Geodog: Blog on Blogging

Responding to Anil Dash's request for even more feedback about MovableType and SixApart

First of all, thank you, Anil Dash, for your patience and willingness to engage in conversation with critics and fans alike. I would also like to agree with you about tone, and to note that I did not help matters with the titles of some of my earlier posts. I think my criticisms were valid, but the tone of some of the titles was uncalled for and unhelpful. Second, I can't believe you have asked me to post more feedback, and are getting me to spend another 2 hours of my life writing about MovableType, something I just said I wouldn't do again. Some would accuse you of feeding a troll, and friends have asked me why I spend so much time worrying about one Weblog / lightweight Content Management System vendor (it's 'cause I like y'all). As I said earlier, we all do have more important things to do. But you (and the Wall Street Journal) asked, so I will try to be brief, constructive and final.

Where I am today with respect to recommending SixApart products:

• I would recommend Typepad to a non-technical person who was trying to start a blog, if they had some aesthetic sensibilities and weren't too price sensitive. Presuming that SixApart can keep up with growth and minimize downtime, it's a nice product, reasonably priced and segmented, and the grouping on Typepad give the author a decent chance of attracting a readership. SixApart does also seem to be adding features to Typepad at a reasonable pace. If someone was price sensitive, I'd send them to Blogger. Blogger's hosting issues seem to be a thing of the past, there are now some nice templates for it, and there are still smart people outside Blogger doing cool things for Blogger. Plus it is free. It is hard for SixApart being in a consumer business where so many of their competitors are giving away their product for free. Maybe it makes sense for SixApart to do B2B only? See below.


• I would recommend Movable Type for a institution or business wanting to host a corporate blog that didn't have a lot of internal technical expertise. There is good documentation, nice templates, and good support. I don't know if SixApart permits it, but if it does I would recommend that the business start with 2.661 and let the dust settle on 3.x before upgrading. Depending on what the institution's other needs were, I would also recommend that they evaluate pMachine, Expression Engine, CityDesk and Drupal. Some of other others are better options if the institution also needs to build a complete website, or wants community features as part of its content management system.


• For myself, personally, I'm spending all my weblog hacking time playing with WordPress, and I now have 3 blogs running it on 3 different servers. Unless some cool new MovableType-only feature appears in the near future, I will probably convert my 4 existing MovableType blogs over to it over time instead of upgrading to MovableType 3x. WordPress' documentation isn't nearly as good, support is hit-or-miss, and I'd guess there is a substantial chance the whole project will explode and fork into many pieces over the next year or so. So why convert to WordPress? I'm comfortable messing with PHP in a way I never will be with Perl, if you count plugins the pace of feature additions seems much faster with WordPress than with MovableType, and it is free as in freedom. I don't have to worry that if some stupid idea of mine takes off and suddenly I have 10+ people wanting to be authors, as happened with SARS Watch, suddenly I would owe SixApart a $100. It isn't that $100 is unfair, or a lot of money, it's just that I don't want to have to think about it, and there are lots of alternatives where I don't have to.

My suggestions for SixApart:

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Anil, you personally are doing a great job of it now with SAPN, and Mena made a good start with Mena's Corner and SixLog. The hard part, as we all know, is keeping it up, and answering people's questions publicly. Phil's question on the MovableType-Pro list, asking what incentive there is to develop plugins for MovableType now, has sat unanswered for a week. Maybe someone answered him offline -- but I bet a lot of other developers are wondering what the answer to that question is. IMHO most of the problems with SixApart's constituents over the last year and half have been because they felt SixApart wasn't responding to their concerns (the rise of comment spam), or because they were unpleasantly surprised by SixApart releases (no beef, new license, breaking plugins). A lot of the concerns could have been ameliorated, and perhaps SixApart might have made some different decisions, if there had been more communication with stakeholders.


2. Eat your own dogfood, specifically with respect to comments. I know SixApart weblogs have trackbacks enabled, for which SixApart should be commended, but I'd guess that most of SixApart's non-institutional customers have comments enabled. Experience what your customers experience, and let customers have an easy way to talk to you and with each other.


