We noticed a great new site called Until Monday that just launched as a beautiful community-based events site that’s as attractive as it is useful. Because it served as a great example of what can be done with Movable Type, we wanted to interview George Johnson to provide a glance behind the scenes of the new site. Here’s a transcript of our interview from earlier today.

Q: Okay, to get started, a brief introduction of who you are and who you’re with. And what’s Hyperlocal media?

hlm: I’m George Johnson, Jr. Prior to co-founding hlm, I was an Executive Creative Director at Publicis Dialog, a pioneer in the development of commercial Web applications for brands as General Motors, Toyota, LeapFrog, Continental Airlines, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, E*TRADE, Estee Lauder, and Levi Strauss & Co. Hyperlocal Media (hlm) is a small firm that specializes in hyperlocal coverage and building online communities. Buffalo Rising was our first product.

There’s just two days left to get Movable Type at up to 30% off the regular price. For businesses, pricing starts at a 5-user license for $149.95, and for personal users, a supported license is $49.95.

We’ve also just updated to version 3.32, a minor update that fixes some nitpicky bugs. It’s a recommended fix if you need any of the fixes listed in the release notes, but it’s not a required update.

In addition to those small improvements, you get all the power of Movable Type 3.3. There are dozens of new features that can really help you get the most out of your blog while reducing the time you have to spend on management. You’ll want to check out widgets, tags, custom feeds that let you manage your blog right from your feed reader, and smart templating tags that make it easier than ever to customize your blog.

There’s a lot of healthy and well-justified skepticism about the idea of a corporate blogs, even though many of us take the idea for granted. So we spend a lot of time trying to show people how this Business Blogging thing should be done.

One of the best recent examples is at Wieden + Kennedy London. The communications agency has a fantastic business blog that’s candid, human, and shows a great sense of humor. For many organizations, this kind of conversational style might be more appropriate for an internal company blog than for a public presence. But in this case, the fact that the blog is public makes it a useful example to learn from.

The W+K team began the year by boldly posting a list of objectives for 2006. Then, last month, they followed up with a review of 2006 so far. In both posts, they outlined a series of high-level goals and then offered a candid assessment of not just their progress but their potential for improvement.

It’s a fantastic example of information that wouldn’t be useful to share in email format. There are some easy ways to tell which medium is right for your message:

• Blogs are great for sharing ideas that aren’t time-critical, that have enduring value after they’ve originally been posted, or that inspire comments and responses that are valuable when shared with the entire audience.
• Email is great for critical announcements or notifications that are worth interrupting someone’s time for. It’s also useful for messages that can be deleted or dismissed once they’ve been dealt with.

Since the big-picture thinking from W+K is taking place on a blog, their staff, clients, and the community around W+K can refer back to these posts over time, adding context or annotations through comments, and reviewing it when they have time to really think about the ideas. Instead of being yet another email to file away, there’s now a web page with a post that can be bookmarked for future reference.

In most companies, leaders welcome this kind of analysis and thinking, but want tools that will let them control the conversation. So here’s a link to pass along, showing one possible high-level use of blogging that’s impossible to do with any of the other communication tools commonly deployed today. And if your company’s a little less exhibitionistic than W+K, we’re happy to help you make sure it’s a private blog.

(Thanks to our friends at Mule Design for the image.)

With the release of Movable Type 3.3, we’re excited to note one of the best new parts about Movable Type, and it’s got nothing to do with the dozens of new features.

Movable Type 3.3 is free for your personal blog.

For as many authors as you want, as many blogs as you want, you can just go get it. As always, you can have affiliate links or AdSense or a tip jar on your personal blog. And there’s dozens of new capabilities in Movable Type 3.3 that make it well worth the upgrade, including support for tags, widgets, huge improvements to the templating language, and activity feeds that let you manage all of your blog’s activity right from a single feed.

Of course, one of the best parts of the Movable Type platform is that we offer professional support for it. So you can buy support for your personal blog directly from us, and right now, it’s just $49.95/year. Cheap!

Honestly, we’ve put a lot of work into making Movable Type a professional tool, and that’s the reason it’s the most popular blogging platform for businesses, organizations, and professionals. But we know that personal bloggers are an important part of our community, and our success with businesses (and now with enterprises) helps us make Movable Type free for the individuals that want a professional-grade tool for their personal blogs.

So give the new version a try. If you want support, get a license and talk to our help team — you’ll find out why people rave about our support. And don’t forget to mention us to your boss or your coworkers when they start asking, “Hey, should our company get a blog?”

Lots of bloggers have been paying attention to the issue of Net Neutrality lately. If you’ve been tuning out, there’s a push from telcos to create tiered service for Internet access, based on charging more for different classes of connection. Scientific American published a pretty fair editorial on the topic, which reaches a clear conclusion:

A system for prioritizing data traffic might well be necessary someday, yet one might hope that it would be based on the needs of the transmissions rather than the deal making and caprices of the cable owners. Moreover, personal blogs and other Web pages are increasingly patchworks of media components from various sources. Tiered service would stultify that trend.

That seems like a reasonable analysis, so the natural next step for any Internet-related cause is to get a good website going to help with advocacy. Enter It’s Our Net, supported by everyone from Adobe to Yahoo, and sponsored by Amazon, eBay, Google, InterActiveCorp, Microsoft, and Yahoo! . It’s a simple, effective site combining the latest news, information about how the proposed change would affect the web, and tools to contact your elected officials. We’re also proud to note that the entire site is powered by Movable Type. We don’t like to preach too much, but it’s important enough to take a few minutes to visit the site and help spread the word.