Ghost Blogging Platform Review

**Update 10/12/13: This article is pretty old right now. I plan on doing an in-depth review once it releases to the public. (in a couple days!). Make sure to follow their updates on Twitter and check out their website for the latest info.

A couple good recent articles on Ghost:

• Ghost wouldn’t sell to Facebook
• Technical review of Ghost Blogging Plaftorm by Zvonko Biškup

A friend showed me this Kickstarter campaign and after checking it out, I’m really excited to try Ghost out for myself. They surpassed their goal in just 24 hours and they are now raising their goal to £250K since they are doing so well already. A couple initial thoughts:

• I love the simplicity of the dashboard, and the intuitive visualization of the content and editor screen. I think this kind of thing will be perfect for bloggers and journalists who don’t want to learn the technical side of website construction and find WordPress to have too many bells and whistles.
• While wordpress.org is moving towards being a content management system for full-scale websites, it will give wordpress.com (blogging platform) some competition and things to consider when updating their platform.
• From a marketing perspective, I love what they did with their kickstarter campaign. Within 15 seconds (which is often all you get to capture the audience’s attention), they tell you exactly what Ghost is and why you should be interested in it. Check out the video for yourself.

They are shooting for a November 2013 release date and I’m looking forward to being able to try it out for some projects related to journalism. One of the strengths of WordPress is the support by the community of users. One of my biggest questions is whether Ghost will be able to create a self-supporting community like WordPress has done so successfully over the past several years. Guess we’ll have to wait and see and better yet, if we like what we see, we’ll have to take the initiative to go ahead and help create that community.

One thing I really liked is their ideal of “for love, not for profit”. They seem like an all around human-centered organization that’s looking to advance the state of the web and allow more people to participate and get them involved in sharing with the world online.

-David Abramson is the CEO and dishwasher of Make Yourself Visible, an organization dedicated to helping you get that visibility that you need online and in your community.