InfoWorld has an interview with Anil Dash of Six Apart, the company which makes MovableType and offers the TypePad blog hosting service. Some excerpts:
The three markets are marketing communications; inside the intranet it’s kind of knowledge management; and then the third market is nanopublishing.
We have a long-term vision, which is something I generically describe as the micro content client. Basically it says that all types of micro content are equivalent. Whether they’re e-mail messages, instant messaging messages, Weblog posts — even Usenet — [they] would have one unified API and pieces can be shuttled between all the different contexts that you’re in. I think that’s something where everybody likes to talk about the underused power of the desktop and grids. One thing that might be useful in applying those ideas to Weblogs and managing Weblog information is that the computers can be used to make connections and apply context to the data that’s being handled. But first I think we [need] to have a critical mass of data before people start to make clients around it. So in the short term you’re going to see integration with e-mail clients and instant messaging, whatever people are using today.