3. The licence. From your point of view it is probably a dead horse that has been flayed, but for many people it is still a live issue. I still think that it was counterproductive to segment the market by number of authors, and to start charging non-commercial hobbyists for the product, especially given past statements and that fact that no new fun user features were rolled out with the new pricing structure. I've read the 34 cents a download argument, and I still think that since a download costs SixApart pennies at most, getting 34 cents for each download is a very low cost of sales. Given the large number of free alternatives, it is penny-wise but pound-foolish to charge the non-commercial hobbyists. You may gain a bit of revenue per download, but I'd guess that you lose a lot more over the long run in not attracting more developers, influencers, evangelizers, and people who eventually convert their sites from non-commercial to commercial sites. Shelley Powers recently posted an interesting suggestion for how SixApart could mix their proprietary code with GPL code that is worth considering.


4. Start adding some sweet candy to the releases, soon. I don't want to wound or get in an argument, but if feels like MovableType hasn't had any fun new features in a long time, and the pace of plug-in releases slacked off a while ago. MovableType has been upgraded with somewhat better comment management and dynamic pages, but that is plumbing, not candy. Anil, you haven't had seismic work done on your house yet, being a relocated New Yorker, but wait until you do. The contractor will fight to add something else to the project -- a kitchen remodel, a new deck, a hot-tub -- heck, if nothing else the contractor will probably throw in a free paint job. Why? Is that because the contractor really wants to make another $10-20K to add on to the $200K they will charge you for the seismic work? No, it is so that at the end of six months of dust, noise and inconvenience, the customer will have something new and shiny to play with and point to, not just the knowledge that their cottage, which they had thought was safe when they bought it for $900K, is now officially safer.


5. Get out of the consumer business. Forget all the stuff above. Businesses have the money. You have already established a reputation for a stable, functional, well-supported product. Sell it to businesses, and let them use it, or resell it to consumers. It is a lot easier to know what a small number of users need and to keep them happy than it is to deal with all those whiny webloggers who want something for free. (On the other hand, at Geoworks we found that dealing with Nokia wasn't always a barrel of laughs either.)


6. Add some project management resources to your staff. This is the recommendation that as an outsider I am least sure of, and that is potentially most biased, since software project management is something I have done a lot of, but from the outside it looks like you are growing so fast, careening from project to project, that you aren't able to plan and organize. Maybe that's why communication has been poor, because you didn't know yourselves what was going to be in the next release or when it was going to be? If so, a good project manager can help.

That concludes the solicited advice, hopefully for good. I would be interested in SixApart or Anil's response, but I certainly don't think they are obligated to respond.

How to write a weblog

Yesterday somebody pointed me towards a little essay published 2 years ago by Mark Bernstein, 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web. What a gem! I can't believe I haven't seen this before. As soon as I read it, I knew that if I searched for the title, it would be cited thousands of times. It has all the hallmarks of a classic, the first draft of Strunk & White for writing on the web. It's a great essay about writing on the web, but also just about writing. I won't cheat by excerpting large portions, I'll just demonstrate that Bernstein knows how to write a headline:

1. Write for a reason


2. Write often


3. Write tight


4. Make good friends


5. Find good enemies


6. Let the story unfold


7. Stand up, speak out


8. Be sexy


9. Use your archives


10. Relax!

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to write for the web, or just wants to learn how to write better. Next time someone asks me, how do I start a blog, I think I'll send them this link. After reading the essay, I became even more impatient for Bernstein to finish the version of Tinderbox for Windows that he is working on, so I have a chance to try it out.

Mena Trott answers 6A's critics and Geodog signs off on criticism

I wasn't planning on ever writing anything about SixApart and MovableType again, but today Kris Krug sent me mail alerting me to a lengthy interview he did with Mena Trott, where she responds to some of the recent criticism of Six Apart and the MT 3.0, and 3.1 releases:

MT: One of the biggest things that I want to get through (and that I probably don't a good enough job of getting through) is that it's completely untrue that we're this big corporate company and that we don't care about the users-that it's all about just Ben and Mena and the venture capitalists. It's not so; there are so many smart people here who love what they're doing and love blogging. It dismisses their value when people say the company is just a big corporation that doesn't care about its users.

People should understand that when you're insulting the company, you're insulting a lot of people. We're all good people and I wish everyone would take some time to see that. There are so many other targets to focus on; our little company from San Mateo is the least among them.

