20x200: When Art Meets Commerce, An Industry Shifts

Here at Six Apart, we've always had one foot in the world of design and the other in technology, so it seems logical to us that a robust content management system like Movable Type can be used to create something beautiful - something that looks, well, nothing like a blog.

For those in an industry that prides itself on aesthetics and has long withstood digital innovation, that can be hard to imagine. Of the few industries that have resisted taking part in new media, none is more glamorous than Art. Long the province of whitewalled galleries and mysterious pricing schemes, art has historically been accessible only to a privileged few.

In January 2007, when gallery owner and entrepreneur Jen Bekman had her middle-of-the night revelation that the Internet was a perfect vehicle for making art available to everyone, she was instrumental in ushering the art market into the digital age. Jen named the venture 20x200, and devised the following formula: each week, she would offer two limited-edition prints - an edition of 200 for $20, an edition of 20 for $200, and an edition of 2 for $2,000. The entire business would be conducted online.

To build out the 20x200 site, Jen enlisted the help of photographer and web consultant Raul Gutierrez. Both Jen and Raul had extensive backgrounds in technology; Jen's career included leadership roles and Netscape and Disney, while Raul, himself an accomplished photographer, had built and produced a number of successful websites.

When they decided to use Movable Type to build out the site, they agreed on one thing: it couldn't look like a blog. The entire 20x200 site was built in Movable Type, using multiple custom plug-ins and integrating Google Checkout to make buying simple. Every Tuesday and Wednesday, Jen sends a newsletter to the 20x200 mailing list, in which she announces that day's edition and discusses its context and relevancy within the art world. The newsletter acts not only as a sales tool, but also as a rich source of information for new and seasoned collectors alike.

The newsletter contains links that lead to the page on the 20x200 site where the edition is displayed. Next to each edition sits a real-time inventory number, indicating how many pieces remain.

Movable Type demonstrates its abilities as a flexible, powerful CMS, allowing 20x200 to easily manage their growing catalogue of artwork. The site uses many custom fields to enable administrators to enter data for each edition quickly and simply; fields such as artist name, artist statement and website URL are consistent across each entry, so that visitors to the site can browse artists and find facts with ease.

Less than a year after 20x200 launched, the site has been an unqualified success: over 14,000 prints have been sold to date, to a customer list that includes artists, celebrities and respected collectors from around the world. The site has become an important corollary to Jen's New York gallery, and a vital part of her ongoing mission to champion emerging artists.

When we talk about Movable Type, we often say: "you imagine it, we enable it" and 20x200 demonstrates that maxim - dare we say - artfully.

Last week marked the launch of an exciting new free service from Six Apart: Blog It. Powered by Movable Type's sibling service TypePad, Blog It is a Facebook application that lets you post to your Movable Type blog (as well as most other common blogging platforms) from right within Facebook. But a demonstration shows this better than words ever could:

Best of all, Blog It makes it easy to use a social network like Facebook to alert and notify your friends when you've published something new, combining the power of Movable Type's publishing capabilities with the distribution and connection of a popular social network. In that way, Blog It acts as the perfect counterpart to Movable Type's exclusive Action Streams, the free plugin that brings all of your social networking activity to your Movable Type blog. All of this is part of a larger effort for the Movable Type platform, which encompasses these two-way connections with social networks, powerful new standards like OpenID and OAuth for connecting sites together, and rich integration with exciting new web services like Yahoo Fire Eagle.

As we continue through our list of what's new in Movable Type 4.0, one of the innovations that's had the community most excited is the built-in support for OpenID authentication for commenters. We've been talking about the momentum around OpenID for months -- over 100 million identities are OpenID-compatible today. And now, with MT4, any of those users can sign in to comment on your blog without having to create a new login or password: Movable Type 4 includes OpenID authentication for your commenters, built right in.

