We’ve got a lot of different audiences for our blogging tools at Six Apart, and Movable Type might have the broadest of them all — it bridges everything from individual hackers running MT on their laptops to giant corporations running thousands of blogs on their intranets.

To the original blogging community that we come from, though, we get a lot of weird looks when we talk about how exciting it is to work on business and enterprise blogging. There are a lot of variations on the question, but basically the thing people want to know is, “Why do you guys care about business blogs so much?”

In short:

• Blogs are a better tool for the job for a lot of business communications.
• Using blogs at work will help people discover uses for blogs in the rest of their lives.
• Nobody else can do it, and we can’t afford to leave it up to companies that don’t care about blogging.

The longer answer is, we’re immensely greedy monsters! No, no, that’s not right — the truth is a lot simpler: If it’s done right, making blogs work for businesses helps get more people blogging (that’s our mission, remember?), and it makes a day at work just a little bit more pleasant for a lot of people.

Using the tools they give you

Because while those of us who work on our own or for smaller companies can say “Well, I want to work on a Mac.” or “I’m only going to use Firefox.” or “I’m only going to use open source applications.” (and most of us at Six Apart fall into those camps), most non-technical people not only don’t have that option, they don’t care enough to find out how to do that stuff. You use what your boss tells you to, and even if you have other preferences, they’re not worth the fight when you’re just trying to get your job done.

So, instead of having to use some horrible “Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server” thing, we think people should be able to use real blogs from a company that actually cares about blogging. And to do that, we have to make blogging tools feel “safe” to bosses and CIOs and CTOs and IT departments and other offices full of people whose job it is to say “no” to anything too new or unproven.

As a result, we get a little bit of skepticism on both sides. People who are zealots, who see blogging as some kind of religion, say it can’t possibly be “real” blogging if it’s integrated with enterprise software or portals or Microsoft Office or things like that. And conservative technologists who want to manage risk in a global business say it can’t possibly be a reliable business tool if it comes from a community of hackers and idealists and, well, troublemakers.

We think we’ve reached a good compromise if both sides are a little bit skeptical, but still willing to be pleasantly surprised.

Updating web pages is still pretty damn difficult

Outside of the blogosphere’s echo chamber, most people who want to publish a page on their intranet at work are still stuck asking a geek down the hall to make the changes, and then waiting 3 weeks for it to happen, and another 3 weeks for the fixes for the mistakes in the first update. Those people deserve a tool as powerful and simple as blogs, if only to help preserve their sanity. And just maybe, some of those people will start to think “Hey, there really is something interesting about blogging.”

For the normal people, the ones who kind of maybe have heard of blogs, but certainly haven’t tried them out yet themselves, discovering blogging as part of work will lead them to thinking about how blogs can change every part of their life. It’s just like the millions of people who first used a web browser as part of their job, or the people who had an email address at work or school before they ever signed up for Hotmail or Gmail.

An obligation to the community

There’s one final point that’s probably worth mentioning: We bring blogs to businesses of every size because nobody else can. That’s not bragging — it’s just a reflection of how new this medium (still!) is. The giant multi-billion-dollar technology companies don’t care about blogging, so they aren’t going to spend time and effort to educate people about it. (Especially if it comes at the expense of Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server.)

And individuals who work with blogs don’t have the resources to educate companies on a global scale about the potential of blogging, or to build up a sales and support team to back up business customers, or to partner with the Oracles and HPs and Intels of the world. We’ve done all of these things, to show businesses that blogs are credible business tools.

It’s probably an obvious point, but making blogs business-ready isn’t sexy work. Almost no coders think “Man, I can’t wait to go home and hack on middleware integration this weekend!” But bringing blogging to a bigger audience, an audience that’s still skeptical of this medium, and unfamiliar with its potential, takes exactly that kind of hard, unsexy work. As a company founded by bloggers, that’s benefited so much from blogging, we frankly felt it was our responsibility to help as many other people and companies benefit as possible. So that’s why we do it. We might not always get geek cred from cynical, jaded bloggers for it, but there are a couple hundred million other people out there who might see the benefits. And that’s pretty fantastic.

The fact is, blogs are a better, cheaper tool for businesses to use for many types of communication. But they’re also still a young tool that most companies haven’t even gotten a moment’s thought from most businesses yet. We think our community can change that, and we hope this gives you a little bit better understanding of why it’s important that all of us succeed in the effort.

A lot of bigger media sites took note of our launch of the MT4 beta, and we wanted to take a look at some of the most notable responses. The entire MT team has been ecstatic about the warm reception we’ve gotten from the blogosphere, and a lot of these press stories help explain why.