The interview is worth reading in its entirety, if you are interested in the whole MovableType saga and some of the issues around the recent releases. To round out the view, or if you want a different perspective, check out long time MT user Ben Hammersley's opinion, Ben Trott's response, and 6A supporter and plug-in writer Timothy Appnel's comments.

I myself have said more than enough about MovableType and SixApart, and gained some unwanted notoriety through a poor choice of weblog post titles. I've also have had my criticisms misrepresented, and Anil Dash has fairly called upon me to examine my criticisms. As a result I reread Anil's post about criticism, and reread for about the 10th time Phil Ringnalda's classic post on the same subject, there is no they, and I've decided not to spend any more time offering what Anil called "unsolicited criticism." We all have more important things to do.

I will just note that I as I have said elsewhere thought MovableType was a was a brilliant product when I first encountered it. The documentation, user interface, features and support were superb. I enjoyed the time learning how to hack the templates and add plugins. I appreciated the ethos of the old MT license -- if you make money, we make money, which seemed appropriate for a product built on top of a huge stack of open source code. I am extremely grateful for being allowed to use the product, and in return I evangelized the product, recommended it to friends and businesses, sold my kids' school on buying it, even put a plug for it on my SARS Watch Org site that was running pMachine. I also liked Ben and Mena a lot when I met them at lunch at Supernova 2002, and Anil when I met him later (Etech?), and in the correspondence I have had with various members of the 6A team over the last couple of years. So how could I have criticised them, and why would I have wanted to do such a mean thing?

I don't think any of them are bad people, I just think that they have made, and are continuing to make, some bad mistakes. A lot of their problems were avoidable and self-inflicted. Because I cared about the product and the people, but I don't really know the people (I sat next to Ben for a group lunch once where neither of us said one word the whole lunch), I said so, not in private email, but publicly, using their tool. Perhaps that was my mistake, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

In any case, I am gratified that some of them are starting to do a better job of talking with some of their audiences, and hopefully listening to them as well. I apologize for any personal distress I caused any of them, and I wish them the best of luck in their personal and professional endeavours.

Help keep the Bird writing

Shelley of BurningBird is broke and needs a little help paying the hosting bills to keep BurningBird going. Shelley is one of the earliest weblog writers, and she has a distinctive, original and beautiful writing voice. She catches a lot of flack because she is often the one to turn over the rock that everyone would rather leave lying there, revealing a truth that people don't want to see. Truth be told, she probably also catches flack because she can be a bit cranky at times, but she only turns her rhetorical guns against powerful people, and she is incredibly generous with her time and expertise.

The web would be a much poorer place without her presence and that of BurningBird, and if you can spare a bit of change, drop some in her Pay Pal jar. If you can't spare a bit, at least help get the word out.

Ben and Mena Trott: You forgot to dance with who brung ya

After I wrote the post this morning, Ben and Mena Trott sucker punch the weblogging community, I had second thoughts about it, especially the title, which has a moralistic and judgmental tone that isn't appropriate. If it wasn't for my belief that it is almost always dishonest to rewrite something that you have already published (and that others have linked to), I would take the post down. Instead, I'm writing a new version of it:

As I said earlier, Six Apart has the right to charge whatever the market will bear for their labor. So why are people so outraged, and why is it a questionable business decision? Is it just because Movable Type users are a bunch of whiners who want something for nothing, as some believe? I don't think so. Six Apart is reneging on a very public promise, and is treating the people who helped make Movable Type a success very poorly. A little history from a long-time user:

Movable Type owes its success first of all to Ben and Mena having done a great job designing, implementing and updating a product with an excellent user interface and superb documentation, and secondly to having it ready at just the right time to catch the blogging wave. But the third factor in Movable Type's success was the army of evangelists and contributors who sold the products to their friends, businesses and community organizations, and who contributed bug reports, bug fixes, responses on the bulletin boards, and great plug-ins. In many ways, Movable Type was treated by the community like a Free Software project, which it wasn't. But the ethos of the MT 2.x license, if you make money off this software you have to pay, if you don't you don't, was very similar to that of MySQL and other open source companies, so people, in spite of warnings, ignored the significant differences between it and free open source. From a business point of view, Movable Type Personal was the seed product, or the loss- leader, that sold Movable Type Commercial.

