DISQUS

Hey John, thanks for the writeup for our presentation. I just wanted to get more feedback about what you were looking for from Chris and I on stage -- I think less than 5 minutes of the hour or so we were up there were specifically about our products. In all honesty, our main mission was to lay out a vision for where blogging is going and how social publishing is going to help it evolve.

If you or your friends want to help continue that conversation, I'd love to connect with you all and get more feedback about better ways to illustrate that to a larger community. The most important part is really that larger vision, and that's where we spent 90% of our time, so hopefully that was of value. And glad you'll give Blog It a try!

Hey John, I saw that Paul Bausch had linked to your post here, and as someone who's been a fan of PB's for ages, I was wondering if I might be able to help in the effort.

I work with the team at Six Apart (we make Movable Type and lots of other stuff) and our team just build Blogs.com on top of Movable Type, as an aggregation of thousands of blogs. That might be a good, free engine to use for a reborn ORblogs -- let me know if you're game, and I can provide more info!

rrcatto, if the only people who are able to publish on the web, or able to connect with communities online, are those who "Read the CODE", then those of us who truly love the web will have failed. Our mission at Six Apart is based on the idea that, no, you *don't* need to be a programmer if you have something worthwhile to say, and that any time more people are sharing their ideas online, we're winning.

And that's the truth. When we started, a lot of people still thought blogging itself was a fad, or that we bloggers would never have the impact that we've had on media, on politics, on culture, on community, on society itself. But now that impact is undeniable. Frankly, we're thrilled any time anybody starts publishing on the web, regardless of which platform. If you prefer WordPress, great! Our Media team can help you with advertising on your site. Our Blogs.com team at Six Apart can help promote your site. Six Apart makes Blog It to make it easier to update that site from within Facebook or on your iPhone, and we make TypePad AntiSpam so you don't have to pay for Akismet just to get great comment spam protection.

In short, when people are expressing themselves online, and using the power of blogs to power communities, then we're winning. I don't know what war you're fighting, or who you want to go to battle with, but if you think there's victory in battling those that want to help more voices get online, then I'm not sure why you'd participate in a community like the one here at Mashable.

Fabrice, that's an absurd comparison. First, Movable Type Pro *exists*. At least until next year or so, BuddyPress is vaporware. Second, MT Pro's features are based on the Movable Type Community Solution, which has been around for more than a year and powers sites all over the web like Talking Points Memo and AMC's Mad Men blog and tons more. So this isn't a theoretical set of plugins that someone can cobble together to try to graft on social features, this is a cohesive platform that you can get professional support and services for, and use to build a large scale sites.

Plus, you get all the benefits of MT 4.2: It's completely open source, it comes with free TypePad AntiSpam which is also open source, and it's up to 100x faster for common tasks. All that while being far, far more secure than WordPress.

In short, this is where blogging is going next, combining open social features with really robust publshing and content management. We're glad that others agree that's the future, and we're proud that Movable Type is the first to get there.

I can't believe people don't know their web history! Ate my balls is a venerable part of internet lore, just as Fail Whale will be someday, and they belong together.

Hey Charity, good news -- I work with the MT team, and there are definitely lots of web hosts you can choose from to use Movable Type. The new version 4.2 that's about to be released is faster than ever and should work on any web host, and you can get it for free at http://www.movabletype.org/ . It even imports your WordPress posts if you want to try migrating your site. Let me know if you give it a try; You can even take a look at a demo install at http://www.movabledemo.com/ if you want to just see how it works.

Simple answer, Doug, we did it because we wanted to help people block spam. :) And we thought we had something that was not just more free and more open, but better-performing as well. Easy!

Not surprisingly, Anil Dash gets anal about April Fool’s day jokes, declaring “your April Fool’s Day joke sucks.”

Oh, that "anal" joke! That is so great. I remember first hearing it when I was ten years old, and boy it is till just as funny as all the lame Google jokes. Call me crazy, but I have a lot more respect for a company or person who can make something that's *actually* funny, the other 364 days of the year.

Nick, have you looked at Action Streams for Movable Type, which supports 75 social networks, and is both free/open source as well as being decentralized? It seems like we don't have to wait forever for the frameworks to be created -- the tools are there, just waiting for more people to get educated about them.

