Because lots of high-profile blogs are full of strong opinions and lively debates, people who are less familiar with blogging sometimes worry if they can trust the information they discover on blogs. That’s an inconvenience if you’re an individual blogger, but it’s a serious problem if you’re in the business of helping companies protect their infrastructure and data.

And protection is exactly Symantec’s business. Whether it’s online fraud, spam, or other security risks, Symantec has been leading the conversation for as long as there’s been a need to secure technology. Today, leading a conversation means having a blog, and that’s where the Movable Type-powered Security Response Weblog comes in.

It’s not enough to merely share information about emerging threats, or to detail how Symantec is providing its customers with the tools they need to defend themselves or to better manage their technology deployments. As a voice of the company itself, Symantec’s Security Response blog has to make customers feel as if they can trust the information the blog provides. Symantec achieves this goal with a few simple techniques…

Blogging presents an interesting tension between the drive to publish and the nagging desire to press “pause” and take some time to reorganize, retool, and re-examine the look of a site. Hopefully, good blogging software makes the publishing aspect so fluid that, for long stretches, the natural redesign instinct can take a backseat and just enjoy the ride.

That said, it’s always a pleasure to see a well-executed change of art direction. Of course, we expected nothing less from the maestros of cultural street cred, Cool Hunting. Adobe sponsored the redesign, which offers a very elegant new look to Josh Rubin’s beautifully customized Movable Type site. Bravo!

(And for those who wonder what kind of company would be so bold as to sponsor a redesign, look no further than Adobe’s own MT-powered blogs for clues. Oh yeah, that kind of company — a cool one.)

It’s only been two days since we announced SuiteTwo along with a world-class team of partners led by Intel, but the response has been fantastic. We thought we’d collect some highlights, offer a first glimpse at what some parts of the SuiteTwo experience will look like, and offer more details on the benefits of the suite.

Usually, we start talking about a project first on our blogs, and focus on the audience we can reach through word of mouth in the blogosphere. But doing a traditional-style press conference with a number of partners and people wearing nice suits was an interesting change of pace, and it had a more important goal: We really want to get businesses of all sizes using these technologies, so we were happy to get to use more old-school methods of communication to try to reach the people who don’t know about the business value of blogs, wikis, and feeds yet.

A lot of that new audience reads traditional newspapers and magazines, either online or in print. There seems to be a really positive reaction so far, so we wanted to share some of them with you to help explain the SuiteTwo story a little more fully.

BusinessWeek offered a great look at the strengths of the suite:

More than one-third of businesses already use some form of the interactive or user-generated technologies, such as blogging, that get grouped under the Web 2.0 heading, according to Intel’s internal studies. Even companies that aren’t embracing Web 2.0 are nevertheless using what [Intel Capital manager Rob] Rueckert calls precursors—such tools as group e-mails and newsletters. “Most of what is being done by blogging and wikis is really just being done by e-mail now,” says Rueckert. “This gives you a central, searchable repository for information…. These tools really do help lower costs and increase collaboration.”

Dana Gardner at ZDNet offers an analysis that starts with the strengths of SuiteTwo:

The announcement of SuiteTwo at the Web 2.0 Summit is at once fascinating and … obvious. Just as companies adjusted 10 years ago to relating to their customers, prospects, and partners anew through static Web sites and hyperlinks, they are now embarking on a grander journey of interacting with them through shared, collaborative, publish-and-subscribe knowledge-munging activities.

From PC Magazine:

Intel is calling SuiteTwo their “fundamental shift toward open, flexible, and participatory computing models.” The companies on board are Six Apart and Movable Type, both blogging software companies, Socialtext, a wiki company, and NewsGator and SimpleFeed RSS feed technology companies. With login to a single page, users can access all of these functions as if they were one holistic service.

CNET’s News.Com captures a key quote from our own CEO, Barak Berkowitz:

[E]xecutives from the companies represented in SuiteTwo said that distribution will help make Web 2.0 technologies more pervasive in businesses. “For enterprises, this is a critical moment. The enterprise finally gets Web 2.0,” said Barak Berkowitz, CEO of social-networking software provider Six Apart, which introduced an enterprise product this year. “RSS lets (businesses) track all sorts of things in their organizations.”

And Reuters’ Eric Auchard offers perhaps the most succinct summary of the benefits of SuiteTwo:

The Intel partnership offers small businesses and work groups inside larger companies what amounts to “Web 2.0 in a box,” by remaking internal and external communication systems to encourage collaboration. Instead of working separately and relying on e-mail to stay connected, these tools encourage groups of office workers to use the latest Web publishing tools to share what they know in both private and public conversations over the Web.

InformationWeek’s Thomas Claburn offers up a good look at the business side of the offering:

Intel’s Software and Solutions Group will make the suite available to its partners and resellers, including Dell, Ingram Micro, NEC, and Tech Data, through what the company calls the Intel Channel Marketplace later this month.

There are countless more stories in various news outlets, and of course people who are already blogging are weighing in across the net. But perhaps the most important result, for those of us who love blogs and their potential, is that a whole new wave of people will start to discover what blogs, wikis, and feeds can do for business.

We’ve been celebrating a number of Movable Type milestones recently, from our fifth anniversary to the release of Movable Type Enterprise 1.5. And along the way, we keep highlighting the impact that our community and the entire Movable Type ecosystem has had in helping the platform grow along the way.

Today, we’re taking that ecosystem to the next level. We’ve long believed that business users should benefit from Web 2.0 in the same way that we’ve all enjoyed these new technologies in our personal lives. The good news is, we’ve done something about it. Led by Intel, a group of companies that includes our Movable Type Enterprise team here at Six Apart, SocialText, NewsGator, and SimpleFeed have combined to offer SuiteTwo. SuiteTwo is the first Enterprise 2.0 suite offering, combining our enterprise-grade blogging platform with tools for wikis, RSS feed subscription, and RSS feed management.

Best of all, the new SuiteTwo product has been integrated under the leadership of SpikeSource, and will be offered by distribution partners such as Dell and NEC. All of these services are available to businesses of any size with single sign-on, integrated search, and a suite-wide tag cloud. The full details of the suite are available on the SuiteTwo website, including a sign up form to get more information about SuiteTwo, which is scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2007.

Of course, if you’re looking to get started with enterprise-grade blogging, you can explore Movable Type Enterprise today. Or just join us at our Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar in San Francisco next week, where you can see what SuiteTwo looks like first hand.