The other part of the history is that when Six Apart got VC funding and shortly thereafter started work on TypePad, it stopped work on its already announced 3.0 product, but didn't say anything publically about it for many months. Meanwhile, the Movable Type comment spam problem started and quickly threatened to grow to unmanageable proportions. As resentment and questioning from the user and developer community built, Six Apart finally announced that they would do a 3.0 product, then, shortly afterwards, Ben announced "The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade." Big Mistake.

Today, Mena announced that the personal product would cost, depending on how many authors and weblogs you run on it, from $79 to $189, for personal use. And if you have more than 10 weblogs or 9 authors, you have to buy a commercial license, from $200 to $700 and up. So, for instance, if students at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems wanted to put together a multi-author weblog for something like the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, which they did this year, the students would have to pay upwards of $700, or get on the phone with Six Apart to ask for charity.

So now many members of Movable Type's amateur developer and evangelist community, who contributed a lot to the product, are being asked to pay significant amounts of money to upgrade the personal and hobby sites they currently run, and that they aren't making a dime from. Ben and Mena reneged on their promises, plus they are charging more for very few new features. Of course people can always stay on the current free 2.661 platform, but who wants to sit on a dead platform?

Stepping back from the situation for a moment, business lessons I would take away:

1. Trying to get people to pay for a product that they have been getting for free is very hard. Getting them to pay more for less is almost impossible.


2. Don't comment on pricing until you have decided what it is. Certainly trying to appease users for being very late to ship a software product by making a promise about price that you can't or won't keep is very foolish.


3. Do a cost /benefit analysis before you decide to enrage your evangelist and developer community, and make sure the benefits are worth it.

Sometimes the benefits are worth it. As Alex King suggests, it may be the right business decision to get rid of the budget conscious, handhold-needing customers, and focus on bigger budget commercial customers. Just make sure the customers you shed aren't also your best salespeople. It may well be that Six Apart has enough in-house programming talent and enough of a commercial reputation that they don't need the army of volunteer contributors and salespeople any more -- I just hope they did this as a conscious decision.

If not, I suggest they change it soon. The longer they wait, the worse it is going to get. Remember New Coke?

Ben and Mena Trott sucker punch the weblogging community

Of course Six Apart has the right to charge whatever they want for MovableType, but having repeatedly said that they would provide a free version of MovableType 3.0 for personal use then announcing this crippleware that is MT 3.0 personal is stupid at best, dishonest at worst.

Enraging your first customers and your developer community is a strange path to business success. Hopefully they will reconsider after being enveloped in the perfect storm that is brewing.

Update: 21:58 5/13/2004
After I wrote this post this morning I had second thoughts about it, especially the title, which has a moralistic and judgmental tone that isn't appropriate. If it wasn't for my belief that it is almost always dishonest to rewrite or pretend you didn't write something that you have already published, I would take the post down. Instead, I wrote a new version of it: Ben and Mena: You forgot to dance with who brung ya

Turned commenting back on

I spent several hours trying to install James Seng's CAPTCHA comment spam reduction MT hack, but didn't have any luck. Seng isn't answering questions any more about his hack, but apparently (undocumented), it requires a newer version of GD.pm than the antiquated 1.38 version that my webhost, phpwebhosting.com, has installed. I tried convincing my webhost to upgrade their version of GD, but they declined, and when I tried to do a private install, I found so many other packages that also needed upgrading that in the end I gave it up.

The problem with comment spam is that I always feel like my site has been defaced, and I wonder why someone would go to all the trouble when I remove the comment spam on a daily basis. I have to remind myself that it isn't anything personal, the spammer hasn't even been to my site, it is just a script.

So back to the old Spambad system until MT 3.0 ships. At least it has sharpened by SQL skills, devising a new SQL statement every day to erase the 90 spam comments while keeping the two valid comments.

In any case, please feel free to comment again.

Comenting temporarily turned off

My apologies, but I have been forced to temporarily turn off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam. I hope to have commenting up and working again shortly.

Ben and Mena, I take it all back!

Ben and Mena Trott have made up in a big way for their earlier silence on future plans for MovableType. In a series of postings on Six Apart and MovableType, they have announced release of a security update to MT, support for Atom 0.3, and a feature list and time frame for MovableType 3.0.. It all sounds great, and to my surprise it seems that they intend to keep the current pricing structure, e.g. free for non-commercial use. I hereby volunteer to be a Beta tester.

