Webware

Community members of Six Apart's Movable Type platform (MT) are launching a new blogging service on Tuesday. Dubbed "Melody," it's an open-source version of MT that community members are free to build on and change.

Unlike previous open-source efforts though, this one is the first to break off (or "fork") from the main product, allowing for much faster and drastic changes. In many ways it's an answer to WordPress, a competitor of Six Apart that began as an open source project and has benefited from rapid development because of it.

Even though it's going in a different direction as MT, the group of users that are creating it hope that many of its community-created features will make their way back into that product. "The word fork is a very charged word," says Byrne Reese, who has been one of the leading contributors to MT, and was its product manager at Six Apart for two years. He's now helping to head up the Melody project and organization that will manage it, the Open Melody Software Group.

In a call with CNET News on Monday, Reese said that everyone who is participating in the project has a love for MT, and that Melody is simply a way to get some new community-driven features into it at a faster pace than what's previously been possible. "When you are an enterprise product it comes with a lot of overhead," he said. "Change in the enterprise world can be dangerous. So that's been one of the great challenges, and where a lot of the pent up desire to contribute comes from."

Reese and the other community members behind Melody aren't trying to get rid of MT though. "What we really hope to do is build on top of what Six Apart has done, and what it's actively doing," he said. "When you have a commercial product, I think your priorities as far as feature development goes, are naturally going to gravitate towards the features that make the paying customer happy."

That also means a faster progression of new releases. While MT is getting a new major release every six months or so, Reese is expecting Melody's to be much faster. "We want to create features that stem from real need. But we also don't want to do that at the expense of being able to draft off the experience of Six Apart. The company is often the first to create new standards. When there's a new service that comes on the market you can expect that Six Apart will be one of the first to have it. If we didn't draft off that we would fail."

Instead, Reese wants Melody's feature set to become the "bleeding edge" of what the MT platform is capable of by implementing community-driven features that can coexist peacefully alongside the work of Six Apart. Although he admitted that doing that while making sure that changes can migrate over to the other platform will be a challenge. "What melody hopes to do is to merge those two sides of the coin. We hope to exist somewhere in the middle," Reese said.

Melody is being released as an early alpha version on Tuesday, with a version 1.0 release later this year. Reese says that this initial version is less "sexy" as much as it is a re-architecting of the core of the existing MT service to more easily integrate code from third parties. "I don't know what the right metaphor is...but I like to think of Melody as a leading edge of a knife. A very long, thin knife. Hopefully we can start to make these little changes, and features that amount to something much bigger."

Correction at 7:15 a.m. PDT: The spelling of Byrne Reese's first name has been fixed.

Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.

There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.

Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with the situation. It released a collection of libraries and scripts, written in the Python language, that converts between the export formats of LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, and Google's own Blogger service, said J.J. Lueck of the team in a blog posting about the Blog Converters project.

That means that a person could convert an exported file into a format another blog system comprehends, permitting the data to be imported into the new system. That could make it easier for a person to move to Google's own service--but also to move off it.

Of course, you'll have to be proficient in running Python scripts to use the technology. But it could get easier soon: Google said the scripts can be hosted on Google App Engine, its service for running Web-based applications written in Python, so perhaps somebody will set up some tools to make blog migration easier for the non-programmers out there.

Future versions of the technology will support the BlogML data format and a mechanism to synchronize blogs with services that have an API (application programming interface) for accessing data but not import-export abilities.

Google added an import-export feature to Blogger in December. The company's "don't be evil" slogan got its start in a discussion about the company's commitment not to lock up people's data such as e-mail archives.

The new TypePad comments are a lot more attractive than before.

Six Apart's paid, hosted blogging service, TypePad, is getting improved community features. The first thing most users will notice is a new blog commenting system. It has both a cleaner display of comments (with icons for the comments, WordPress-style), as well as a simpler comment entry interface. Users can also reply to particular comments and the system supports one level of threading.

The updated comments service hooks into TypePad's new profile system. Commenters with TypePad IDs get a place that collects all the comments they leave on all TypePad comment-enabled blogs, and users can add feeds from their accounts on Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, and about 45 other services. That makes the profile pages a lot more dynamic and interesting.

