Sabeer Bhatia co-founder of Hotmail announced the beta release of his latest venture Blogeverywhere.com, a new utility to enhance users’ online experience with a multipurpose, browser based toolbar that can be downloaded by users.

“With Blogeverywhere, we hope to create a parallel Internet of sorts consisting of user generated content that would encourage users everywhere to blog,” Bhatia told newspersons at the world launch, 10 years after he pioneered the free-for-all seminal email service.

The technology based on Web 2.0 is downloadable free of cost to users and works on the philosophy of user participation. Once downloaded, the toolbar will attach itself to the user’s Internet browser and allow the user to post his/her blog on any website.

“Blogeverywhere will create a mirror page of every Internet page where people can post their blogs in real time. We want it to become a blog repository for every website on the planet,” Bhatia said.

He said the technology was developed over the past couple of years in collaboration with a team of about 40 engineers of the Pune based KPIT Cummins.

Bhatia said the emphasis of the venture would now be to primarily focus on getting as many users on board and it would become a revenue-generating model in a few years based on the number of users the technology is able to attract.

“There are 27 million bloggers of the one billion or so who use the Internet. Our aim would be to get the other 970 million to blog as well,” Bhatia said.

“Blogging is the next big thing and 90 percent of Fortune 2000 companies now dedicate funds to have a presence in blogspace. They see it as a mechanism to influence perception about the company and to get real time feedback on products and services.

“Five years from now, we hope to have 500 million users and this venture will then be a viable revenue model through advertising and in the meantime we will earn consumer trust on our tools and services over the next few years.”

Apart from allowing blogging on any website, the technology offers various other features, Bhatia explained.

These include enhancing hotmail services, updates on RSS feeds on websites, instant access to a variety of search engines directly from the blogbar and fostering blogging debates.

Queried on choosing India as a site for the world launch, Bhatia said that one of the primary reasons was that it was an Indian venture developed here and it made sense to launch the technology here.

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