On top of general OpenID support, MT4 lets you add in service-specific plugins to provide even smoother integration between third-party OpenID-enabled services and your MT-powered site. Of course Movable Type 4 also provides its own built-in authentication service, if you choose. But some of the coolest options are the ones from other sites -- out of the box, MT4 has authentication integration for:

• Movable Type's built-in registration
  
• Generic OpenID
• LiveJournal
• TypeKey (includes all TypePad users)

But the energy that the MT4 community has shown since the platform's launch is reflected in OpenID support, as well. Community member Minh Nguyễn has created an OpenID connector for AIM and AOL logins. That's almost 90 million potential users who don't have to create a password to sign in on your blog's comments! And our own Byrne Reese, product manager for Movable Type, has stepped to the plate with a WordPress OpenID Login plugin for MT4, which supports anyone using the wordpress.com service. Both of these are made possible through MT4's authentication plugin framework, which is accompanied by some spiffy new developer documentation.

We're always happy to see the industry embrace open standards, and as OpenID was first incubated at Six Apart, we're especially proud to have the first professional blogging system that's incorporated OpenID natively into the platform. We'll be watching carefully to see how you use OpenID on your sites, and expanding our support even further in the future.

Your blog is a lot more than just the text you type in to your entries. It's the photos that illustrate your ideas, the audio files that make your podcast sing, and the video clips that capture your audience's attention. It might even be the Word documents or presentations or PDFs that help you make your case.

But keeping track of those files, let alone easily using and reusing them in your blog can be a real pain. Having to struggle with FTP to upload files, or trying in vain to remember where a file is stored on your server can take your mind away from the ideas you were trying to blog about in the first place.

So in Movable Type 4.0, we've included a powerful file management system that has all the capabilities of an asset manager from a complicated content management system, but still keeps the simplicity and ease-of-use of a blogging tool. Any file you upload is automatically stored in the system, where you can preview it, assign tags to help describe it, and easily search through files you've uploaded previously. And the asset listing screens let you filter to show just your images, audio, or video uploads with a single click.

And it's dead simple to insert the files you've already uploaded into your blog entries or pages. You can even use MT4's powerful templating tools to create custom displays of your file assets, like a podcast feed of all your audio uploads. There's a built-in sidebar widget for showing all your recent photos on the sidebar of your blog. And even more convenient touches, like the ability to preview your media files right within MT4 while you're editing, and detailed metadata on your file assets such as image dimensions, captions, and automatically-detected media types. Best of all, if you've got a number of authors contributing content on your blog, you can reuse the files they've uploaded as well.

The standard way of presenting information in blogging tools today was virtually defined by Movable Type's innovative user interface touches half a decade ago, with lists of blogs and entries and comments taking a position of prominence. Those lists were backed by a few utility screens for managing things like authors and permissions. But, having led the revolution in blogging since then, we've learned from our community exactly what information helps bloggers make their sites successful. Whether you're aiming for community interaction or simply to get the highest possible number of readers, we thought there was a better way to present insights into how your blogs are succeeding.

It's become clear: Serious bloggers don't just need raw data on the entries they've written -- you need understanding into what your audience wants.

As a result, Movable Type 4's most immediate improvement is the pervasive use of smart data displays, starting with the powerful new Dashboard. the Dashboard is topped with an intelligent dynamic chart showing recent commenting and posting activity for one blog or across the unlimited number of blogs that can be published with a single Movable Type instance. A simple click reveals a tag cloud display for one or more blogs, and you can easily explore your own blog entries by tag, for review or as inspiration for new entries. You can even use a range of new plugins to include data like the number of visitors or feed subscribers for your blog, by connecting to popular third-party services like Google Analytics or FeedBurner.

The graph of blog activity isn't merely an attractive way to look at your blog's success; It's also a powerful visual way of understanding what inspires your community of authors and commenters. See a spike in commenting activity recently? Just click and drag to select a range of dates, and the system automatically provides statistics about that subset of information. Point to any individual data point for more details on that day's activity, and then with one click, reveal a list of just the comments during that period of time.

There's far more than can be done with Movable Type 4's new graphical blog reports, especially with the new generation of plugins and system extensions designed to work with MT4. But we think you'll find the immediacy and interactivity of the new user interface compelling right from the first time you log in.

We owe a very special thanks to the MeasureMap team, friends of ours who spun off from the esteemed Adaptive Path team and helped design the excellent new version of Google Analytics. Their date slider widget, released under a Creative Commons license, shows the fantastic potential for collaboration between teams working on open platforms.