The TypePad comment system can be embedded on non-TypePad blogs. The service can automatically install on WordPress.org, Blogger, and Tumblr sites. HTML code is provided to put the comment system on other blogs.

This new comment ecosystem is certainly an improvement over the previous version. But bloggers have other very good commenting systems to choose from. I favor Disqus, for instance. Although I do like the new TypePad system, I don't see a reason to install it on my WordPress blog ProPRTips, (and actually, I couldn't if I wanted to--users of WordPress.com-hosted blogs can't get far enough under the hood to make the switch; bloggers using WordPress.org software hosted elsewhere can, however).

The new system is certainly an improvement, and more than that it's interesting to see Six Apart continue to spin core functionality out of its paid products and offer it to the world for free. Previously, of course, the company made Movable Type open source and free. The company clearly hopes that exposure to these products will make revenue-generating products more attractive. Whatever the motivation, these are serious and full-featured products, now available for nothing, and I'm cool with that.

The new TypePad profiles collect all your commenting activities on TypePad-enabled blogs.

Six Apart is announcing Tuesday night the launch of Movable Type 4.2 (download from CNET) and Movable Type Pro. The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro.

Movable Type Pro will enable "social publishing," which is a fancy way of saying readers of MT blogs will now be able to do much more than just reply to posts in the comments. Readers will get profiles pages with "walls," and the capability to rate other posts and comments, and to follow other blog members.

Six Apart also has added an aggregation widget called "Action Streams," that allows bloggers to automatically pull in their activity on other sites, like Twitter or Flickr. It's like FriendFeed, but with all the control and formatting you'd expect of a modern blogging widget.

The new Movable Type will have much richer social features for blog readers. WordPress is getting all social, too.

Meanwhile, WordPress (download from CNET) is converging on social networking as well. A new platform, BuddyPress, which is being built on the Wordpress core, will allow users to set up social networks. Presumably publishers will be able to graft these networks onto blogs.

The power of a blog is its network of users, and Web users are becoming accustomed to a culture of participation. Just as blogging is changing publishing, social networking is going to change blogging. So it's appropriate the these products are getting new social features.

Related:
Salon goes open
Wired: WordPress-powered social network to arrive late 2008
Google's DiSo project

Download links:
Movable Type: PC and Mac
Wordpress: PC | Mac

Movable Type users looking to get simple video comments on their blogs have access to a new plug-in from the folks at Seesmic. Once installed, commenters can add text and/or video underneath someone's blog post, similar to what's been available for WordPress users since late April. The plug-in joins similar ones for Disqus, DotClear, and Cocomment. One for Drupal is also right around the corner.

Personally I've never been a big fan of video comments on blog posts solely for attention's sake. I just can't tell if a comment is worth viewing from the thumbnail, whereas I can eyeball text far faster. That hasn't stopped some of our competitors like Mashable and TechCrunch from adding video commenting to their sites though.

What do you think?

Six Apart is releasing a new plugin for Movable Type this morning called Activity Streams that let MT users create a news feed and add it to their blog. Similar to the FriendFeed, which I checked out back in October, MT users can plugin their various affiliations with other social services and present all the information in one place where they are already publishing content--their blog.

MT's creators said the plugin is different from services, such as Plaxo Pulse, because you host it, not a third party company. Hosting it yourself keeps your login information in your hands. MT also added privacy options, similar to Facebook's news feed, letting you hide stories you don't want to share entirely, or on an ad hoc basis.

If you do want to share, the service is designed to work with other MT users contributing to the same blog. It'll break up each action by user, and by each set of actions by day. You can see an example of it in action over on Movable Type's team blog.

Activity Streams works with 75 services now, and MT's creators said they have plans to add more services. MT users need to be running version 4.1, and have the plugin installed. There are already a handful of examples of Activity Streams in action on MT blogs, ranging from an entire page to a blog's sidebar. You can check out the examples here, here, and here.

Add a news feed to your blog, now a standard feature on Movable Type.

(Credit: CNET Networks / davidrecordon.com)

Six Apart announced last night that it has sold off its free blogging service LiveJournal to Russian Internet company Vox, the blog publishing platform TypePad, and the professional-level blog software product Movable Type. LiveJournal was brought into Six Apart through an acquisition in 2005.

