I have long been interested in the apparent overlap in RSS newsfeeds and the possible application of instant messaging to alert blog readers to new entries. It seems I am not alone in that regard.

I recently spoke with Howard Liptzin, of Tipic, a European player in the instant messaging space. The company has developed an XMPP-compliant instant messaging product which interoperates with Jabber and other XMPP solutions.

But the reason for my call wasn't instant messaging, per se; it was the announcement around Tipic's new blogging solution, Mo'time, which is a simple but powerful hosted blogging solution, much like Blogger or Typepad. What caught my eye is the integration of instant messaging as an alerting capability. As Howard puts it,

"The guiding vision behind Mo’time has always been to give users more powerful tools to let them feel that they are actually “on the air” with their blogs, and that the blog itself is but one facet of the experience. Everything about the platform is designed to heighten the user’s experience of being connected to a community in real-time, using tools that have been proven to be the most popular with current users -- instant messaging, web logs and wireless devices.

Thus the architecture was conceived to coordinate our members’ subscriptions to the blogs that interest them (including their own) with an Event Dispatcher that will feed news of updates or comments to a user-preferred delivery device. We created a browser-based Jabber (XMPP) compliant instant messenger (that pops up only if the user activates it) to be the primary recipient of event alerts while the user is online.

The alert comes in with the name of the author, the blog, the first few lines of the content and a hot link to the source. The Event Dispatcher can also send out email digests and Mo’time users always have a Web-based digest of “what happened while I was out?” one-click away. It’s a next-generation aggregation system."

The idea of persistent chat rooms -- like Yahoo Chat, for example -- is similar to the persistence around blogs. How many times when you were reading a blog have you wondered who else was there, virtually next to you, reading the same story? Posting a comment is not quite the same as conversing with a concurrent blog reader.

And as a blog author, I would like to see much more integration of IM with blogging: for example, a one click ability to post an IM session to a blog. Some folks find IM interviews difficult, but I have grown used to the medium, and actually favor it over telephone calls, where people think they are speaking grammatically but they aren't (which you learn when you read the transcript). Also, the lag time between an IM session and posting a story might be as short as a few minutes, while transcribing telephone recordings may take days.

Howard says that Tipic is committed to developing these sorts of instant messaging integration for Mo'time. I can't wait to see it...