Gagapost offers easy collaborative blogging

PALM DESERT, Calif.--How can friends and family best share their experiences of things or events they did together?

A Taiwanese company called Qubes took the stage at Demo 09 Tuesday morning to offer its answer: Gagapost.

This is essentially collaborative blogging, in which multiple users can all share ownership and authorship of the blog they've created. In many ways, this is very much like a wiki, but with a simpler front end and cross-Web commenting tools that anyone can use, regardless of whether they're one of the blog's owners.

The company presented an example of co-workers who have returned from a party and who want to both share their thoughts on the event. So one would start the post, save it, and then invite their co-worker to participate. That person would then get the invitation and would be able to instantly start adding their own thoughts to the post.

In addition, the service allows commenting--and comment threads--anywhere on a post, not just at the bottom of the page. This is nice, because it makes it possible to quickly see readers' reactions right at the spot where you want to see it, rather than having to interrupt your train of thought to scroll down to the bottom. It also makes contextual commenting possible, something that has been sorely needed.

And these days, something like Gagapost wouldn't be complete without an associated iPhone application. And indeed, Gagapost has such an app, one that allows an iPhone user to start a post, take pictures on the device and share them, and also share ownership of the post with others. This then works both mobile-to-mobile and mobile-to-PC.

All in all, this is a very simple concept. As with everything, it is too early to tell if users will flock to this new platform, especially with so many other well-established competitor platforms, but if people do come, this could present a nice alternative to the established blogging model.