|
Monday, March 7, 2005
Where else 
| | Today's photo was shot dawn, taking off from an airport, in the late 1980s. For the shrinking number of broadcast engineering obsessives out there, the subject is iconic. |
| | A small clue: Two of these three towers were damaged by a hurricane after the picture was taken. They have since been restored to their original design — which is remarkable, since they didn't need to be. |
No
Main(stream)frames
| | Blog Tool Writing Its Own Story of Success, by Michael Hiltzik, graces the front page of the business section of the LA Times this morning. It's the story of Ben & Mena Trott and Six Apart. The piece is mostly interesting to me for how it positions (as the marketing pros like to say) various blogging tools, and the organizations that make them. I've bold-faced the positioning statements: |
| | ...Market statistics are rare in the informal blogosphere, which is estimated to include 8 million blogs. But considering that it's hard to find many weblogs, save for the most rudimentary, that don't run on Movable Type, it's not a stretch to say the product is probably the world's leading blogging tool. |
| | It allows bloggers to generate pages, archive their postings by subject or category and distribute content in other Web-friendly formats. Six Apart says that Movable Type and TypePad, its paid Web hosting service, have at least 1 million registered users between them (though it doesn't break down the numbers further). Google Inc.'s Blogger weblog publishing program and BlogSpot hosting service are competitors, but they are largely free and aimed mostly at novices. |
| | In the last two years the hobby has become a business. Movable Type is licensed to multinational corporations that use it for internal communications and offer it to customers. In January, Six Apart acquired LiveJournal, a largely free service that hosts online diaries and journals for about 6.5 million members, of whom a small percentage pay a fee for enhanced features. The acquisition (for an undisclosed sum) brought the company's payroll to about 70 employees, including sales teams in Europe and Japan. |
| | The main take-aways: 1) Moveable Type is #1; 2) Blogger is "rudimentary", for "novices" and not much of a business; and 3) LiveJournals are not blogs. |
Copyright 2008 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
