March 2007 Archives

Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com, but though he has a high-profile position, he complements his official statements with his own personal thoughts on his blog All Things Distributed. Because of the intelligent way that Werner’s All Things Distributed acts as a personal complement to his professional work, it’s a great choice as today’s Movable Type Featured Blog.

What do we mean? Well, a few Six Apart folks were at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference earlier this week, and we saw a great keynote presentation on Amazon’s web services platform. Now, we’re big believers in this kind of technology — that’s why we get so excited about things like Amazon’s TypePad widgets. But in addition to making great web services, we all have a human side to the things we write about on our blogs, even ones where the tagline claims to be a “weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems.”

And that’s where the fantastic disclaimer at the bottom of Werner’s blog comes in. It reads, in part:

This is a personal weblog. That means that the opinions voiced here are purely personal and they do not in any way represent the opinions, experiences or directions of my employer Amazon.com. If you take any of the statements on this weblog and use it as an official statement by Amazon.com you are knowingly misleading your audience. For official statements by Amazon.com visit the Amazon.com Virtual Media Room.

If I do write something worth referencing, and you feel strongly about the need to reference my affiliation, you should also mention in your reference that this is my personal weblog: “Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, mentions on his personal weblog that the Seahawks have a good shot at the Superbowl this year”.

If you can not play by these simple rules, please do not reference this weblog at all.

The truth of the matter is, we should be able to have personal blogs where we can speak freely without having to worry about them being a “gotcha” for the press or others to attribute our every thought as Official Corporate Policy. And while nobody can enforce a disclaimer like this one legally, it can be useful just to make the desire explicit. Best of all, getting the fine print out of the way means that we can all enjoy a chance to look inside the mind of one of the people who helps create the technology of one of the largest-scale sites on the web.

Have you found another example of someone creatively solving a problem with their blog? Submit the site and we’ll consider it as a Movable Type Featured Blog.

At last week’s BlogHer Business conference, one of the standout speakers was Redbook Editor-in-Chief Stacy Morrison. As part of the closing keynote panel on the ethos of the social media world, Stacy spoke passionately about wanting to modernize the image of Redbook, taking advantage of the fact that the brand is extremely well-known, but using social media like blogs to help show a more contemporary and relevant side of the magazine to the women who are its core audience.

So it seems only appropriate to make one of Redbook’s signature Movable Type-powered blogs our Movable Type Featured Blog for today. Take a look at You Are Here, part of the site’s “Time For You” section, which celebrates a more contemplative and introspective side of its readers. As the site describes it, “Take a moment for yourself and read what Redbook editors do with their time. Jump in, the water’s fine.”

You Are Here has a fresh design, following the aesthetics of Redbook’s entire site, and eschewing a traditional blog layout in favor of one that puts editors’ names and faces front and center. It’s a humanizing touch that seems only appropriate for the topic. And as with every section of the site, the editorial blog is complemented by a hand-picked blog directory of independent sites around the blogosphere that complement the tone and voice of Redbook’s own editorial.

With You Are Here, Redbook has kept its unique voice while moving solidly into a more contemporary mode of conversation with its readership. If you’ve had a similar success in telling your story in a new way through blogs, submit your site as a featured blog and join the conversation.

Climate change has been a… hot topic in the news, and even at the Oscars, for some time. But a lot of people who are concerned about the issue just want to know some steps they can take to help as individuals. TerraPass is an organization that lets you calculate your “carbon footprint”, or the total of the carbon dioxide emissions we create with daily activities such as driving, electricity use, or flying. And TerraPass provides the opportunity to help offset that old technology by investing in new technology that helps better the environment.

But communicating about complex issues around climate change such as renewable resources, investment in industrial efficiency and alternative energy sources is a tough task. So TerraPass uses their Movable Type-powered TerraBlog to explain the heart of their business: It’s not just a one-way channel for the company to talk about these issues, but a forum that supports a community of people who are asking the tough questions. And the company delivers their blog to their readers by leveraging Movable Type to notify their 20,000 email subscribers about new entries, and talk about relevant news of the day.

According to the staff of Terrapass “Movable Type is the core of how we do business.” It’s a ringing endorsement of the value a blog can add to your company’s relationships. If you’re using Movable Type to tell your community about your story, submit your site as a Movable Type Featured Blog and we’ll be glad to help you get the word out.

