AOL has opened up its AOL Journals service to users of AIM:

Matt Hicks

[from AOL Opens Blog Service to IM Users]

AIM users also can submit posts to their AOL Journals blogs through IM. When they are logged in to the screen name associated with a blog, they can send a message to AOL Journals in order to have it published, AOL officials said.

Ok. This led to me trying to fiddle around with the new service. First, you have to login using a screenname: I used my 'boydstowe' handle, created a blog -- took two seconds -- and was up and running. Then things starting being hard.

I upgraded to Mac OS X yesterday (a different story), and now Fire crashes whenever I start it. That is generally the IM client I use to connect to AIM as 'boydstowe'. I tried logging in at AOL Journals using my iChat identity 'stoweboyd@mac.com' but it wouldn't accept that handle. Ugh. Finally I logged in using their web client, and posted an entry that way:

Looks like the Journals are not presence enabled -- you can't see the online status of authors, etc. -- although every post has mood settings. There is a mechanism to be alerted when new entries are added to a Journal you are interested in: IM meets RSS.

The Journals don't seem to take advantage of IMers' habit of constantly updating their status with personal information about mood, location, activities and so on. What I would like is to simply blog every change in status at the AOL Journal. I doubt I would use it for anything else. And of course, I want it to play nice with iChat, which it doesn't. (See my journal here.)

[tags: aol+journals, instant+messaging]