Writely for Bloggers: Write on!

Lost amongst all the hoopla over the Blogger Beta announcement, Google has made Writely (the “Online Word Processor”) available again.

It supports posting to several blogging formats including Blogger, MovableType, LiveJournal, SquareSpace, Wordpress, BlogWare, BlogHarbour and MetaWeblog.

There’s also support (amongst others) for privacy options, tags, online publishing and collaboration tools for team blogs, RSS feeds, plus a whole slew of word processing features including word count, justification, total font control, etc., etc.

Writely can also import Word documents, save to PDF, OpenOffice, Rich Text Format and Zip files.Whew! But will it end up replacing my trusty w.bloggar for writing blog posts and editing my template? The jury is still out on that one the one folks.Combined with Google Spreadsheets and Google Calender, it looks like an online Google Office Suite is just around the corner.

With hardware prices continuing to plummet Google can afford to position itself as the Microsoft of the internet. Indeed, Microsoft still owns the desktop but Google owns the universe. When Writely is finished it’s going to be a really nice app, and it blows away the piddly little editing features you will find in Blogger Beta. But just remember Writely is also still in beta and isn’t without its issues either.

So keep a tab open while you’re blogging and write on!