Blogs as an e-mail replacement

While at a cafe on Friday afternoon I experienced a new use for TypePad. I was at Ritual Coffee Roasters in the Mission district of San Francisco Friday afternoon when I noticed a gentleman transferring notes from a notepad to entries on his TypePad blog. His girlfriend is currently in Africa as a humanitarian aid worker and he created a password-protected TypePad blog to keep in touch. Blogging had replaced e-mail as their most reliable form of communication.

How do you communicate with someone when you are unsure when they will have access to the Internet in one form or the other? Will they have access to free, web-based e-mail? Viewing a web page is the simplest and most reliably accessible form of communication for this couple.

The man I met would write short notes in his notebook to tell his girlfriend about his day and he later creates a blog entry for each day or major occurrence. His girlfriend only has the opportunity to check his blog about once every two weeks and she leaves comments on some entries.

This couple had a very cool use case and it made me realize how much I take for granted in my daily search for wireless Internet access and the ability to publish and read others.

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