February 2008 Archives

Andy Kessler makes the case in the WSJ that the best path to "an open and innovative Internet is not sneaky technical fixes nor more rules and regulations and bureaucracies to enforce them. The Internet will only expand based on competitive principles, not socialist diktat." Eliminate the barriers to competitive networks, and focus on a "policy to help cut a path for more competition, rather than protecting incumbents...." Nut graph:

This is the essence of the Ed Markey's (D., Mass.) Orwellian-named Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which would foist network neutrality on the wild and woolly Internet. The Federal Communications Commission is holding a public hearing today at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., to build the case for the ill-conceived idea of preventing, as Mr. Markey's bill would, network operators from using technologies that may favor one application over another.

It's a bad idea because the only thing Mr. Markey's bill will preserve is mediocrity via the lack of competition, and full employment for regulators micromanaging a business whose very innovation comes from the lack of rules. With net neutrality, there will be no new competition and no incentives for build outs. Bandwidth speeds will stagnate, and new services will wither from bandwidth starvation.

Read it here.

We all spoke at Google Zeitgeist 2007. For some reason those guys got more attention, though. Go figure :) It was cool hanging out with the likes of Fred Smith, Tom Brokaw, Thomas Friedman, and Al Gore in the green room. Thanks to Esther Dyson for moderating. Here's the video of our panel.

From Six Apart News today, Gourmet's TV series "Diary of a Foodie" profiles food bloggers and ends up highlighting all Six Apart bloggers. We love food bloggers and love being part of their delicious world. Here's an excerpt from the SA News post:

In the episode, which you can preview on Gourmet's site, the producers have documented some of the leading lights of the food blogosphere, from Hong Kong to Hanoi, to two of the cities Six Apart calls home, Paris and San Francisco. And every single one of the blogs featured is powered by Movable Type or TypePad. Once you've checked out the show, here are just some of our food bloggers you'll want to sample:

• Sticky Rice, where Mark Lowry documents his culinary adventures in Hanoi.
• Chez Pim, Pim Techamuanvivit's signature take on food from the Bay Area and beyond.
• Cha Xiu Bao, Josh Tse's story of his delicious discoveries around Hong Kong.
• David Lebovitz, the eponymous diary of a Parisian foodie.

There are dozens more food blogs on TypePad, if you want to get a taste for the food blogosphere, and of course you can sign up yourself and tell the world what's cooking.

Here's an interesting and beautiful MT site about... interesting and beautiful MT sites! Very cool.

Blog design just got a whole lot easier. This is a fantastic new tool created by Jim Ramsey. Here's an excerpt from the mt.org post:

For years now, Movable Type has had a powerful "Style Catcher" built in, which lets you browse a number of different style libraries all over the Internet, and then apply a style to your blog with just a click. It's really simple, but as a company that's always cared a lot about design, we wanted to give you more power, more personalization, and more control over the way your site looks. So behold, the Movable Type Design Assistant, a beta of a new tool designed to help you make beautiful sites, easily.

...

Jim Ramsey, Movable Type's lead designer and someone who's done some great thinking about design in general has listened to a lot of feedback from the community, and knew that we could make this whole process easier. One of the first steps to making great design simple was his Universal Template Set concept. But everyone who uses Movable Type's default templates should have more tools -- not just to make the design process easier, but so that it's easy to learn how the whole system works while making a custom design.

Blogs are so powerful because they enable people to express themselves personally -- and to completely and easily control that expression. So much of self-expression in this world is otherwise tied into other people's identities and other brands, that it's sometimes hard to break free. We've seen a cycle on the Internet where large online media have yielded in great part to individual media, only to then be eclipsed by large online communities, which I believe are starting to yield to more individualized forms of community and communication. "Individual community" sounds like an oxymoron, but I submit that what makes a community is more heterogeneity than homogeneity. Sure, common interests serve to bring people together, but a community takes on its own form not by being a mere amalgam of clones, but in the interplay of individuals.

