Every company that sells consumer goods has to have a page explaining the product. Gold Medal Flour’s standard site is no exception, with the usual images you’d expect, like a sack of flour and a perfectly browned pie in the background.

But humans have been working with flour for millenia, and the Gold Medal brand was established 125 years back — just mentioning the product isn’t going to grab many people’s attention. More importantly, there’s no narrative, no way for someone baking at home to form a connection with the brand.

So what’s the answer? Let them bake cake. And baguettes. And biscuits. Gold Medal asked renowned baker Rose Levy Beranbaum to help tell their story in her blog, Real Baking with Rose. Rose has a well-established track record of being an excellent food writer; Her latest book is actually called The Bread Bible. An in just over a year of blogging, the site’s grown a dedicated band of readers, who relish the interaction and dialogue with one of the leading lights in the baking world.

A few weeks ago, networking giant Cisco announced that it was transforming its communcations, with the most visible part of the makeover being the launch of a new logo. As the discussion on Movable Type-powered design blogs such as Speak Up and Strategic Name Development indicated, Cisco’s audience on the web was ready for a new visual direction for the company. The new logo was even designed specifically to be displayed correctly at very low resolution, as on a mobile device or in the little favorites icon in your browser.

But the bigger news was the larger communications initiative taking advantage of the new web-based tools for interactivity:

A transformation is occurring on the Web. The end user is more in charge, creating collaborative websites and blogs, generating, mixing and sharing content, and having more of a say in how companies do business with them. The potential of the Internet is being fulfilled by more than the physical network alone, it is the human network where people are connecting and collaborating, enabling ideas and opportunities. This represents an ideal time for Cisco to transform our website, into a platform for collaboration, interaction and innovation.

A bunch of us at Six Apart are incredible nerds video gaming enthusiasts, so we were happy to discover DSicons, a site aimed squarely at fans of Mario Kart DS, Nintendo’s kart racing game. Now, we talk a good game about the big, serious Fortune 500 businesses using Movable Type as a publishing platform, but a lot of the blogs that are closest to our hearts are the ones run by people who are passionate enthusiasts about a hobby. DSIcons is exactly that kind of blog. It’s created by the good folks at Firewheel Design, who also brought you IconBuffet and BlinkSale.

Of course “passionate enthusiast” is really just a nice way of describing geeks. We know; we’re geeks too. That might also be why we can really appreciate what DSIcons does: Each of the graphics featured on the Movable Type-powered blog isn’t designed to be downloaded, it’s a set of instructions for how to create your own icon, one pixel at a time. If you’re looking to decorate your kart, you could hope that your skills with a stylus are good enough to make a design that’s legible, perhaps even attractive. Or you could just check the latest updates on the DSIcons feed, follow the detailed instructions on creating your own works of digital art, and be the envy of every other Mario and Luigi out on the track.

So, got a got a geeky obsession of your own? Get Movable Type and let the rest of the world see just how creative you can be.

Starting two years, ago Intel CEO Paul Otellini began communicating with the team inside the company by using blogs as a direct channel to Intel’s staff around the world. When the blogs were first publicly discussed, the idea of such a prominent technology executive participating in a private internal blog made a splash. Otellini’s first post had a great explanation for why he started blogging:

Why am I doing this? Well, it seemed like a good idea to be able to create an ongoing vehicle to share my thoughts and observations on Intel and our industry with our employees, and to allow you an opportunity to have a platform for your thoughts or responses. While this is intended as an internal blog, I recognize that it will become public— welcome to the Internet!

The truth is, a lot of large enterprises begin blogging quietly in private, sometimes growing to hundreds or even thousands of blogs before they make the leap to talking to the public with their blogs.

It’s no surprise — managing a community and the response to a public blog is a big commitment, and it makes sense to have the right process and technology in place before getting started. With years of experience under their belt, it’s no surprise that Intel recently unveiled their very first public blog, powered by Movable Type Enterprise.

Blogs are a terrific complement to the other media we all enjoy, and NBC offers one of the best examples. The peacock network has featured live premiere blogs from the creators, producers, or cast members of every single show that’s aired this fall. That list includes many of the most popular shows on television, such as ER, The Office, three different flavors of Law & Order, and blogosphere favorite, Heroes.

NBC has clearly embraced the online community around each of its shows; They’ve even added free streaming video for each show. But why did they switch all their blogs to Movable Type?

Just looking at the blogs that have already been launched offers a completely different perspective on the shows that millions of us have been watching for years. For example, Law & Order has been on the air for seventeen years, but until the premiere episode of this season, we’ve never had a chance to hear series creator Dick Wolf talk about the show in his own words. Whether he’s waxing philosphical about a theoretical movie or just saying how much he enjoys blogging, it’s a fascinating peek behind that scenes that simply couldn’t be done any other way.

We think there’s a fundamental understanding that the biggest thing the web can add to the TV watching experience is a sense of community, interaction and connection. NBC’s use of Movable Type for their blogs has helped cement that connection, and shows exactly how blogs can add value to a business that’s been established for decades.

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the original announcement of Movable Type 1.0.Within the first few hours of that post, hundreds of people had downloaded the software and started blogging. Today, tens of millions of people have posted with Movable Type, commented on MT-powered blogs, or read sites powered by Movable Type. In the past five years, we’ve released dozens of upgrades and introduced hundreds of new features, all while being supported and inspired by one of the most widely read, influential, and passionate communities on the web. We usually try to focus on the ways people use blogs, but today we wanted to take a moment to look back.