I and some others have complained publically and privately to about the lack of news regarding MovableType. I received some kind private email from Mena, but this kind of an announcement demonstrates better than anything that the Trotts listen to user feedback, and that they have not forgotten their first users. It makes me feel a little sheepish about my earlier criticism -- I hope that it was useful, in the way it was intended to be. Certainly the least I can do now is volunteer as a Beta tester and send some of my Christmas pin money their way, to help pay for all the engineering and usability work.

To Ben and Mena and the rest of the team at MT/SA, thanks for all the news, and thanks for the hard work that it represents.

Soldiers posting Iraq photos on the net

While doing some digital camera format research, I ran across Through the Lens of a Soldier, which are ostensibly (I assume that they are genuine, having no reason to disbelieve it) pictures taken by a soldier in the 101st Airborne division serving in Mosul in Northern (Kurdish) Iraq that were then posted on a photo sharing service by her sister, for all to see and comment on. The debate on whether the Iraq War is good or bad is of course raging in the comments, with many of the participants ostensibly members of the armed forces. There are many moving photos, and some funny ones -- my favorite in that category is a picture of a "no photography" sign.

How does it change journalism when serving soldiers are publishing reports and photos from the front for all to see? How about when they start sending back live video? And then other serving soldiers debate the war in the comments of the publication forum? How does it change the military, and the relationship between the military and the American people?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, except to know that it will cause changes to all of the above, and to hope that more openness and more unfiltered communication between the American citizens at home and those citizens serving in the armed forces will enhance democracy.

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, break the long silence on MT Pro

Six Apart is a company that specializes in personal communication products, but they haven't done a very good job of communicating recently. In February Six Apart announced that Movable Type Pro would be out in the summer, and summer passed and went with no comment at all. Schedule slips are fact of life in software, and clearly there was a lot of other good stuff going on with Six Apart's business that might get in the way of releasing a new version of Movable Type, but Six Apart can't expect not to cause comment and speculation with a continuing silence like that. If Six Apart had just announced a six-month (or one year) slip I am sure everyone would have understood, but silence breeds speculation. When this was compounded by the fact that Six Apart didn't seem to take any action to deal with the issue of Movable Type comment spam, leaving volunteers from the Movable Type community to come up with steps to combat the problem, it seems like a natural conclusion to assume that Movable Type as a standalone product is on the back burner, at best.

Don't get me wrong here. I haven't had to pay a cent for Movable Type, and Six Apart doesn't owe me anything. I owe them and the Movable Type community for the wonderful product I have enjoyed the use of for almost two years. If Six Apart decides that their business is best served by ceasing developing Movable Type as a standalone product and by concentrating on Japan, or on Typepad, or some combination of the two, then I will applaud them and wish them well, and recommend Typepad to people starting out writing on the web. However, Six Apart should not be surprised if ardent fans of Movable Type (and of the Trotts personally) like me start speculating about what is going on when there is this kind of silence, and if some of us decide to use other systems that we have more confidence are being actively developed and improved. The November 21 announcement after 9 months of silence was a step in the right direction, but Six Apart needs to do more communicating of its plans on a more regular basis if it wants its current volunteer evangelists to keep spreading the good word about Movable Type, and if it wants continue fostering a community that adds enhancements to its products.

To Ben and Mena, thanks for listening, and thanks for all the fun I have had with Movable Type up until now.

Don't you think this is getting a little incestuous?

Weblogs commenting on media stories commenting on weblogs commenting on media stories commenting on web...

Or is the word l am looking for tautological?

Anyway I am glad that weblogs are getting some press, and they are getting away from the stupid "Are weblogs journalism debate?" and focusing more on the benefits (and drawbacks) of weblogging in bringing unmediated experiences, building community, and enabling people as creators of content, not just consumers. Still, there is something incestuous about it.

And media become more like weblogs ...
Improved Tools Turn Journalists Into a Quick Strike Force: "Some media critics say the technology's potential benefits can be undermined by the pressure it places on reporters to be filing continually simply because it is possible to do so." Sounds a lot like a weblog.

Fiddling while Baghdad burns

I couldn't take any more of the war after a while today, so I buried myself in blogtech. I redid the design of my link log, The Midnight Blog, to make 3 columns using CSS. Let me know what you think of it, and if you find any bugs. I've only been able test it with IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.1 on Win2K. I've been thinking of redoing the design of this site as well, so this is sort of a test run. I have gotten really tired of the relative fonts that took me so long to hack in, so know I am considering going with a multiple stylesheet solution, like Daily Kos and I Me Michael have.