So it is that the large communities are bursting with individualism. This tension is inherent even in the name "MySpace." MySpace is a single place where everyone is trying to be different (albeit often in the same kinds of ways). Who's space is it anyway: is it the user's space or News Corp.'s? Even the austere and formulaic Facebook has evolved with customization, personalization, and a host of apps, if not much diversity on the design front.

The social networks have been aggregations of online action and activities, but they've been isolated from one another because it would seem the network owners prefer control to freedom. Facebook owns its turf, MySpace owns its turf, and they haven't been much interested in allowing their folks to mingle, I suspect because they fear that loss of their control over their users will mean loss of ownership for them, and then loss of their value.

But just as big online media made way for individual media with blogs, big social media will give way to individual, and individualized, forms of social media. Blogs have always been about individual control and freedom and they too, I predict, will be the force to free people from social networks. Not *remove* them from social networks -- blogs haven't replaced traditional media, they've augmented it -- but give them options to construct their own persona, on their own terms.

That's why I think MT's new Action Streams (see mine in the left sidebar) is more than just a cool new set of capabilities for blogs, but in fact something indicative of a much larger trend and perhaps an inflection point for blogging and social media. Rather than actions being held hostage within online services, now, using the power of blogs, people can have their actions aggregated around them -- not the other way around.

Huge props to Mark Paschal from our MT team who did an amazing job on this. And his post on this is both eloquent and intriguing. Here's an excerpt:

There are both a mighty need and a grand opportunity for us to knit our society back together, and I expect us to use the internet to do that. Putnam mentions the idea that the internet lets us connect in ways we haven't before, but rightly views the utterly unproven possibility with skepticism. I've yet to adequately articulate myself on the topic, and I'm still not able to do so here, so instead let's discuss a meager tilt I took at that windmill: the new Action Streams plugin for Movable Type 4.1.

Just changed the url of this blog from r21online.com to r21.org -- saving you a full 6 characters!

I just posted this on Six Apart's main blog. It's been a great journey for me so far with MT -- starting with this blog -- and the road ahead has never looked brighter. Here's the first graph...

I started blogging on Movable Type in 2002 -- and began a long love affair with the product that has helped transform the world of blogging, and the world blogging touches. I remember that sense of both freedom and control that I felt when I realized how easy online publishing could really be for an individual. When I came to Six Apart in 2006 I had the privilege of being put in charge of the Movable Type group. And now as CEO, I get to continue that work, which makes it even more important to explain not just where we've been, but where we're going.

Read the rest here.

I wanted to personally thank all of the fantastic TypePad members who responded to my recent letter and the follow up post on Everything TypePad. In addition to the helpful comments on the blog, and responses to our survey, I've received hundreds and hundreds of emails from you personally. Nearly every email is positive and has a productive suggestion on how to move TypePad forward. I am reading and responding to all of these emails as soon as I can. If you are waiting for a response, please bear with me! (I did take some time off during the Super Bowl!). And thanks again for all of the great feedback. We know how important TypePad is to you and we really appreciate you helping is make it even better.

I had the distinct honor on a recent visit to Tokyo to attend the performances of the 10 finalists of a musical contest, "OtoRevo," put on by Columbia Music Entertainment. It was a battle of the band context with a social media component -- completely powered by Movable Type -- in which fans would view, comment, and vote on their favorite bands. A sort of American Idol for bands. I had planned on being polite and catching just the first few acts to support this great use of MT, but I loved the energy, creativity, and the musicality of the amateur bands and stayed all the way through. One of my favorite bands, Good Crew, won with "I Say Go." They really deserved the win. They had tremendous energy and stage presence and the lead singer has great charisma. They also have a TypePad blog! Here's a video:



Many of the stories of the musicians were touching -- even based on the little I was able to get translated for me live. And some of the songs we touching too. The catchiest tune to my ears was from Omitaka which translates as "The story which is read in you."  Here it is (it's now in my iTunes):