Whither Movable Type?
September 30, 2010
There are several comparisons of WordPress and Drupal here at Changing Way, the most recent being 5 months ago. What about other social publishing platforms? Well, I posted about a Smashing comparison of WordPress and Joomla at around the same time.
And what about Movable Type? That’s the question posed in a recent comment on the WordPress and Drupal post. It’s a good question, particularly in the light of recent news about MT’s parent company. I refer to Six Apart dropping Vox, and then being acquired by VideoEgg. (I didn’t post about the acquisition, but former Six Apart evangelist Anil Dash did.)
The most recent post on the official MT blog is a promise that MT is safe: “of course we will continue development and support of this platform that now has a decade of history behind it.” The same post stresses that MT is open source. In that, it is similar to WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Unlike those other platforms, it was not born free/open.
Many of the key points at the MT overview page will be familiar to those made about the other open/free social publishing platforms. MT isn’t just for blogging, it can be used as a more general tool to create websites. It can be used to build community, as well as to publish content.
Movable Type is not 6A’s only product, or even its only platform. There’s also TypePad, “Six Apart’s premier hosted blogging service… [with its] easy to use interface.”
So, that’s my shot at mixing Movable Type into the comparison. It may be more about 6A than about MT, but that seems appropriate at the moment. Comments are welcome, on 6A, on more technical aspects of MT, or on pretty much anything else.
Social Media Grows in Terms of Connection, Not Content
September 28, 2010
I’ve long thought of the web as being about two things: content and connection. According to research by Forrester, connection is growing, while content creation is flat. I find this rather sad, since the ease of publishing is one of the things I like about the web.
There are posts at GigaOm and at Mashable, each of which provides a table showing that the percentage of web users considered Creators has dropped a little over the past year in both the USA and the EU. Neither post links to a post or page at Forrester. It seems strange that there isn’t a post at the Groundswell blog, since Groundswell seems to have provided the framework for the research.
Update, the following morning: there is now a post at Groundswell.
Windows Live to Roll Over to WordPress.com
September 27, 2010
Web services close down all the time. TechCrunch, among the sources I subscribe to, is the most zealous at documenting such shutdowns. It usually uses the term Deadpool.
But it just passed up on the opportunity for headlines such as “Windows Live Spaces to the Deadpool.” Instead, Jason Kincaid’s post has the title Windows Live Outsources Blogging, Migrating 30 Million Users To WordPress.com. Now, this seems to be less abrupt than many closedowns.
Users will be migrated through a process that preserves all of their content, and will automatically redirect visitors who head to their existing Microsoft Live Spaces sites… Microsoft is going to be killing off the existing Spaces product in six months.
So it’s killing off without a deadpool? I’m not sure why it takes TechCrunch most of the article to use a word of death. It’s not usually that delicate, or squeamish.
Anyway, this is big for WordPress.com, where Paul Kim welcomes the new arrivals.
Clients and the Cloud
September 27, 2010
You’re reading this on some kind of client: a laptop, a desktop, a smartphone. This post, along with the software that runs it, lives on a server (operated by WordPress.com). There’s probably a connection between the client and the server at the time you’re reading this.
How big is the client? How is work split between client and server? These are questions addressed at GigaOm by Michael Mullany of Sencha.
In the mainframe age, data and application state were stored at the server tier, and the client device was a stateless (and therefore cheap) terminal. But in the client-server era, application logic moved down from the server-side to the end-user workstation…
In the web era, we returned to the mainframe model of thin clients and fat servers…
But now, HTML5 heralds the return of state and application processing to the client-side device.
The argument is that parts of the HTML5 standard describe means of storing web pages and data at the client side. The pages can then be used at even when there is no connection between client and server. This part of the standard will soon be implemented in browsers.
This means that the client will get fatter. In particular, it means that part of the (server side) cloud will be condensed into a client side puddle.
If (and I won’t go into whether that’s a thin or fat if) this comes to pass, it has several interesting implications.
- There’s a need for excellent heuristics to populate the client-side puddles. If the locally-stored page links to another page, does that other page get stored? What about its links?
- We are a way away from ubiquitous high-speed connectivity. If and when we have that, clients can go back to being thin again. If we had it now, we wouldn’t be interested in client-side puddles.
- Good for the browser that implements this part of the standard. Perhaps not so good for apps?
- Good for the operating system that exists mainly to run the browser, such as Chromium OS.
An Even More United Citizen
September 23, 2010
On Sunday, I became a citizen of the United States. My understanding is that I remain a citizen of the United Kingdom, as do my American-born kids.