Speaking of comments, I know that I have some regular readers, and according to my referrer logs a fair number of people stop by. Do me a favor and leave me a comment, will ya? While I've had a lot of readers recently, I haven't had many comments. Comments and conversation are a large part of what this is about for me. I don't really care what you say, just react somehow. It's too much work to write all this if it isn't part of a conversation.

The War on the Web

Slate has a nice roundup of places to get news of the war. I've started my own Iraq blogroll, but I'm not particularly interested in following the military campaign, blow by blow, literally in this case. At this point I assume that most of what we will get is "bang bang," heavy on supposed drama, war toys and "entertainment value", light on people's thoughts and analysis.

But the news junkie in me will probably still check twice daily to see what's happening.

Freed at last from Userland's Radio!

Another refugee from Radio makes a clean break. I just finished moving the last of my old Radio entries over to Movable Type, using Bill Kearny's radio.exporter tool. Thanks, Bill! It seems to have gone ok -- the only glitch that I have found so far is that things I had as drafts in Radio, unfinished thoughts and such, seem to have been published over on this site. And now it takes a l-o-n-g time for my site to rebuild -- I need to figure out what Phil is talking about. And I'm sure that next time I look at the site, I'll find a bunch of things broken, but at the moment it feels great. I should only have to run Radio one more time, when I insert the Robert's refresh code.

I took a long time writing up a how-to as I went along, because I couldn't find a good one, and I suspect that a lot more people will be doing this, especially if Salon does go under (I hope not). I'll clean it up and post it in the next couple of days.

Implemented RKB's comment visibility design upgrade

Robert K. Brown implemented a nice design upgrade that makes it much easier to see who is commenting on a post and what they are saying. As soon as I saw it I wanted it, and he very nicely took the time to post a how-to on his site. I like this much better than Burningbird's Talkback. It makes the comments more visible, and links the name and what's been written, but without that Total Information Awareness aura that the the Talkback Search by name feature had for me. (Don't get me wrong, I don't impute any evil intent to Burningbird's feature. It seems kind of cool and shiny, as Phil would say, I just think that its social negatives outweigh the positives.)

While it does have some aspects of fiddling while Rome burns, sometimes it's a lot more fun to play with blogtech than to read more details on the disaster that Dubya is leading us into. So I spent most of tonight's blogging time implementing Robert's feature. Cool and shiny, methinks.

Thank you, Robert, leukemia survivor, political comrade, family man, and geek and writer.

Burningbird has a dangerous idea

By their own words shall they be known. Sounds like a reasonable idea, right? Aggregate all the comments someone has made on your weblog and display them prominently. Their every comment. Preserved. For eternity. In all its glorious intelligence and grace. For instance, every comment that Geodog has made on BurningBird's weblog. Stavrosthewonderchicken thinks it is cool and likes it.

Me, I'm not so sure. I can see the appeal of the old credo, "you own your words", and I tend to sign at least my pen name to comments. But I think of comments as ephemeral, and strongly contextual. Plus, as Gibbon might say, some things are meant to remain veiled in the decent obscurity of a obscure format. The last thing I want when someone puts my name in Google is to have the first thing come up be some stupid late night comment I put on a popular (dare I say A-list?) weblog. So will this cut down on stupid late night comments? Or just increase the number of anonymous cowards?

Thanks to Stavros... for the tip, and Burningbird for the idea and for implementing it. It'll be interesting to watch what happens.

Power Laws, Nano-publishing, Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Fleishman

I've been chewing since reading Clay Shirky's Power Law piece and Dan Gillmor's little writeup on Nick Denton's Pro blogs. Still didn't have any strong opinions, other than amazement on how hot tempers ran.

Finally, I ran across Jeff Jarvis's article Breaking the power law, which is the first thing I have read on the topic that really resonates. He says "Weblogs are the ultimate niche media."

One of the rules of marketing that I learned early in my career: segment the market until you get it small enough so that you can be the leader of it. The same applies to blogging. If being popular is what you care about, specialize in something, says Jarvis. Become the online expert at something. This makes a lot of sense to me.

