UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries is a new project by the University of Minnesota to offer unlimited free blogs to all staff/students/faculty. The system is easy to configure and get started—just login with your x500 and give them a title/tagline for your blog. For example, I got one setup in under 5 minutes or so.

It’s easy to add new posts (just the standard MovableType interface), but perhaps not so obvious if you have never used it before. They do an okay job trying to offer some links to tutorials/help sites, but there’s no direct hand-holding along the way.

I find it relieving (and quite interesting) that they left all the power-user features of MT (like being able to customize all of your pages with templates) in place. However, the beginning user is likely to get confused and will have a tough time fixing any mistakes if they go messing around.

I found the lack of installed plugins depressing, especially since the individual user will have no power to install “personal” plugins for themselves. At a bare minimum, I’d recommend installing MT Textile which significantly speeds up the time it takes to write, and allows beginning users to easily add links and such.

I think it will be interesting to see how adoption goes, especially since it looks like they will be providing each user ample space (they assumed 180mb per user or something like that per 3 years). It also has the benefit of no ads and quick loading times. The only detractor is their obligatory legal statement on the bottom of every page:

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.

However, that is easily circumvented with a little bit of css, namely by adding the following to the styles-site.css template.

h5{ display:none; }

Another feature that many people (namely those coming from blogging “communities” like Xanga and LiveJournal) will miss is the ability to “subscribe” to other people’s posts and quickly view new entries. Albeit, this problem is easily survived with RSS readers (like the excellent Net News Wire), I don’t think enough of the users will understand such a concept.