I’m putting this post in the Business category for two reasons. First, business and government are hard to separate, particularly here, so near to DC. Second, I believe that citizenship is a requirement (explicit or implicit) for a higher proportion of jobs here than in most other parts of the USA (certainly than in Boston, where I moved from).
WordCamp Mid-Atlantic
September 13, 2010
I spent Saturday at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic in Baltimore. It was my first WordCamp, the one in Boston having taken place just after I moved down to Maryland.
I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to make it to the event, was on the waitlist, but managed to leapfrog the list by responding to a call for volunteers. I spent some time at reception (but most of the checking-in was done by others), directed people to sources of coffee, listened to complaints about the directions, etc., but was mainly free to roam.
Most of the online discussion of the event is to be found at Twitter (#wcma), rather than on WordPress blogs. A micro-sign of the times, perhaps.
It won’t be my last WordCamp. I hope to be at (and have offered to help with) WCMA next year.
Amie Street is One Way to Amazon
September 8, 2010
Amie Street is a music download site with a business model I thought was brilliant, and Michael Arrington still describes as “awesome.”
Artists upload songs and those songs are free to download to start. As more downloads occur the price goes up. A cent, fifty cents, etc., up to $1… Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times, and the company raised venture capital from Amazon and others.
As time went on, I developed qualms about the service. If tracks are $1, Amie Street is like lots of other ways to get music. What does it mean if a track is less than $1? That it’s not very good? That I can pay less for it, even though the artist probably needs the money more than those who command the full $1?
Anyway, the Amie Street service is closing down. So what happens to my account? I can’t tell from the site itself, which is currently offline for maintenance. Mashable Stan posts that I have until September 22 to spend my balanced (~$3?). It won’t be transferred to Amazon, which acquired Amie Street. But I will get $5 to spend there.
The Amie Streeters will now focus on the web radio platform Songza. So I don’t see this as a sad story, just as the end of a chapter in the big and growing book about music on the web.
Vox Stops: Six Apart?
September 8, 2010
Six Apart launched Vox in 2006. I don’t think it ever lived up to 6A’s hopes for it to be “home, home, on the web” for a great many. I said so around Vox’s first anniversary. Anil Dash, who was 6A’s chief evangelist at the time, left a Vox-defending comment. At the time I felt that his comment seemed to arise out of duty, rather than out of the passion he often conveyed for 6A’s other offerings.
Now Vox is headed to what TechCrunch call the deadpool. I prefer the term amputation ward, since Vox is a limb, and 6A still has other limbs. That said, 6A went out on a limb in terms of the resources invested in Vox.
I hope that use of the term deadpool won’t soon be appropriate for 6A. It seems rather ominous that, of the social media blogs I subscribe to, only TechCrunch considered the amputation of Vox worth a post in itself. Mashable gave it a mention toward the bottom of a roundup post.
ReadWriteWeb, which used to run on 6A’s Movable Type (but now runs on WordPress) didn’t even mention the silencing of the Vox (or mentioned it so quietly that I didn’t hear). Anil, who left 6A a while ago, didn’t post about it either.
Even though I won’t miss Vox, I find its closing sad.
Planning a PTA Website
September 7, 2010
I just got back from the first PTA meeting of the school year at Highland Elementary School, where my daughter Maddie has just started first grade (and where my son Max is likely to start kindergarten next year). I wasn’t able to make any PTA meetings last school year.
One of priorities for the Highland PTA is getting more parents involved. I see a website as a means toward this end, in that it would be available all the time, while real-world PTA meetings can never be. The site would also make involvement easier for some parents able to be involved anyway, but who might want to get or provide updates between meetings.
Were I to set up the site right now, my priorities would be as follows.
- Provide updates on PTA activity. Some updates might be meeting-based (reminder of meeting, here’s what was discussed, etc.), some between meetings (we’re weeks away from the next meeting, but what do you think of this?).
- Solicit input, especially from parents and teachers who are not able to attend meetings at the school. No time is good for everyone: this morning’s 9am meeting was well attended, but still must have excluded many families.
- Be multilingual, or at least bilingual. The Highland community speaks many languages, with Spanish and English being particularly prominent.
I’ve done some searches on terms such as PTA website. There’s a lot of stuff out there, including:
- PTA sites at the national (US) and state (MD) level.
- A PTA website builder site. First reaction: the nonprofit side of my brain says that it seems expensive; the for-profit side sees an opportunity in the PTA website builder business, if my pro-bono efforts at Highland go well.
Now,to solicit input on PTA websites. I’ll send out a few emails. But if you, dear reader, have thoughts on PTA sites, please share them here, especially if they include links to successful PTA sites.
