Cloaked
: Atrios appears to be unemployed and so he’s asking for money. I’d always understood — rightly or wrongly — that much of the reason for his cloak of anonymity was his job. With that gone, I wonder whether he’ll now reveal himself like the rest of us.
: UPDATE: Atrios replies in the comments:
Advantage of revealing yourself: Somebody can meet you for a beer.reasonable chance you’re correct. though, we’ll see.
CanCat fight
: Canadian media ladies unleash claws.
First swipe: Toronto Star scribe Antonia Zerbisias saying that warbloggers are silent lately (I hardly hear the quiet, do you?) and using this as an opportunity to claw Relapsed Catholic:
The warblog drums are growing silent.
They’re either running out of time, or money, or steam
The SixApart Solution: Divesting TypePad II
: Below, I laid out the inherent pickle vat into which SixApart has placed itself by trying to be both a software and a service company and competing with its own customers. I urged SixApart to divest Typepad, its service company, so it could go back to selling software without pissing off its customers. If I do say so myself, it’s pretty good (free) busienss advice; go read that first. Now some reaction to that:
: Fred Wilson, a VC who’s one helluva lot smarter and more successful at business than I am, agrees about the issue but suggests a different solution:
One approach that SixApart could take is to just come out and say that they aren’t going to license the MovableType software enhancements going forward (starting with 3.0) to blog hosting service providers.
I respond in Fred’s comments:
The problem is, in this nanoworld, who is a “hosting service provider”? If I host blogs for my grandma and aunt, am I a hosting service provider? Where’s the line? One blog? Two blogs? Two hundred blogs?
That is precisely the (unsolvable) problem SixApart has now created for itself. There is no clear line between “commercial” and “noncommercial,” between “personal” and “hosting.”
If SixApart does what you suggest and refuse to license improvements to hosting providers, who are they (the little guys or the big guys and how big is big?… the commercial guys or the noncommercial guys and if your ad strip starts raking in big bucks does that make you commercial?)? Thus, if they do what you suggest then they in essence take the other tack: They shut off the line of software licensing as a business to advantage their own hosting business.
: John Robb says:
This is a difficult decision to make (I’ve been there). However, the solution is to productize Typepad for large communities provided by leading hosting companies. Typepad needs to be sold as software. Treat the current instantiation of Typepad as a demo of its capabilities.
So, in essence (to unfairly summarize): Fred suggests getting out of the software licensing business (to any possible competitors) to be in the hosting business primarily. John suggests getting out of the hosting business to be in the software licensing business. And I suggest divesting to allow each business to grow on its own merits. But we all agree that there is a conflict here and that SixApart had better deal with it.
: I’m not piling on SixApart; I’m just making these suggestions (openly in this open world) in an effort to help a company and a product I very much like.
But I will add one more complaint: The one feature I have been dying to have for month’s is a page on which I can display all (or more than five) comments so I can deal with spam more effectively. “It’s coming,” I was told a few times. Problem is, it came in a new version that brings all kinds of headaches.
So can someone please write a plug-in to the current version to give me lots of comments on one page with some easy editing tools (i.e., I want to see quick excerpts and kill comments with a click and ideally, add IPs to the banned list at the same time)?
: I am having someone I respect give me a list of blog software alternatives with the pros and cons laid out. I’ll let you know what I find.