Now that Movable Type 4.0 is widely available and we've seen such a positive response, it's time to start diving into all the new features in MT4. Though MT has been fundamentally rebuilt from the ground up, the most obvious new improvement is MT4's striking new user interface

We've been fortunate -- Movable Type has always been praised for its clean, easy-to-understand interface. And now in Movable Type 4, the entire application has been redesigned, honoring its tradition of clarity but showing off a modern new look that makes it easier to understand your blogs, your community, and Movable Type itself. The goal? Removing everything you don't need, and making more opportunities to put powerful tools right where they're most convenient.

At a high level, the number of links and controls displayed on each page has been greatly reduced, and navigation has been refocused on a few simple links arranged around key tasks: Creating content for your blogs, managing the community and organization of your blogs, changing the design and styling of the templates that publish your blogs, and adjusting your preferences for publishing and managing your site.

The new design is even more striking for users who have system administration privileges -- there's a unique graphic in the system screens that helps remind you of context, but also hints at the new power under the hood.

From a more aesthetic standpoint, Movable Type also reflects its evolution into a true power tool. Instead of merely focusing on presenting lists of items in an administrative view, the system has evolved to focus more on presenting information that encourages creating new content and helping to build community. And even the distinctive new palette of Movable Type shows off how completely the system has been rethought, with a glossy black header, an entirely new set of default icons, and thoughtful elegant touches throughout the application creating a tool that's as powerful as the ideas that are published by our community.

MT4's new abilities are much more than skin-deep, of course, but we thought there's no better place to start describing the new platform than with the first part that will catch your eye. And we owe a special shout-out to our friends at Mule Design, not just for being long-time users of MT and members of the community, but for helping make sure MT4 looks like Serious Business.

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.

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.

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.

Today, Microsoft is making some of their biggest announcements ever -- if you're even remotely interested in technology news, you're going to hear about the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. But what you might not know is that these new milestones mark the first time that blogging can really be integrated between Movable Type Enterprise and two of the most popular software platforms in the world.

To be honest, Windows and Office aren't always known for being the most cutting-edge platforms. But at Six Apart, we've got some very cool demos about ways that you can connect these decades-old platforms to the latest innovations in blogging. And you might be surprised to see that even some people who work at Microsoft are using these tools themselves.

Some background: A year ago, we showed off some cool ideas about blogging with Office at the MIX06 conference that Microsoft held in Las Vegas. (There's even video online -- just skip past the showgirl and the Elvis impersonator.) Now the technology demo we showed off last year is something that you can actually deploy.

You see, we’re not gonna be happy until every company can have a blog. To get everybody using blogs at work, we have to connect with the tools people are already using. Some of that's already happened -- you can use Movable Type Enterprise with your Oracle database or build templates in Adobe's Dreamweaver. But the big Kahuna of office apps is Office. And Office 2007 is surprisingly good, so it makes it even more attractive to plug it in to the power of blogs.

Okay, enough talk. Let’s see what blogging with MT Enterprise and Office 2007 looks like:

• Post to your Movable Type blog right from Microsoft Word. How well does this work? You’re reading a post created in Word 2007 right now.

• Publish your Movable Type blog posts in Microsoft Word format. We’ve been talking about this idea for years, but imagine the potential – if you’ve got a guy in your office who is afraid of blogs but just wants to get his information delivered on his desk in the format he’s used to, now you can do that. What about just publishing each category archive as a Word document, so you can have a single file with all the information about that topic?
• Support for feeds in Outlook 2007. There are tons of things you can do with feeds that get more powerful in Outlook – every tag has its own feed in MT Enterprise, and of course every blog does, too. But you can make feeds across all the blogs in your system, so you can do cool things like having every post tagged “important” go into a single folder in Outlook, where you can make a macro to turn them into to-dos.
• And lots more. There’s all kinds of other opportunities with the new Microsoft platforms. OpenSearch support in IE7 lets you automatically perform searches of your intranet blogs right in your browser. XML-based formats for PowerPoint and Excel mean you can actually pull in live data from your blogs into presentations or spreadsheets. And we’re sure the best stuff hasn’t even been thought of yet.

More of this kind of integration is on the way; Movable Type Enterprise already integrates with platforms like Microsoft’s SQL Server. But we wanted to make sure that, amidst all the other news of the day, nobody misses the fact that two of the most popular software platforms around are finally ready for business when it comes to blogs.