Qumana: Our test report

As promised we have tested Qumana a desktop blogging application. What better way to try it than create the post for our trials.

The Download/Installation
The download went well. Although at 4 MB at first glance it seemed a little heavy.

Configuring Publishers/Server Admin

This was fairly intuitive and our tests with Blogger login seemed to confirm good API integration with the Google service. Enter your blogger user name and password, test the connection and then...

Select a Blog

We were delighted to see all of the Blogs associated with our Blogger account.

Select the blog you want to publish to and then compose.

Composing your Post

A familiar Windows/Word/Outlook type toolbar is displayed. Interface is clean, all icons have tooltips. Includes spell check and thesaurus. Seems complete. Select POST and your done, almost.

After the post we looked at it and it needed some HTML tweeking.

Somethings we'd like to see

• Image upload integration - All the images have to be uploaded and the URL specified. For Blogger accounts we'd like to see Qumana tied in with Bloggers image facility.
• CSS template synch - While we were impressed with the ability to specify any font style on our local machine we'd much rather have seen the styles from Blogger that are applied to our template become the default to assist the user in maintaing the look and feel.

Overall Assesment
A good program to assist posting to a blog but, not ready for your CEO to start blogging. Considering the features we think it's a reasonable size download.

This post powered By Qumana

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Businessweek

Desktop Blogging Tool : Qumana

Qumana
From their Web site:
"QumanaLE is a free blog publishing application that offers bloggers choice and control when writing for the Web – creating posts and inserting Technorati tags into individual items.

QumanaLE helps writers quickly capture, organize and edit chunks of content. Users drag-and-drop pieces of text, links, pictures or images. Then, with one click you can add Technorati tags

Edit and publish the blog post … to as many blogs as you wish ... or save it as a draft to work on later. Turn your content into a draft Word document by saving it as HTML or RTF and opening the file in Word – or QumanaLE – later."

The staff at Deep River Communication will be reviewing this product in the next day or so.

Reporters Eye Blogs

I ran across a new study that shows that although journalists may not see blogs as highly credible, they read them.

"Most journalists use blogs to do their work, even though only 1% believe blogs are credible, according to a survey by Euro RSCG Magnet done in partnership with Columbia University.
The study finds that more than half of journalists use Weblogs regularly, with 28% relying on them for day-to-day reporting. By comparison, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that only 5% of the online population reads blogs regularly.

Other highlights of the study include:
45% of journalists are less trusting of the professional behavior of their own colleagues — up from 34% in 2003.
93% note that they are less trusting of colleagues who are paid to act as spokespeople.
79% believe that recent revelations about journalists taking payment from third parties has had a strong effect on media credibility.
78% believe that Rathergate has profoundly altered the media's credibility.
93% of journalists said they are being "excruciatingly careful" in fact-checking their stories in 2005 — a huge increase from 59% in 2003, likely a reflection of the press's declining credibility."

Source: http://www.emarketer.com/