John Cook’s write-up on blist in yesterday’s Seattle P-I continues to circulate. I thought I’d chime in one more time and respond to a few comments and questions I’ve been getting via email.

First, I think people may be overly influenced by the title of John’s post. I would argue that Excel is the world’s most ubiquitous database. In that sense, blist aims to provide a much better environment for creating simple, visually rich databases. John asked me during the interview if we plan to add support for all of the functions Excel does. No way. I’m an avid Excel user and love all of its built-in statistics, math and financial functions. blist will offer some simple “column math” functions for things like creating a derived column. For example, if you were building a stock portfolio with columns “Number of Shares” and “Current Price” it makes sense that you would want a column called “Current Value” which is computed as “Number of Shares” x “Current Price”. We’ll also support some aggregate functions - sum, count, average, median, etc. I think of these as things you would expect in a database (and which are included in most databases). If Access were easier to use a lot of people would use it instead of Excel. We definitely see those people as our core audience. Of course Access and Excel were designed in the 80’s, before the Internet enabled us to work in much more distributed and collaborative ways. blist recognizes that and updates the delivery and collaboration model as well.

Second, our name isn’t derived from a river in South America or a Himalayan mountain. We all know that the word blog is a contraction for web log. Well, to be accurate it’s actually a portmanteau just like spork is derived from spoon + fork. Where we’re trying to innovate is on ease of use. We’re building the world’s easiest database. We wanted a name that conveys ease of use. We all already know how to make a list, so if we can make a list we should be able to make a web list - a blist.

Finally, are we like a webified version of Tableau Software? No. My understanding is that Tableau is not a database, but has some awesome visualization tools that allow you to see patterns and trends in your data as it resides in Oracle, SQL Server or some other data warehouse. When we use the word “visual” to describe blist, we mostly mean to convey that we have built-in types that let you store more than text and numbers. For example, pictures, music, documents, flags and stars can be stored. The visual effect is that when you look at your data, where appropriate its rendered graphically. You might create a corporate directory and have a column called “Mugshot” which shows the picture of an employee.