iWeb looks pretty cool. I spent about 10 minutes or so chatting with the guy who designed the interface, peppering him with all sorts of technical questions. The biggest thing about iWeb is that it does work without .Mac. Basically, you can save whatever you create to your local disk. From there, you can copy it over to your webserver by whatever means suits you. The Apple guy said that some minor things won't work if the pages aren't hosted from .Mac (like their hit-counter), but it didn't sound like there would be any major roadblocks. Granted, this isn't as easy as using .Mac, but I definitely think that there are people out there who are going to use this feature.
I spent some time talking about the blogging features, and they seem to be pretty basic. The blogging functionality of iWeb doesn't support comments or trackbacks, and I forgot to ask if it does automatic archiving of posts in a calendar-based format (but it probably does do that). The Apple guy described it as more of journal -- for people that are used to keeping a diary or writing e-mails to their family, they can now bang out simple blog posts in iWeb without much learning curve.
And that, in a nutshell, seems to be what iWeb is all about. Get the content that you have (journals, photos, movies, etc.) onto the web with a minimal amount of hassle. The advantage of this is that it will get people who normally wouldn't publish on the Internet, publish on the Internet. It will get more people blogging. And that is just fantastic. This is one of Apple's core strengths -- taking something that is difficult for the average user, and making it so easy that they are not intimidated by it.
Of course, this also means that I probably won't get too much use out of iWeb.
Drat.
:)
-Andy.