My sense is that this very primitive implementation that I've done is probably *not* the most useful thing to do with this technique. I'm just hoping to inspire someone more creative to come up with a good reason to do this. :)

BenB definitely. I think pretty much everything you've mentioned is on the roadmap for TypePad in the next little while, but to be honest, I don't know offhand the specific timing for the various parts.

I totally agree we need to open up more about the roadmap for TypePad, and we're planning to start doing that over the next few weeks. If you're not already reading it, the best place to start is the Everything TypePad blog. One recent example is the massive improvements being made to things like comment publishing. That's just the first step in similar improvements that will be made across the service. Similarly, you can look at Apple's own web app directory to see that we're not just content that TypePad's got the best mobile experience of any blogging app, but that we're going to keep pushing the boundaries there to invent new things.

Perhaps the simplest thing to point to is the influence that efforts like Vox have had on platforms like Movable Type. You can see how MT is using the asset/image/video management capabilities of a platform like Vox in combination with the scaling abilities of LiveJournal. We've already brought TypePad onto much the same technological platform as LiveJournal and Vox, and that means the next phase for TypePad will be realizing the fruits of those efforts. Until then, we've made it dead simple to post to TypePad from Vox, and there's a ton more features on the way.

"It’s a bit revisionist to call them social networking pioneers. Blogging, yes. But there’s not much of a social network component to it."

I think that LiveJournal in particular (and to be clear -- this is both LJ before we acquired it and since it's been part of 6A) can be credibly described as the most pioneering social networking site. It was the first large-scale site to popularize fundamentals like being able to add friends, being able to aggregate friends activity on a single page, being able to discover content and connections through Interests, which work like tags, and having profile pages which show all your social connections.

Just as importantly, fundamental technologies like memcached (which is used by nearly every social networking site), OpenID, and many other platform components were not just created at LiveJournal, but made open and free enough that dozens of other sites could adopt them to serve tens of millions more users.

Oh, and yes, blogs are social platforms. Both Movable Type and LiveJournal were amongst the first blogging tools to power basic capabilities like comments. Just my opinion, of course. :)

I should point out -- LJ is far from perfect here, sinceit's still early days for this kind of filtering. But I've had the chance to see the thinking that our team's put into this, as well as the great results they've gotten out of it, and I think it's going to be another great tool in the arsenal of anti-spam tech.

Good news, I just got an email saying the new copyright policy pages, with working email links, are now live on Rojo ( http://www.rojo.com/corporate/policies/rojos-co... )
and NooZ ( http://www.nooz.com/about/policies/copyright-po... )


So you’re saying because I’m the only one with a problem, it’s not really a problem that deserves notice, or you couldn’t imagine that someone would want to opt out of a scraping service you didn’t even know you had?

Nope, I was just trying to explain how it broke and I wasn't aware of it. Hope that helps.

Sounds good. I'm also going to be back in New Orleans (can't wait!) for the Word of Mouth conference in about a week and a half, and if schedules work out, we could meet in person, too.

Hey JB, thanks for being patient with us -- you caught a few folks in transit or on the road. We've just got a chance to sit down and figure out all the issues, and when I get back from PodCamp, I'm hoping to comment with more details.

Here's what I *do* know: We definitely messed up by having the opt-out/takedown emails get messed up. We're working on fixing them (they may be fixed as I type this) and I apologize on behalf of all of us for those being broken. For what it's worth, we didn't notice the problem right away because almost nobody every emails any requests in, despite millions of people using our various services.

Second, we definitely take copyright and IP law seriously. We're a company started by, for, and of bloggers, and our senior management is chock full of people who've worked in publishing, founded magazines and websites like Red Herring and HotWired, and a lot of us have earned our keep as writers along the way, too. I only want to point that out to highlight that our intention, any mistakes aside, is to do the right thing and be as open as possible.

On a personal level, I think the reason the LiveJournal syndication works the way it does was a simple technical limitation at the time Brad and his team implemented RSS reading years ago. Put simply, it was easier to duplicate a feed in that context in order to display on people's Friends pages. (That's LJ's equivalent of an aggregator.)