Adobe’s Apollo project is an ambitious undertaking: A rich application platform that combines the ubiquity and power of Adobe’s Flash and PDF formats with the user experience standards set by modern Ajax applications. With the release of today’s alpha test version of the platform, the team has reached an important milestone. But for the product to succeed, it’s going to take a lot of conversations with the developers, businesses, and eventually the actual users of Apollo for the platform.

With the success of such a huge project relying on a strong dialogue between Adobe and its community, we had to mark the release of the Apollo alpha by making Mike Downey’s blog our Movable Type Featured Blog. Mike is the Senior Product Manager for Apollo at Adobe, and he’s been blogging on Movable Type as part of the Adobe Blogs community for years, including back in the Macromedia days before the companies merged. And the same is true for other Apollo team members — folks like Mike Chambers are must-subscribe bloggers for any fan of Adobe technology.

So if you want to see what’s coming down the road from Adobe, be sure to take a look at blogs like Mike’s, and then head over to the Adobe Labs site to grab the code and start hacking. But don’t be shy about feedback — the Adobe team has distinguished themselves from day one by really listening to the comments and blog posts that people write about their products.

Today’s Movable Type Featured Blog is a special one: It’s Ze Frank’s The Show, one of the most popular video blogs in the world, which is signing off tomorrow in the end of an amazing one-year run that’s culminated with Ze being widely recognized as one of the key innovators in the young medium.

Now, Ze’s How To Dance Properly was already knocking around as one of the then-young blogosphere’s favorite links half a decade ago when Movable Type was first created. And I had the chance to see Ze’s first public presentation at the Gel Conference a few years ago, where his skills as a performer were already strongly in evidence. So Ze Frank’s bonafides as someone who really gets the web were already well-established long before The Show ever launched; In fact, Ze’s been posting updates in Movable Type and embedding videos on his site for years. But what’s impressive is how well he’s understood the unique artistic requirements of the nascent video blogging medium, and used experience from one era of blogging to help kick-start a new one.

So as Ze gets ready to retire The Show, it seems there is a parallel to a comedic talent who helped define an earlier video medium’s first forays: Lucille Ball. Because, though there are lots of video bloggers doing great work today, only one year ago there had been very few breakout stars. And many of those who were creating video blogs had simply tried to bring their text blogs into the video world.

The same was true of television in the early days — radio stars were often reading off the same scripts they’d used on the air, only now they were doing it in front of cameras. But I Love Lucy helped define a vocabulary that was native to the new medium. The sitcom genre that the show invented was uniquely of, and uniquely for video on television. And Ze’s Show shares many of the same traits as that show: It’s full of a strongly physical sense of humor, a canny understanding of how to frame and feature an extremely expressive face, and it has a pacing and timing that makes all the work that comes before it seem downright languid.

So, while it’s bittersweet to be featuring a blog that’s nearing its end, it’s also wonderful to recognize someone who’s already become a huge influence on a whole new generation of video bloggers. And it’s good to acknowledge one more similarity between a pioneering television show and a pioneering video blog — they both know how to exit gracefully while at the top of their game. Congratulations to Ze, and we can’t wait to see what he shows us next.

Learning Movable Type isn’t just today’s Movable Type Featured blog, it’s a cornerstone of our community and one of the best resources that exists for, well, learning Movable Type.

Elise Bauer has been maintaining the site for years as an indispensable reference for all of us who spend our days working and playing with the platform. Along with her collaborators Jesse Gardner and Arvind Satyanarayan (whom you might remember from our post a couple of weeks ago), Elise has been posting tutorials and how-tos that explain even the most technical concepts in perfectly understandable plain English.

But what’s really exciting is what the team’s done now: They haven’t just redesigned the site, they’ve reimagined it, as a truly community-driven effort. Everyone in the community who has something to share is welcome to publish their articles on the site and become a contributor. Most fittingly, Learning Movable Type shows off what Movable Type itself can really do: check out the smart organization of the site, grouped by topic (categories) or by subject (tags) or by contributor (authors). And new technology features like a community search make it easy to find the best Movable Type resources, regardless of where they are on the web.

We’re really excited to see the renewed level of energy around the Movable Type community these days, so it’s most appropriate that one of the flagship resources for the community has been reborn. But don’t take our word for it — go check out the all-new Learning Movable Type, maybe even contribute an article of your own, and see exactly what makes the site so special.

Back in January, we praised Time for really embracing blogs as a key part of their redesigned website. The new collection of blogs are all hosted on TypePad Business Class or powered by Movable Type, and there’s also a great new blog that covers all the areas that are in Time’s domain, called The Ag.