LiveJournal will be run by a new company, LiveJournal Inc., out of San Francisco, but owned by SUP. LiveJournal's seven employees (transfers from Six Apart) are currently working in the Movable Type offices.

What can we expect from the remaining three products at Six Apart? Alden wants his company to focus on building "community and content management systems," not just publishing platforms. This transition is already evident in Movable Type, which has a new (and expensive) add-on called Movable Type Community Services (see story: Six Apart is fixing forums). Among other features, the product lets end users mark other people as friends and track what they're doing. Just like a social network.

The free blogging tool Vox also offers interesting community features, like the capability to define who's in your blog "neighborhood," to make keeping track of your Vox friends easier. It also has a good system for restricting who can see your personal posts.

That leaves TypePad, the paid blogging service that, while capable, isn't currently a shining star of ad-hoc community, the way a contemporary general-purpose social site like Ning is. Alden confirmed to me that in 2008 TypePad will get Movable Type Community Service features like user recommendations on items, voting, and group membership. Vox will get these tools as well. Alden also said that the Six Apart's goal is not just to give bloggers tools to manage communities that spring up around their sites, but to link these communities together.

Moving into community management is a good direction for Six Apart. Communities--not individual bloggers--are the power brokers on today's Web. It's readers, en masse, who move markets. Six Apart's goal to empower bloggers with tools that turn readers into active community participants could leverage this power shift.

I'd like to see Six Apart partner with Ning to extend this vision. I don't think this will happen, though. It looks more like Six Apart is trying to clean up its business to make the company an easier acquisition target.

Disclosure: I worked with Chris Alden at Red Herring, the magazine he co-founded, from 1998 to 2001.

Six Apart, which makes the Movable Type blogging platform and hosts the consumer blog sites Vox, TypePad, and LiveJournal, is releasing a new and very interesting update to its professional-level Movable Type 4 software: Integrated forums.

There are other forums tools for sites and blogs (see Jive Software, for example), but the Six Apart product, called the Movable Type Community Solution, is the first that I know of that integrates this tightly into a blogging platform. With MTCS, users logged into the blogging platform for commenting will automatically have a login for a site's forums, and they will be able to manage their posts and monitor their feedback from a single location for all their activity on a site.

Not your father's online forum.

In an upcoming release, users will also be able to denote "friends" on a site and track the activity of those users. BoingBoing, a Movable Type blog, is using an early version of this feature.

However, since Movable Type is software installed separately by each blog publisher, MT blogs don't by default get linked social networks. If there are users you've marked as friends on BoingBoing, and they are also on Huffington Post, you'll have to mark them as friends again. Cross-site friending--and the rise of a de facto social network for blog readers--will come as Movable Type improves its login procedures. (But see also: MyBlogLog.)

Users get a unified control panel to see all of their site contributions and feedback.

Other social features in MCTS include voting and ranking, or "Digg in a box," as Six Apart VP Anil Dash described it to me. Dash also showed me a new administrator's control panel for the MTCS forums, so moderators don't have to do all their work in the forum's authoring environment.

I'm intrigued by the new integrated forums in Movable Type. Forums are hugely useful sources of information and community on many sites, but they are rarely well-integrated, easily managed, or indexed well by search engines.

The only bad news to this story is that the Movable Type Community Solution will cost about $10,000, on top of your Movable Type 4 software license. Dash hinted that we might see hosted versions in 12 months or so.

While the iPhone may not be ready for business, it doesn't mean you can't take advantage of its big screen and keyboard to get some blogging done. The folks at Movable Type have a new plug-in that makes the blogging tool's interface very finger-friendly, with tabs, and a touch-to-edit function that's a little bit like Facebook's iPhone app. You can create new blog entries and edit old ones, although keep in mind you're still short on copy and paste, so if you're trying to add links from one browser window to the other (an almost necessary part of day-to-day blogging), you're out of luck.

The plug-in is free and open source, meaning you can tweak it to your desire, and implement the work and creations of other community members who find new ways to improve its functionality. If you're a Movable Type user, you can grab the plug-in here.

(Credit: Six Apart Ltd.)