Part of the delay on getting a reply on Rojo, and especially on Nooz, is that honestly not all of us who were on the 6A team first were as familiar with those apps. As much as we've welcomed the new team members, they've been so busy at their new jobs that we've maybe been a bit behind in checking in on the apps they'd built before they joined us. :)

What I do know is the intent of the Rojo and Nooz applications, which is to offer a feed-reading and content discovery service for people that makes it convenient for readers, but also adds value to the reading and sharing experience. Basically, something similar to Technorati's tag discovery pages or even the RSS reading features of a My Yahoo or Google Reader. Aside from the bug in requesting content takedowns, which is absolutely our fault and we're working to fix, the overall intent is simply to be another great way to read and discover interesting writers, and the consensus we hear from most users and bloggers is that this is the case.

I'll check back in with more info, but I hope that helps clear up the initial questions, and I'll be following the conversation if you've got suggestions or feedback about what we should be doing.

Oh, there was one part of your assertions that *was* factually incorrect... "Though Movable Type has largely been replaced by newer blogging applications, including Wordpress". Despite the perceptions in some parts of the blogosphere, that just ain't true. They've got a successful product, and that's great, and we're innovating in a lot of areas (like enterprise blogging) where nobody else even comes close to what we've achieved. MT hasn't been replaced by anything, and is still the most powerful blogging tool around. :)

And one minor point. You say, "I sense that there is a bureaucracy problem taking place here though." And I think it may actually be the opposite -- despite the perceptions, we're still a relatively small company, and the Rojo team is an even smaller subset of our company. If one or two people are traveling, out sick, or just have pre-scheduled meetings that keep them busy, it can be hard to be as responsive as we ought to be. I would guess the big giant companies have entire departments to deal with this kind of bureaucracy, but for the most part, it's just us trying to catch up with following the entire blogosphere.

Anyway, thanks for the passionate and detailed feedback on all of this -- you're helping us get closer to what we want to be doing. It's heartening to see you assume that we're *trying* to do the right thing, because that's definitely our goal, and I'm looking forward to checking back in to see how we're doing. If you need to get in touch, feel free to email, IM me at anildash, or you can text/call me on my mobile at 646-541-5843. I'll post more info as I know it.

Vote: Vox

Robert, thanks for the kind words, and I especially appreciate the honesty it takes to re-evaluate something once you've formed an opinion the first time.

I think one of the reasons personal/private blogging like Vox is hard for some of us with public blogs to grok is that it's using a familiar technology in an unfamiliar way. Imagine if we'd only ever known email as a medium for newsletters and all of a sudden we were able to use it for person-to-person communication as well.

Maybe more instructive is the example of SMS text messaging on phones. The carriers thought they'd use it to send you status messages, maybe to tell you when you have voice mail. Most never imagined that people would send each other short text messages all day.

That's part of what's exciting to me, that a lot of us who've been blogging for a long time are getting to rediscover on Vox some of the reasons we started blogging in the first place.

It's absolutely like high school, and it's annoying. What I was trying to do was politely point out how foolish that made the whole conversation seem, when there's literally tens of millions of other blogs that people could be reading which wouldn't be full of drama.

So, FWIW, I agree with you. And believe me, it's even worse being in the middle of an industry where this kind of thing is considered normal.

Congrats!

"We were talking about your positioning. Not about what your product actually does."

My feeling is that people judge technology by their experience, not by what anyone tells them. In your experience of Vox, was it condescending? And if so, was it more or less condescending than being told, "that’s not the point. Wrong question. Next."?

John Furrier's never tried to make me feel stupid for asking a relevant question. I appreciate that about him.

Have you used Vox?

It's probably worth mentioning that in the past few weeks, in addition to opening up Vox a bit, we've released a new beta of Movable Type 3.3, added a number of new features to TypePad including the first integration with Feedburner of any blogging service, and have rolled out a number of improvements to LiveJournal.

Massimo, I think there's a few inaccuracies in your statement, but I think your one question is intended to be about "Project Comet"; That was our codename for the service that's now known as Vox. And our goal has always been to have a solid business behind everything we do, that hasn't changed.

Thinking of you... make sure to take care of yourself during this time, as well.

Thanks, Duncan, I know the whole TypePad team appreciates it. :) And it looks like we're pretty solidly back up now.