on him and thousands of other current and former employees. In his blog Jenkins draws important lessons for readers from his own experiences trying to protect himself from identity theft. Then there was Michael Krigsman, who writes a blog for ZDNet entitled Rearranging the Deck Chairs: IT Project Failures. Krigsman told me that in his experience, most failed software or computing projects fail for one of three reasons (or all three at once): greed, arrogance, and ignorance. I understood the arrogance and ignorance parts—people often launch grand projects that they have no idea how to execute—but the greed part wasn’t so familiar to me. Krigsman explained that the third-party consultants usually brought in on software projects actually benefit financially from failure, as late-running or over-budget projects usually result in extensions of their contracts.

The evening was capped by drawings for a range of fabulous prizes. Xconomy’s crack CTO, Andrew Koyfman, would have won the evening’s grand prize, a $100 gift certificate from Shoebuy. But by the time his name was drawn, he had already left The Pour House to meet some friends from San Francisco, and somebody else got the footwear. Now we’re just calling him Shoeless Joe Koyfman.

Frazier has posted pictures of the event on her Flickr feed.

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Would Henry David Thoreau have been a blogger? I think he might have been. And if he’d had a cell phone and a voice blogging service like Utterz—launched today by Maynard, MA, startup RPM Communications—he could have blogged all of Walden right from his little cabin in the woods.

Thoreau is on my brain because I’m finishing this column on my MacBook from the shore of Walden Pond, a hundred yards from the site of said cabin. I can hear the MBTA commuter train rumbling past in the distance. The same rail line was active when Thoreau lived here from 1845 to 1847. Obviously, there weren’t any MacBooks, electrical plugs, or batteries around here in Thoreau’s day. But imagining that he’d had a way to record his own spoken thoughts and get them out to the world instantaneously (at www.walden.org, of course), I bet he would have loved it.

That’s what Utterz does, and after a few days of pre-launch testing I’m already taking a liking to it. As someone who blogs both professionally and personally, I know that I’m sometimes moved to sit down with my laptop and write something serious and contemplative. Other times I’d just like to post something short and spontaneous, without even bothering to find a computer or an Internet connection where I can log into my blogging service (Wordpress for Xconomy, TypePad for my personal blog). With Utterz, I can simply call up 712-432-MOOO (432-6666) and talk for as long as I want. The service will automatically post the audio clip to the blog or social-networking site of my choice, in the form of a widget that can be embedded as a sidebar or directly in a post. (Click here for a widget with some sample Utterz I recorded here at Walden Woods.)

While the voice blogging feature is the centerpiece of Utterz, it can also handle text, video, and photos. When you register with Utterz you program it with your cell phone number and e-mail address. Then if you mail a photo from your phone to go@utterz.com, it will automatically match it with your most recent audio clip and display them together. All of this works seamlessly. A phone call or e-mail is literally all that’s needed to broadcast what you’re thinking or seeing to the world.

“We’re leveraging your cell phone to let you create, access, and manage content on the Web and share it with friends and with your social networks from anywhere, at any time, regardless of your carrier or your type of phone,” says Michael Bayer, CEO of RPM. Today’s a big day for Bayer’s company, which also announced that it has closed a $4 million series A funding round, led by Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures.

The company makes money by collecting a small fee from cellular carriers each time a customer calls 712-432-MOOO. “It’s good for the carriers because it’s minutes used,” says Morgenthaler partner Greg Blonder. “And if you wind up using more minutes than you would normally, you might buy the next plan up.”

Will Utterz catch on? It’s hard to say. Tools for mobile blogging, or “moblogging,” have been around for years. TypePad and other blogging platforms, for example, offer users the ability to post directly to their blogs via e-mail. Audioblogger, launched in 2003, was one of the first services that let you call a phone number and make an MP3 recording that would then be posted to your blog, where visitors could listen to your recording online or download the file. Audioblogger was discontinued in 2006, but other sites such as Gabcast, Hipcast, Gcast, and Jott offer similar capabilities.

Yet most blogs are still 99 percent text, perhaps with a few pictures thrown in. Given that most everyone who blogs probably also owns a perfectly good moblogging device (i.e., a cell phone), there are only two obvious explanations for why audio moblogging hasn’t really taken off as a sub-genre.

One is that people view blogs as a primarily text-based medium, and that they don’t have a burning desire to create or consume audio posts. This explanation could turn out to be the right one. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell without first eliminating the other potential explanation, which is that the existing tools for getting an audio clip onto a blog are too clumsy and complex.

Utterz should provide a good test of the second explanation. It’s so easy to use that if it doesn’t take off, that will be a pretty good indication that the companies offering audio blogging tools have miscalculated, and that there just isn’t much of a demand for this particular service. But I’m betting that it will succeed, at least among the subset of people who keep or read blogs but also enjoy more personal and immediate forms of communication such as instant messaging, SMS text messaging, Twitter, and picture-mail on cellular carriers like Verizon and Sprint.

Thoreau may have gone to the woods to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” but he was no hermit, and I think he would have found something to like about the Internet. If we’re lucky, some modern Thoreau is blogging (or Uttering) right now from the slums of Kolkata or the slopes of Kilimanjaro.

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