Recently in Featured MT Blogs Category

This week marked a quiet, but significant, milestone for the world of journalism done through blogs: Joshua Micah Marshall’s work on his widely-acclaimed Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for Legal Reporting.

The Polk awards are astutely described by Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News as “the Golden Globes of American Journalism” on his Movable Type-powered blog. But the New York Times’ Noam Cohen points out that Marshall’s win, and indeed his team’s work as a whole, offers a decided contrast to the hoary old cliché of the blogger as a pajama-clad guy with a more attitude than ideas.

To scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good. Many took it as vindication of their enterprise — that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not. And most reassuringly, it showed that fair numbers of people out there were paying attention.

At Six Apart, we’ve always believed that blogs are nothing more, and nothing less, than a new medium, native to the web and nimbler than the ones that preceded it. That means that, even though people have been falsely debating “blogs vs. journalism” for the better part of a decade, the truth has always been that this is just another medium in which a great journalist can do great work.

We’re thrilled that a distinguished member of our community has set this precedent. We know that it’s only a matter of time until similar honors, such as the Pulitzer  Prizes, understand that it’s not the choice of medium that makes a work legitimate, but rather the efforts of those who care about sharing their ideas that define a work. And we build tools like Movable Type with the hope that they can be one small part of helping talented teams like the TPM staff achieve work that not only is on par with, but indeed can even eclipse, the best journalism in the world. Though it’s an infinitely smaller tribute in comparison to a Polk award, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mark the moment by naming Talking Points Memo as a Movable Type Featured Blog.

One footnote: As Joshua Marshall himself noted after his win, a big part of why he’s been able to do so much with Movable Type is due to the help of an incredible team that typifies what the MT community is capable of: Apperceptive. He says, “[T]hey come with our strong recommendation. And if you’re looking for people who do this kind of work I’d be happy to answer your questions about our experience.” And as fellow MT blogger Jason Kottke notes, Apperceptive is “the little engine that runs a large chunk of the professional blogosphere”. So our congratulations as well to the team that helps MT power some of the biggest sites in the blogosphere.

Every hero needs a nemesis. Today's Movable Type Featured Blog, The Superest, catalogs a neverending game of illustrative oneupsmanship, with a series of charming and clever drawings that follow two simple rules:

1. Player 1 draws a character with a power.
2. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.

It's madness, genius and super powers, all in one slick site, with an effusive community of fans who are understandably enthusiastic about each day's drawings. It's the kind of clever blogs that we love, showing off the fact that you cancompletely change the design and aesthetics people expect from a blog, and publish content that's rich and expressive, and end up with a result that's a real winner. Well, at least until tomorrow's hero defeats it.

The Superest is the brainchild of the Philadelphia superhero team-up of Kevin Cornell, whom you may know from his drop-dead-gorgeous Movable Type-powered blog Bearskinrug, and Matt Sutter, whom you can find sharing his works and wares at InkFinger.

Boing Boing is one of the biggest breakout successes in the history of blogging. From its roots as a zine cofounded by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair to its presence today as one of the most popular blogs ever, the site has exceeded all expectations. Guided by Mark, along with David Pescovitz, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing has influenced not just the blogosphere, but culture as a whole, leading the conversation on topics ranging from intellectual property to oddball gadgets to the fringes of art on the web.

And today, we’ve made them our Movable Type Featured Blog to celebrate the fact that they’ve relaunched on Movable Type 4.0. They’re using some of the most powerful features of the platform:

• MT4’s built-in user registration features let Boing Boing create its own database of registered users. Andif they want to support OpenID in the future as as sign-in option, MT4 has OpenID authentication built in.
• MT4’s ability to manage an unlimited number of blogs in one installation made it easy to launch Boing Boing Gadgets, which can share logins and management functions with Boing Boing itself. BB Gadgets is helmed by Joel Johnson, who’s no stranger to the big leagues of gadget blogs — he used MT every day as former editor of Gizmodo.
• MT4’s powerful comment management capabilities give new Boing Boing team member Teresa Nielsen Hayden the ability to oversee the site’s rambunctious and vibrant community. (You know Teresa from her venerable MT-powered blog Making Light.) And with MT’s multi-blog support, Teresa can manage comment on both Boing Boing blogs in one place.
• MT4’s flexible new templating features let our friends at Federated Media and Apperceptive take advantage of some unique features to help build the site’s new look. Cross-blog aggregation makes it easy to include content from more than one blog, and improvements to the templating language simplified the ability to choose exactly which content appears on each page.

There are, of course, many more people involved in a launch of this scale — Federated Media’s team played a pivotal role in everything from implementation to the business side of the launch, and you can read a bit about that on FM’s MT-powered blog. Jemma Hostetler created an amazing design that honors Boing Boing’s history while giving it a fresh, new look. And we’ve talked to Six Apart Professional Network members Apperceptive in a little more depth in an interview on our Professional Network site which talks a bit about the opportunities they’ve found in working with MT4 on sites like Boing Boing.

All of us on the Movable Type team at Six Apart are extremely proud to have played a small role in helping reinvent Boing Boing, and we’re thrilled that it does such a great job of showing what smart, talented bloggers can do with the power of Movable Type 4.

A few years ago, Spider-Man came out and did a brilliant job of showing off the classic character, making it okay to really enjoy a “comic book movie” again. This summer’s sequel, Spider-Man 3 opens tomorrow and seems to be a lock for the first blockbuster film of the season. So naturally, we’re thrilled to make the Spider-Man 3 Official Movie Blog our Movable Type Featured Blog.

The Spider-Man 3 blog is full of the kind of content you’d expect — links to trailers, feeds for fans to subscribe to, and behind-the-scenes videos that show off the making of the film. But innovation abounds all over Sony’s efforts on the blog. There’s smart use of Movable Type’s categories feature to highlight content that includes rich media. You can find extensive use of embedded video to include clips right within the blog. And the team has reached out to the entire blogosphere by providing beautifully designed templates for use on your blog, including Movable Type templates, exclusive designs for LiveJournal users, and the first independent designs we’ve seen any major film create for the Vox community.

But most importantly, the Spider-Man 3 blog really embraces community. Nearly all of the entries tell stories of how fans are excited about the film, what they’ve done to enter or win contests, or what their experiences have been as the film gets ready to launch. Congratulations to the fans and filmmakers who’ve done some heroic web-slinging to help create and launch the Spider-Man 3 Official Movie Blog.

There are lots of discussions about how newspapers need to evolve, and many of them focus on the lessons traditional news outlets can learn from blogs — how to update more frequently, accept submissions and comments from readers, or how to make archived content easier to discover and share.

Well, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser in southeast England has taken those lessons to heart in relaunching its web presence: The newspaper’s site is now published entirely with Movable Type. And that makes the Buckinghamshire Advertiser today’s Movable Type Featured Blog.

There are often debates about this sort of thing — if you’re using a tool like Movable Type, which is platform designed for blogging, but it’s being used as a general content management system, is the output still a blog? Our answer: Who cares? The important thing is that the Advertiser’s staff has an easy way to share news and updates with their community, and the Buckinghamshire community has a simpler way to keep up to day. The Press Gazette offers an astute analysis:

Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.

Just as sites like thePlatform and Seed Magazine show us, content that’s created with blogging tools doesn’t have to look like a traditional blog. All that matters is that a site connects with its audience in way that’s meaningful and useful. The Trinity Mirror team that’s relaunched the Advertiser has achieved exactly that — and the new Buckinghamshire Advertiser is ample evidence.

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.