I’m pleased to announce another Movable Type Hosting Partner. 2MHost offers an Movable Type integrated into an MT-Ready hosting package. A full list of all Movable Type Hosting Partners can be found on the Six Apart website.
Category: Work
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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?
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Monday Morning Read In
Elise Bauer has published an update to her overview of blog tool market share and has determined that:
– the number of blog sites has grown 120% in six months,
– Six Apart, (my employer) with the acquisition of LiveJournal, has the largest market share of blog sites,
– It’s impossible to measure the business market which sits behind firewalls,Elise admits that using Google and Technorati for your research tools is crude at best but it’s the best guess out there and this report is the best report out there since Forrester’s, Blogging: Bubble or Big Deal? When and how businesses should use blogs last November. The two reports together make a compelling case for why businesses should be blogging and which tools they should use.
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Personal Privacy and Commercial Databases
First ChoicePoint and now Westlaw. Both are in hot water because of news because of real and potential security breaches. Both companies keep large databases of private records such as Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and residential addresses. This is not the first time ChoicePoint has made the headlines. In 2003, they were slammed for putting profit margins over ethics by selling voter registration information (registration required) on 65 million Mexican citizens to the US Government.
I once was given a demonstration of the ChoicePoint database and was amazed at the information within. They have two levels of access, one for businesses and another for licensed law enforcement officers. Needless to say, in order to demonstrate the system I was given a tour of both levels of access. Just to make sure no privacy rules were broken, we kept the browsing to my own profile but as I walked away from the booth I couldn’t help but think that that, as far as I could tell, the sales rep didn’t have law enforcement clearance.
So here’s the rub. How do you demonstrate a highly secure database that’s only supposed to have limited access. Commercial pressures are always going to drive you to bend the roles a bit, especially as you get towards the end of a quarter when sales goals need to be met.
Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, just is thankful that his company isn’t in this kind of database business.
Update: ChoicePoint gets sued by California woman for fraud and negligence. [Wired]
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Google Hubris?
I just uninstalled Google Desktop Search which has been running alongside Yahoo Desktop Search for the past few months. Not only did Yahoo have a better preview feature of hits, Google’s tool was, strangely enough, too integrated into the browser. I prefer to jump into "Search archives & files mode" as a separate activity from my browsing and internet search activity. Having Desktop Search running in a separate application window helped that.
The recent hullabaloo over Google Toolbar Autolinks didn’t help either.
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www.sixapart.com
Six Apart redesigned its corporate web site and now brings together all products, Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal under one URL. www.sixpart.com has the look and feel of a portal but is actually run completely on Movable Type.
Lots of good stuff here. A nice history page where you can learn about the company, a centralized support page where you can actually see what our crack support team looks like, a Movable Type case studies page, an integrated TypePad page which also serves as the Typepad login screen and features thumbnails of showcase sites, and finally a Partner section where we promote our hosting partners and have a blog of recent partner news.
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Internet Explorer Update this Summer
Microsoft announced that it will be updating their Internet Explorer browser which hasn’t had a major upgrade since they announced 6.x back in 2002. The news was greated warmly by most users commenting on the MSDN IE blog with many asking for advanced CSS, PNG, and XHTML support while others ask for features such as Tabs or integrated Popup Blockers, Microsoft is touting this release as focused on fixing security & phishing exploits.
One thing left off the request list, and pointed out by some, is integrated Search which I personally make extensive use of in my instance of Firefox. I regularly use the Google, Amazon, and Dictionary plugins and have also installed the Wikipedia and Creative Commons plugins which come in handy. Are they leaving this out just to keep Google and Yahoo guessing?
The release will be made available to XP Service Pack 2 subscribers and later rolled out with their Longhorn OS upgrade. Another nail in the coffin for any Windows 2000 users out there.
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Six Apart Global Headquarters
Thanks to Niall, you can have a look-see around our new offices. Always nice to have blogger friends to document your life for you. I think this era has got to be the most documented age in human history. Too bad it’s all in bits though, 3,000 years from now no one will have a copy of IE or Firefox with which to read all this stuff!
For those that want to preserve their blogs in print, try BlogBinders.com