Forcing oneself to think within hyper-limited horizontal compartments doesn’t seem all that attractive – especially if you’re constantly considering the reaction of your audience, which is just another layer of unnecessary self-censorship.

What really bugs me about most of the word processing software packages out there is that they are designed for processing words, not to help you write. Think about how well say Microsoft Word support you in: - Collecting little snippets for your next article? - Organising your thoughts into different, alternative structures? - Getting feedback from your peers on the ideas and flow of your piece rather than the presentation and formatting?

Well, it turns out this is not a new problem and there’s a fair bit of software out there trying to address it. Literature & Latte have a nice list of writing software for Mac OS X ( http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.html ), however the only one I’ve personally tried is WriteRoom. It seems to solve the distraction problem in an interesting way, but not the kind of issues I mentioned above.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Then again like Christopher points out above, maybe the tool is the smaller part of the real problem?

And I forgot to add ‘RSS aggregator’ to the list – any blogger worth his salt is now tweeting when they publish (many automatically via services like twitterfeed).

Where do you stand on FriendFeed? Some of the features there are more advanced than Twitter but they seem to be falling behind on take-up.

(Sorry, this is getting a bit OT from your article…)

It is one or all of conversation, broadcasting, Q&A, live blogging and IM, depending on what you want it to be at any given moment in time.

And once you get that, you get Twitter IMHO.