PC World, Network World, and InfoWorld all ran with the story, with a… world of praise for what we’re trying to do for business blogging:

The new version’s enhancements keep Movable Type ahead of the rudimentary blogging capabilities vendors such as IBM and Microsoft have begun putting in their collaboration platforms. “No one has anything as robust as Movable Type. Six Apart has a big head start,” said Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst.

InfoWorld’s (MT-Powered!) blog gets in on the action, too. Steve Fox says, “Not content with being the social software of choice for everything from one-man megaphones to major corporate sites, it now wants to function as a content management system (CMS) for whole Web sites. Two years ago, this would have been laughable. Today, it may not be. Blogs are at the center of many major sites, and a basic template approach to everyday Web pages (not just ones we think of as blogs) is viable.”

Another article looking at the launch from a Serious Business perspective is CIO Magazine:

Six Apart is moving toward the enterprise, said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester. He cited their broad support for running MT4 on the Linux, Windows and Solaris operating systems, as well as their support for databases including MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server. “They are clearly doing the most interesting blogging stuff in the enterprise,” he said. … The move to create an open-source version of MT “could be terrific,” he said, because it could stimulate the open-source community to develop applications and extensions, while putting Six Apart’s business blogging application at the core.

There were even more mentions of the launch worth reviewing, including internetnews.com, a great overview from Reuter’s Eric Auchard and eWeek’s Stephen Bryant offering his take.

Of course, we value feedback from bloggers as much as praise from the press, and those responses have been great, too. Richard MacManus was first out of the gate with one of his typically insightful analyses over on MT-powered Read/Write Web, saying “MT4 is also pushing itself as ‘a social media platform’, which allows users to turn their audiences into communities. In effect this means that readers can become members of a website, with rights to post alongside authors - including sharing photos, videos, and audio.”

On TechCrunch, our old friend Duncan Reily offered up a pretty thorough look at the new beta, concluding, “As a vocal critic previously I can now say in all honesty that a leopard can change its spots. The new version of MovableType looks wildly appealing to me as a blogger.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick offered, “It sounds like they are taking a very smart approach; learning from best of breed related apps (many of which they also own) and developing towards where users appear to be headed.”

Perhaps one of the most satisfying groups of people that we’ve gotten positive feedback from is our Professional Network members, who rely on platforms like MT for their careers. Michael Klassen at Thinking Cap was wonderfully warm in his post:

There are lots of reasons why Thinking Cap prefers Movable Type as its preferred web publishing platform for client sites. But our main reason for liking MT is that they are committed and passionate about their core product, Movable Type. We’ve just done a brief test run of the first Movable Type 4 beta version, and we very much like the direction this software is headed.

There are many, many more responses to the announcement, of course, and a lot of the reaction so far predictably focuses on things like our MT open source project. But we’re most excited about the new capabilities we’ll be introducing for bloggers, as well as the features that should help an entirely new wave of people start blogging. Thanks to everyone for the kind words and extraordinarily positive reaction so far!

If you’re reading this blog, you probably know a lot about Movable Type. It’s the power bloggers’ tool, made by people who just wanted to make a good, flexible blogging application. Over half a decade, it’s grown into a platform that even enterprises and global businesses use to publish to the world. Today, we’re returning to the mission that started Movable Type in the first place, building a community that wants to make the best, most influential blogs in the world.

It begins today with the Movable Type 4 beta release, a real beta process that will collect your suggestions, improvements, feedback, and most of all the passion of all of you in our community. We’re just at the start of that process, and we’ve already put in more resources than have ever gone into any version of MT.

If you just want the details and features and good stuff, there’s a free beta version to play with, and you’ll find out about all kinds of cool new features:

• A completely reinvented user interface with a dashboard overview of how all of your blogs are doing
• Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT
• Brand-new community features like OpenID, and a built-in user registration system
• A completely redesigned component architecture that makes MT faster and more scalable than ever before
• And it’s going to be available in a completely open source version with its home at a completely relaunched community site that revives an old, beloved URL: movabletype.org.

But before you dive into all the usual blogosphere chatter about what’s new and what needs fixing and how the features stack up, we wanted to explain why we’ve made this massive investment in Movable Type and its community. The truth is, Movable Type is how Six Apart got started, and one of those ideas that motivated us from the very beginning is that we’ve got a mission.

The Mission

Blogging has made a huge difference in our lives at Six Apart, but had even more impact on the millions of members of our communities. And our mission is to bring the power and potential of blogs to as many people as possible.

