Earthlink's Earthling Blog

Earthlink is one of the most popular ISPs on the planet, and though they've dabbled in blogging before, they're really hitting their stride with Earthling, their new Movable Type-powered blog.

In the post detailing where the Earthling blog came from, there's a compelling set of goals:

Get readers. Be useful to them. Write about EarthLink's projects, culture, and people. Write about what interests you on the web. Help people learn to use the technologies around them. Have conversations, and engage with people.

It's a great manifesto for any business blog to follow. And Earthling makes effective use of many of Movable Type's most powerful features. There's comments and TrackBacks enabled on every entry for feedback and interactivity with Earthlink's community. Web feeds for all the entries are of course automatically generated. Flexible category archiving is used to organize posts and to make per-category feeds available, and Movable Type's plugins make it easy to include Flickr images that are appropriately tagged.

In addition to all the technical features, Earthlink has hired a dedicated blogger, Dave Coustan, who helps ensure that the blog has a strong human voice. It's also a good sign that Earthlink as a company is invested in having the best blog content possible.

Earthlink's long helped people get online and make the most of the web, and now the company can help businesses get the most out of the web by acting as a role model for business blogging. We'll be watching to see how Earthling continues to make the most out of Movable Type in the future.