Movable Type

http://www.movabletype.org/about.shtml

Movable Type is Six Apart's customizable publishing system which installs on web servers to enable individuals or organizations to manage and update WebLogs, journals, and frequently-updated website content. Movable Type's engine also powers the TypePad weblog service, where you can sign up and start a full-featured weblog.

-- LesOrchard - 20 Jan 2002

Today I attended the talk Weblogs - Blogging on the Internet at the Silicon Valley WebGuild, presented by Mena G. Trott, Co-Founder and CEO, and Ben Trott, Co-Founder and CTO of Six Apart.

Very informative. Movable Type was designed to be used by web-savvy people. Mina and Ben have been surprised that it went way beyond that. So they added features to make it much easier to use, e.g. templates, layout (single, double, triple column, with/without banner...), color scheme to chose from etc. Besides usability, they also addressed the flexibility with a Plugin API. What struck me is that Blog tools are moving towards an application platform; some Wikis like TikiWiki and TWiki are also moving into that direction.

The question came up to compare Blogs with Wikis. Ben said that Wikis are good to collect and organize content, Blogs are good to publish content quickly in chronological order. TWiki can be used to build blogs, the TWikiNewsPortal in use at Wind River looks very similar to a typical Blog, as is the DiscussionForumAddOn. Albeit, some details need to be ironed out, like creating a topic directly without edit, or making it a pick and choose your template, scheme and layout process.

Another detail. The company chose not enable feedback for the blogs on their corporate website (like Mina's corner). This is to avoid nasty comments. In return they list trackbacks, which are links with summaries to other blog entries mentioning one's blog entries.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Apr 2004