I just got off the phone with Robin Hopper, CEO of iUpload. He's at Demo in Scottsdale to show off iUpload's latest product, Perspectives, which he'll present Tuesday. iUpload is rooted in the enterprise content management world.

Before starting iUpload, Robin was VP of sales for Ibex Technologies, a leader in the fax-on-demand space. In starting iUpload six years ago, he wanted to pursue the vision of making information available when, where and to whom it's wanted. iUpload started as a content management system for web publishing. In the past 18 months or so, they've clearly identified that their content management expertise could improve the level of control a publisher has over their blogging.

In the current blogging paradigm you have to manually replicate your content in all the different forums you want to post: personal blog, corporate blog, other people's comments, social networking communities, CRM, etc. iUpload offers two critical wins in the business blogging space:

First, said Robin, with the Application Suite, "corporations can give individual blogs to whomever they want, both internal and external people, and they have all kinds of tools they can use to manage that. They can liberate the gems from individuals' blogs onto a corporate blog site, for instance." Those back-end tools is where iUpload leverages its CMS knowledge.

The Perspectives piece allows bloggers to "live in your blog and let the content show up in other communities." When a company signs up a Perspectives sponsor, iUpload provides them with a range of back-end tools to specify what information should be included for their site. Users can choose which Perspectives they want to post to and customize the voice of their posts accordingly.

When the service launches on Tuesday, it will include Perspectives from Tribe, Yahoo, Ebay, Salesforce.com, Plaxo, Technorati and others. The service includes Technorati user-generated tags, as well.

The business model includes charging both sponsors and corporations for the hosted service. Individuals can use the blogging tools for free.

"Currently, a corporate blog isn't really any different from an individual blog," Robin pointed out. "It will have some company information, some individual information, it just happens to have a corporate logo. This contributes to information smog; if you don't know about it you can't subscribe to it." Finding the sites and feeds you want to subscribe to is hit-or-miss and time-consuming. "We let you liberate content from individual blogs." Perspective sponsors have a wide range of tools to approve postings, reuse and provide editorialization on posts, interact with submitters, set approvals for different users.

I asked Robin if sponsors wouldn't be concerned about opening themselves up to more spam by participating in a tool that facilitated the reposting of content across the Net. "All of our sponsors do a lot of heavy lifting on the back end. They have the control to shut people down, decide who's a trusted contributor, who's a spammer." Because in the iUpload system, people have to author content in their blog, "that takes the edge off," Robin said. Anonymity breeds spam; authorship breeds responsibility.

Besides the distribution-oriented Perspectives, there are also authoritative Perspectives, a way to limit access to your blog to a small set of individual readers. In the case of Salesforce.com and Plaxo, you would want to limit access to users of the CRM or CMS system. "We're also turning blogs into extranets."

Robin said that there's a perception that they compete with Six Apart, especially around TypePad as a hosted blogging package. "In reality, we're competing against the IT department thinking they have to roll out their own blogging system." I asked Robin if hosted services are being embraced as a way to move without involving IT. "We've seen a real change. Six years ago, IT would have tried to shut down the discussion. IT embraces us now because they believe they have better things to do. Having been involved in enterprise content management, we've had to figure out the answers to IT's security issues and other legitimate concerns."

In a crowded market for blogging tools in which no one has really threated Six Apart's status as the market leader, iUpload is offering a new level of functionality, but it's not a UI improvement so much as a networking improvement. They offer a way to leverage the blog UI to allow users to play in higher visibility or more targeted communities. By letting companies select their bloggers and exploit their content they are creating a strata of the blogosphere that boasts selectivity, content promotion, and control. Control is not generally seen as a virtue in blogging circles; yet the impending HR morass around blogging and the increasingly long list of employees fired over their blogs suggests that having an approval mechanism might have its virtues on both sides.

At the end of day it looks like iUpload is starting to carve some much-needed pathways among bloggers, companies and major online communities.

Links: Perspectives Press Release | Demo