everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: Six Apart

  • University of Minnesota upgrades to MT 3.16

    University of Minnesota’s UThink installation is one of the largest, (if not the largest) Movable Type installations in the academic world. Shane Nackerud, the administrator of their 1,200 blog network, has done yeoman’s work wrassling an earlier version of Movable Type (2.x) to fit his needs and written a number of scripts to help him manage his ever-growing network.

    Today, I’m happy to announce that University of Minnesota has formally announced their plans to upgrade to our latest version of Movable Type. I’m really excited to set Shane loose on our latest software and look forward to hearing how he extends it for his community.

  • Blogs on the cover of BusinessWeek

    It’s going to be another busy week – BusinessWeek has a lengthy cover story on why companies need to pay attention to blogs.

    Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

    At the same time BusinessWeek Online launched five new blogs (powered by Movable Type) at Blogspotting.net

  • Favorable Review of TypePad

    The Associated Press has done a review of several hosted weblog services including Microsoft’s Spaces and the recently launched Yahoo 360. TypePad comes out on top,

    Unfortunately, none of the five free or semi-free services satisfies
    me fully, and which one you choose depends on the specific features you
    value most.

    To get them all, you must pay at least $4.95 a month to subscribe to TypePad. It pretty much has everything I could ask for. . .

    Full text of the review here.

  • We got Hats! We got T-Shirts!

    A shameless plug for the Six Apart Store. Be the first on your block (maybe the only one ever on your block) to wear a T-shirt that says “My other shirt is rebuilding” Shweet!

  • Boeing Blog takes off with Movable Type

    After a false start with “another blogging software package,” we’re pleased to see that Boeing has come around and launched their blog on Movable Type. After criticisms for not having an RSS feed, permalinks, archives, nor search they’ve come around and included all of these features in Randy’s Journal 2.0.

    They were also hammered for their style and what they wrote about:

    A number of articles have been written in print and on the Web,
    implying that Boeing’s blog and others like it just aren’t “real”
    blogs. Why not? Because we don’t rip on the company in the blog.
    Because we don’t trade in gossip. That’s funny. I happen to like the
    fact that I work for Boeing and talk about aerospace.

    I think that’s just fine. Define your passions and create your place to talk about them. That’s a true blog. You are a gardener of your space on the web and if it gets weedy and clouds out what you’re trying to say, it’s your job as an editor to keep things tidy for future readers. I do think it’s useful to have this direction stated up front which is why About pages are so important, they set direction and tone for your readers and future commenters.

  • General Motors gets mileage from blogs, now Podcasting

    General Motors created a lot of excitement and gained serious cred in the blogging world when they launched their Fast Lane blog several months ago. Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz hosted Michael Wiley, the sponsor of the the program in one of their podcasts.  Neville is a huge fan of Podcasts and I guess it rubbed off because now GM is podcasting and, according to Christopher Carfi who took time out to listen, has kept the “behind the scenes” feel right through to the podcasts which is great and should continue to draw car enthusiasts to their site.

    Looks like the team at GM has done it again and broken another precedent in the world of corporate blogging. All good stuff for the world of blogging and good for GM too!

  • Yahoo API plugin for Movable Type

    It was only a matter of time. Ken McCloskey over at Pixelabra has developed a plug-in to allow you to search Yahoo! using their new API from within Movable Type.

  • TypePad in the Classroom

    Bud Gibson, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, writes about using TypePad in the classroom. On the three reasons why blogging is not just another technology in the classroom fad Bud writes,

     

    By design, blogging allows individuals
    to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without
    having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design
    consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with
    students. Bulletin boards tend to be top-down and are owned by one
    person. Wikis force you to go through a social filter. Others can edit
    your pages or even delete them.

    Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very
    easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place
    while still maintaining individual attribution.

    Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and
    resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did
    ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but
    they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly
    produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs
    make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.

  • Yahoo Search API

    Just in time for it’s 10 year anniversary, Yahoo opened up API access to its search platform.  Allowing programmatic access to search services via URLs is a trail that Google has already blazed but in what maybe another arms race as we saw with hosted email storage, Yahoo allows five times the number of queries; 5,000 over a 24 hour period.

    There’s already an O’Reilly Hacks book in the queue (what’s with the cowboy boots on the cover anyway?), a growing list of applications that’s hosted on a wiki, and, a developer’s weblog running on our favorite blog platform, Movable Type.
    Jeremy Zawodny     has done a great job of bringing together all the right tools to get this ecosystem off the ground and is clearly the booster that made it happen. Great work!

    Opening up access this way ties in nicely with Yahoo’s media hub strategy which distributes their services in order to drive people back to Yahoo properties, boosting page views for advertising and brand awareness. The question on everyone’s mind is if the Search API set is a trial balloon for a broader rollout of other services. Yahoo IM? Finance? Music? Maps? Horoscope API anyone?