Spreadsheets are the new blogs

You heard it here first.

Merging blogs and spreadsheets
I think we are going to start seeing people merge blogs and spreadsheets in interesting ways. A straightforward example would be for a weight loss program. Instead of just having an excel sheet with calories, the date, and weight this could be expanded by having a comments section that is really a description of the person's entire day.
If someone who was charismatic and could write well did this it could take off. People would be able to get into the persons ups and downs. Pictures of the person could be taken on different days and interested into the cell.

Another popular possibility could be the spreadsheet of an athlete training for the Olympics. People could see how her changing her training regime affected her sprint times.


Spreadsheets will be checked for daily progress
An important part of this is that these spreadsheets are not just presented at the end in progress. Seeing a spreadsheet of a training regiment that an athlete present after the Olympics was over would be interesting but dry. But for people to be able to check in each day and see how the timings are going gets exciting.

The personal spreadsheet
It will be startling how personal a spreadsheet can be. Even just a record of how you spend your leisure time can startle you. One part of creating a spreadsheet is that your idea of what will be in there changes as you create it. You may start with just 4 columns but as you begin to enter data, you think of other fields that may be related. This type of thinking is not available to conventional bloggers they are thinking more generally.

What needs to be done
The technology isn't here yet to make this easy. Or it is here and isn't properly integrated. The presentation also needs to be fixed. The product that ends up winning won't look like a spreadsheet.

It may take less work to make blogs more like spreadsheets. It will also reduce the intimidation factor. Here's a simple change that could be made to blogger. In the preferences a new section is created called "personal stats." There you can choose from a drop-down with some fixed values (e.g. weight, mile time, money spent) or have the ability to add a custom one.
Then in each new post web page. The name in the name value will appear (non-editable) next to a text box. The user will enter a number.

That is all the user has to do. Blogger will then create graphs based on the date of the post and the data.
This setup should be very easy to understand even for people with no spreadsheet experience.

Google Pages should integrate Google applications

Google Pages should make it easy to show all my Blogger posts, Google or YouTube videos, GoogleReader shared items, and Picasa images. These nuggets should be as full featured as possible. None of the nuggets available even come close.

• The YouTube nuggets show only search or popular videos. I could add a specific video with YouTube generated custom HTML but if I add a new video a week later users will have no way of knowing. It should show icons for the videos I've created with the most recent first.
• The Blogger nuggets available only do search.
• There is a Picasa nugget but I was unable to see it. After clicking ok the preview pane still stayed displayed and did not add to the page. The preview pane also didn't show a preview.
• The same applied to the Google Reader nugget. This nugget appears to have not been generated by Google. In addition during customization it shows the users password in clear text. I don't think the outside developer should be blamed- Google needs to to be responsible for integrating its properties.
  

I may not have chosen the best available nuggets for these since there were many options shown when I did search. Yet this is part of the problem, Google should be making it easy.


Other notes: Blogger seems to have some function for integrating Google Reader shared items. But doesn't have ability to add any of the nuggets above so it is not a suitable alternative.

Google analytics should also be automatically integrated. There should be no user setup. If not a nugget should be made available.

Google Groups would be good too. A display could be made of all the items I've posted.