The example is that came to my mind is Glenn Fleishman. Glenn is an extremely nice guy, who has lots of interesting thoughts about all kinds of things, and has general interest blog, Glenn Logs . He also makes a living as one of many Macintosh experts, writing articles on the Mac for general interest publications. But Glenn's current claim to fame (and online popularity) is that his WI-Fi news site has become the place people go to for news on what is happening with wireless networking. Early on, he took the time to wade through the arcane 802.11x specs and learn what all the issues were, and he put effort into explaining them to less informed people. WiFi news is now the clearing house for information on WiFi, and he is now a (the?) central node in wireless networking. I was at a conference he was at a while ago, and it was amazing to see the deference that the execs from the wireless companies paid to him. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that WiFi news gets 10x or 100x the views that Glennlog does.

I also liked Jeff Jarvis's reply to Anil Dash wondering why he writes a little general interest weblog: "if I wanted to have a bigger weblog I would follow the law of the niche -- or the law of nano -- and I would not write about whatever I fancy but would, instead, pick one topic and cover it with laser intensity. I would be bigger but I'd be bored."

I feel the same way.

Weblogs are a lot more fun than journalism

I just ran across a really funny and true post by Phil Ringnalda. Even though Phil is one of my regular reads, I originally skipped over it because of the title, "Are weblogs journalism?" I've seen so much boring droning on about that topic that I couldn't imagine that there was anything else worth saying on the topic. I was wrong. Phil hits the nail on the head: "doing a journalistic blog means getting to do all the good parts of every job in journalism, without any of the nasty annoying parts. No wonder you keep asking." Phil is right, and he is funny to boot. Recommended.

Google buys Pyra, creator of Blogger

Dan Gillmor announces that Google is going to buy Pyra, makers of Blogger. It certainly validates blogging. I'm sure the blogoshere will be discussing nothing else for days.

I loved Ev's first response "Holy crap. Note to self: When you get off this panel, you should probably comment on this."

Congratulations to Ev and his crew. They certainly worked long and hard for this. I'm looking forward to seeing what Ev has to say. It isn't clear to me what the synergy is. Maybe it is just altruism? You could probably buy Pyra for Serge and Larry's pocket change. Why would Google want to get into the hosting business? And there will certainly be questions around fairness -- bloggers seem obsessed with Google and their Google rank - some of them will undoubtedly wonder if blogs hosted on Pyra/Google have higher ranks. No press releases yet from Google.

I wish Google wasn't located in Mountain View (a brutal commute from Berkeley). By all accounts, it is an interesting place to work.

MT 2.6 and MT Pro announced

Ben and Mena Trott have announced the release of Movable Type 2.6 and the forthcoming (summer 2003) release of Movable Type Pro. Lots of yummy new features in both -- the Trotts never fail to impress. Upgrade instructions and details on new features available on their site.

Looking for a new webhosting company

Does anybody have any recommendations for a cheap hosting company for this blog? I've used phpwebhosting for the last 2 years and been very happy with them until the last few weeks, where first I had my Berkeley DB get corrupted (which googling indicates is usually caused by a disk getting full), and now I am getting out of memory errors every other time I try to run mt.cgi.

I can understand that problems happen, and that for $10 a month people aren't going to stay up all night holding your hand if you run into any problems, but I have now filed 5 tech support requests in the last 7 days, and received one short response, to the effect that maybe the problem is because I have huge database. I have a tiny database. I have not had any other response. It isn't an acceptable level of service.

Maybe its time to move on, and to move my company Onscreen Systems' website too. Any recommendations? TIA.

WLIJAGDH

What Phil says to people who take Weblogging a little too seriously. Do we know anybody like that?

I like it.

Interesting event calendar

Mostly a note to myself to check back on the WorkIt Event Listings on a regular basis. May also be useful as a model for the Berkeley Blog.

That nasty IE 6 scrolling bug that shows up in MT

If you have noticed that on this site, and on some other sites that use columns, Internet Explorer 6.0 doesn't seem to scroll correctly, it is because of a notorious IE 6 bug. As a user, all you can do is refresh, which sometimes helps.

If you are the site creator, putting

<div style="clear:both;"> Space or Random Text </div>

right at the end of your template/page, just before the

</body>

seems to work around the bug.