Great sites like this don’t just happen — they come into being with the help of members of Six Apart’s Professional Network. In this case, Time turned to the expertise of a longtime Movable Type stalwart, Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting.

Now that the blog’s been up and running successfully for a while, we thought we’d ask Chad some questions about how the site came into being.

6A: How did you first find out that Time was looking to redo their blogs?

EC: I’ve been working with Time since November of 2005 on a variety of projects. That came from a referral via Six Apart, to work on the redesign of Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” blog when he moved over to TypePad Business Class (and to Time). I don’t think that he’s part of Time any longer, however - it looks like he left earlier in February to move to The Atlantic - but he still uses the design that I implemented, for the most part :).

6A: And which blogs specifically did you work on for the Time team?

EC: In a variety of capacities, I’ve worked on: Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, The Global Health Blog, The Allen Report, Real Clear Politics and of course The Ag. Though not strictly blogs, I’ve done some other work for Time, including their White House Photo of the Day site and an implementation of a new design for their various search results pages.

6A: Which platforms were they using for their blogs? Did your skills transfer between the hosted TypePad blogs and the Movable Type-powered blogs they hosted themselves?

EC: What is perhaps most interesting is that when we started, all of their blogs - of which I am aware - were on the TypePad platform. While the hosted platform offered some nice features, it didn’t allow others, so before too long, we ended up implementing Movable Type as well. Now, the pendulum has shifted, with only the “Global Health” blog still existing on TypePad (Andrew Sullivan is as well, but he is with someone else now). It’s a big change. Plus, even more blogs are on the Movable Type platform. The skills transferred easily between Movable Type and TypePad, because the templates are nearly identical - there are only a few tags that don’t transfer between the two platforms, which made moving a breeze, and Time seemed to appreciate how quickly things went. The hardest thing was getting the right web host for the new platform. Once that was in place, getting things rolled out took no time at all. In fact, we were able to mostly copy the existing templates for two blogs that we were getting ready to roll out on TypePad, and they were up and running quickly.

6A: What were the biggest surprises of working on the project?

EC: The biggest surprise was that, even though this was probably the largest project - at least in terms of marketing/impact - it was very likely the smallest in terms of how long it took us to scope it and get it out the door. All of the knowledge that we had gained to this point allowed us to get The Ag up and running very quickly. While the first project we did isn’t exactly the same, because it was more of a one-off project, it took much longer to put together. But The Ag was a much faster turnaround, and we were really able to leverage the knowledge that we had been building. So in turn it was a huge return on the knowledge we had built.

6A: Was it nice working on a site where everybody knows the company you’re working for?

EC: Though working for Time is nice, I don’t know that it ultimately matters much. I’m more like the Wizard of Oz, the guy behind the curtain, so it doesn’t really matter that much which project I’m working on at the time. The interface looks the same to me whether it’s a large multinational or a mom-and-pop, so it ultimately isn’t all that important in the end.

6A: How has being in the Six Apart Professional Network helped you with your work, if at all?

EC: Being in ProNet helps on two fronts. One is that referrals like this can make a difference. Here is a job that originally came in well over a year ago, and there is still income being generated from it, because the lead was a solid one. The other is that it provides a group of generally like-minded individuals where you can share success stories and help to foster a community of support for one another.

The great news is, Everitz Consulting isn’t just for newsmagazines that are a household name — they work with regular bloggers to help them get their sites running perfectly, too. Thanks to Chad for taking the time to talk to us, and for being part of the community for so long, including contributing many popular plugins that Movable Type bloggers use every day. Be sure to check out the Everitz Consulting to find out more about their work.

The Morning News is a stalwart bastion of great writing, one of those sites that really show off the potential for independent publishers to be the equal of any other media in the world. Though it’s informed by a New York sensibility, the Morning News team has consistently been broad-reaching both in its choice of topics and in the talent that it recruits to help write for the site.

Of course, we’re partial to The Morning News because they’ve always been powered by Movable Type, and even once had some articles contributed by our co-founder Mena Trott. But half a decade after the site started publication, the influence of TMN’s combination of beautiful aesthetics and smart writing is undeniable. You might want to make a few minutes with TMN and a cup of coffee part of your routine if it isn’t already.

We’re proud to make The Morning News the first in our series of Movable Type Featured sites. And we’re happy to be bringing back a tradition of featuring great MT blogs on our site. Submit your Movable Type-powered blog, and we’ll try to feature it in the future.