To tell you the truth, it’s been a complicated path. Our core audience of Movable Type users, starting back in 2001, gave us two very clear messages.

1. You wanted all of the coolest new features and gee-whiz web gagdets to help make your blog as flexible as possible.
2. You asked us to help get your friends and family and coworkers and maybe even your bosses to start blogging, to discover this medium for themselves.

You were tired of media that didn’t respond to the world you live in, and frustrated by companies that only used broadcast communications to talk to you. You didn’t think that keeping in touch with family and friends, or sharing ideas with like-minded people, should be limited by geography.

So we set out to reach all of those people, to teach them what MT users have always known, that blogs can help change the way we communicate. The change isn’t always 100% for the better, but it is definitely new, and over time, the benefits become clear.

Getting the word out

We have three tools other than Movable Type here at Six Apart: TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. Each of them was designed to reach people Movable Type couldn’t connect to. And now that they’re all on the path to getting their audiences, we can take their technology, and the lessons they’ve taught us, and bring them back to Movable Type.

We started TypePad four years ago, to get a lot of the power that MT users had experienced into the hands of people who didn’t want to install software, and it’s evolved into a tool for serious bloggers, as well as great option for small businesses and even big-name publishers to get the word out without the technical requirements.

When the LiveJournal team joined Six Apart, it was a crash course in community, one that’s been challenging at times, but has also been immensely rewarding as we start to see what helps people really connect with each other at a human level. And it doesn’t hurt that the LiveJournal team invented a lot of the technology that’s helped grow not just our communities, but all of Web 2.0.

The success of all those Web 2.0 communities is something that greatly influenced our efforts in Vox, where the community lessons of LiveJournal were combined with one of the messages that our Movable Type community taught us early on: Sometimes we just want to talk privately to our friends and family, even when we’re blogging. A lot of the biggest challenges in blogging have come from not being able to direct the right conversations to the right groups of people, and so we’ve spent a lot of time trying to meet that need.

Bringing it all back home

Which brings us back to Movable Type. As we’ve worked on each of these platforms, we’ve learned a great deal about what our earliest audience needed to move forward. From TypePad, it’s easy to understand how we can bring over elements like listing screens into Movable Type and efficiently reuse bits of the application. That makes it quicker to bring out new features, by reducing the amount of time they take to develop. But we’ve also learned a lot about power bloggers wanting to manage the non-blog content of their site, like standalone pages and media assets, right within the same tool. So powerful media management is built right in to MT4.

From LiveJournal, we’ve learned how important it is to support open, engaged communities, and so we’ve brought over technologies like OpenID and support for Memcached. But we’ve also seen what amazing contributions the open source community makes, and how much more comfortable people feel knowing that, instead of data lock-in keeping them tied to their blog, an open process of development makes them want to participate. And that’s greatly influenced MT4’s new open source initiative: Later this year the open source version ofMovable Type will be released under the GPL license.

And then from Vox, we’ve learned what it’s like to rethink the blogging experience completely, redesigning the user interface around the idea of presenting the information that matters. It should be effortless to share all the rich media content that makes the web so compelling, and connecting to the rest of our communities on the web should be easy. MT4’s completely new user interface bears witness to that influence.

Where we’re going next

All of these efforts have culminated in something pretty remarkable: That original audience of MT users has helped blogging become an incontrovertible success, in every realm from individual people talking to friends and family, to communities forming around every conceivable interest, to independent businesses being able to promote their efforts to the world. We measure success by how many new people we help to start blogging, and when we first launched Movable Type, there were almost no newspapers, television stations, radio broadcasters or publishers blogging. Today, nearly all of them are doing so, with many of them powered by Movable Type.

And those of you in that core audience of MT users, the individuals who’ve become “blog stars” and helped inspire a lot of these other successes along the way? We think you’ll all find a lot to love about MT4 and the revitalized community as well. Those of you who are newer to the community: Welcome. We think you’ll find there are some amazingly creative and innovative peers for you here.

In the coming days, we’ll get into the details of what’s new in MT4, and all the blogging goodness it contains. But this release of MT4 has been a long time coming, and we wanted to explain where our inspiration came from, to help set the stage for where our community is going next. We can’t wait to hear what you think, and hope you’ll check out what we’ve got so far.. Thanks for coming along.

Update: A number of users are telling us that when they access www.movabletype.org they see content from movabletype.com. It is possible that DNS changes made to facilitate the launch of the beta and the new website have not fully propagated. In the meantime, users should be able to access the website at the following alternate URL: beta.movabletype.org.