Other workarounds are documented on Kristine's site. Thanks to Kadyellebee and the gang on the MT support boards for their help.

Clay Shirky has a lot of people talking.

A lot of my regular reads and a few off the beaten path have something to say about Clay Shirky's article Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. Me, I'm still chewing on it. And contributing to the phenomenon with the links above. And wondering why people care so much.

Why I never get to sleep when I should

This is my life.
Luckily, I've found my doppelganger.

Thanks to my nearest and dearest, for bringing the paper version of this to my attention.

A passion for writing

I've found since I started this weblog that as I go through my day, I often think "I'd like to write about ..." I write essays in my head as I walk to the office. I have this huge backlog of things that I mean to write about. I stay up late at night writing (often completely different things than I meant to write about) even when I know I have to get up at 6:45 to get the kid off to school.

Does anyone know if this happens to real writers? Does this happen to you? Let me know.

Legal blogs I read

An attorney I know who is new to the blogosphere asked me if there were any legal blogs, and if there were, which ones I read. There are tons. Apparently lawyers are opinionated and like to write. Ernie the Attorney has one list of legal blogs, and others can be found through Google. I am interested in legal issues, and I occasionally stop by lots of legal blogs, I read only three regularly: Lawrence Lessing; Eugene Volokh;, and FindLaw's War on Terrorism sites. Lessing writes well, and he and the EFF are spearheading (on the legal front) the battle against the media monopoly's attempts to curtail our freedoms. I read Eugene Volokh because he is honest, thoughtful, prolific, opinionated and principled, even if he is a gun nut. I mostly disagree with his right-wing politics, but I admire his writing and often learn from reading it. Plus, he responds directly to comments. Finally, we are both admirers of Judge Alex Kozinski, another principled right-wing/libertarian attorney who can write. While Findlaw's War on Terrorism site isn't technically a blog, it has daily news on the War on Terrorism and the War on our Civil Liberties, plus lots of primary documents, such as briefs, motions, and decisions. I'm still looking for the good ACLU/Bill of Rights blogger, if you find her, please let me know.

Serious legal junkies probably want to check How Appealing daily, but since it is mostly news and pointers to opinions, as opposed to original writing, I don't find it very interesting.

Geodog is back

I am back up and running, after a week's absence. What a pain it has been. For some still unknown reason, the Berkeley DB that Movable Type uses got corrupted. See my posts on the MT forums if you are really interested in the gritty details of how I figured this out. My hosting provider, phpwebhosting, who usually does a pretty good job, claims that nothing changed on my server. I am not aware of any "out of disk space" errors. So why or how did it get corrupted? Shades of my old experiences with Radio, which is what made me move over to Movable Type.

In order to recover my blog, I had to go through all my old posts and convert the information into the form required by MovableType's import format. At this point, I discovered I had made some unfortunate choices when editing my templates, such as getting rid of the seconds in the time format.

An alpha geek might have whipped up a perl script to do this in an hour. A sensible person might have just resigned himself to a long evening or two of tedious of cutting and pasting and retyping.

In my case, not being sensible person, and being a wannabe geek instead of a real alpha geek, I decided to take the opportunity to learn the macro language of my text editor, NoteTab Pro. Side note: I have been using NoteTab for years now. It is the Swiss army knife of text editors. Versatile, simple to use, but also very powerful. Highly recommended.

Add problems with my neighbor's new 802.11b wireless network putting mine out of commission and a child with scarlet fever, and it has taken me a while to get back up and running. But I am back up now, having reinstalled Movable Type, this time running on MySQL, with an additional 100 Meg of disk space purchased, and plans to back up on a regular basis. The only thing that seems to be lost is the majority of comments. Sorry Mom, and sorry guys who disagreed with my position on SUV's.

What I learned:
Sh*t happens, especially with tech. But I knew that, right?
Phil via email, Robert on his blog and Girlie on the MT support forums are really helpful, but when you are screwed, you are screwed. Thanks for trying, folks.
NoteTab is a powerful program with decent documentation.
Movable Type is a powerful program with great documentation. As someone who wrote tech doc in a previous incarnation, I know how hard it is to write good tech doc. The Trotts succeeded.
It could save you a lot of time in the future to take a look at the import documentation, and make sure that you produce the data required in your archives, even if it is just within an HTML comment.
Back up regularly. But I knew that, right?