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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blue Flavor is an established team of expert web developers, with access to every web technology that’s available. But when thePlatform came calling looking for a standards-based redesign that would produce search-engine friendly pages that could be easily updated, Blue Flavor chose Movable Type. We’re always thrilled when members of our Six Apart Professional Network have case studies to share with the community, so we were happy that Nick Finck, Blue Flavor’s Director of User Experience, had a few minutes to talk to us about the project.

Six Apart: So, to get started — who’s Blue Flavor:? I feel like I know you all since many of you have been in the blogging community forever, but maybe everybody doesn’t know the name yet.

Blue Flavor: Blue Flavor is seven people, myself, Brian Fling, D. Keith Robinson, Garrett Murray, Tom Watson, Kevin Tamura and Cyndi Fling. Brian, Keith and I make up the principals. Garrett is both the youngest age wise and employee wise… Sorry, he’s taken, ladies!

Six Apart: Hah! Great. So, the latest project I’ve seen your team launch is thePlatform. Before we get to the site itself — how do you end up in touch with a relatively large company, when you’re such a small (but admittedly well-established!) team?

Blue Flavor: They say it’s all about who you know. In this case, Keith has a pretty good relationship with the client. They knew we did web standards-based design and needed someone to come in and redesign their site the right way.

Six Apart: And the site they asked you to help with is thePlatform. What is it?

Blue Flavor: thePlatform is basically a broadband application service provider. They provide services that businesses use to manage and publish various kinds of broadband media. It’s one of those companies where you see their handiwork all the time as a consumer, but are not directly exposed to the technology. It’s all a seamless experience for you. The focus is mostly on business-to-business communication.

Six Apart: That sounds like a demanding audience — but if they all have broadband and presumably have the latest browsers and things, does it still matter that you’re building with web standards?

Blue Flavor: Of course, standards are always something we need to pay attention to. We always design and build our websites so that they are accessible to all, be it people with older browsers or people with screen readers. We like to layer the advanced technologies so that users who have systems or browsers that do not support those technologies can still access and read the content on the site. Just because the bandwidth may be there for your site’s audience doesn’t mean you should abuse it as a designer or developer.

Six Apart: That makes sense — you have to have technology that works for everyone. Switching gears a little bit, this doesn’t look like a blog, in the traditional sense. But it’s powered by Movable Type. How did you make that choice?

We’re happy to congratulate the smart folks over at Ning on the launch of their new version of their cool Social Network platform. But in addition to their hard work on their service, they’ve been doing some really creative writing on their Movable Type-powered company blog that’s worth a closer look.

As you’d expect from a tech startup, there’s a video walkthrough of the new site (it’s easy enough to embed videos from sites like PodTech in your blog), and some brief updates when the usual little launch-day glitches pop up.

But where Ning really went beyond the normal “We have a new product!” platitudes was in the other posts surrounding the launch. Take CEO Gina Bianchini’s “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned by Starting a Web Company” — it’s the kind of personal story that really lets a community know about the human side of a company. We might be biased because a lot of her points are ones that resonate with us at Six Apart as an independent web startup ourselves. For example:

Sometimes it’s really easy to follow the crowd and use the “well, this service did it…” school of product design, even when it goes against what you stand for. We stand for the creation of social networks by everyone. Not just developers, start-ups, or big media companies, but everyone. For us, we see the goal as the freedom to make your social network whatever and whomever you decide it should be.

It’s an important point, well-articulated. And it’s the kind of message we’ve been trying to focus more on ourselves: We want blogging to be for everyone, not just for developers or web experts. So thanks to the entire Ning team, not just for making cool things, but for blogging a story that makes your work even more meaningful.

Rebecca Blood hasn’t just been blogging longer than you, she literally wrote the book on blogging. And one of the things we try to do is share the vast wealth of knowledge that the expert members of the Movable Type community have gained in their years of blogging.

Fortunately, Rebecca’s not just doing that by writing books. Take her fantastic series of interviews of Bloggers on Blogging. From Glenn Reynolds’ work on Instapundit to Heather Armstrong’s blogging on Dooce to Jason Kottke’s venerable Kottke.org, many of the biggest names in blogging talk about what has helped their sites take off, how they use Movable Type to update their sites every day, and other insights that only come from experience.

One of the best examples is the recent interview with Bruce Schneier. His Schneier on Security blog is one of the most popular English-language blogs in the world, and as has been noted, it’s a great example of how a blog can help you build your career. As Rebecca says:

If you’re interested in using your blog to advance your professional reputation, it’s worth studying Bruce’s Blend—blogging, writing, and speaking—to guide your own efforts.

We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for future interviews, and if you find other resources that we should be sharing with the community, just let us know.