Category Archives: Weblog platforms

How will Twitter make money?

Micro-blogging service Twitter will celebrate its third birthday in March and may have a revenue model to support the company over the long-term. Last month Twitter CEO Evan Williams told Kevin Maney of Porfolio.com the company will kick off new revenue streams by March 2009 to avoid raising another round of venture capital funding. Twitter’s deeply engaged community would love to see a sustainable business develop around the site, its services, and the community. In this post I will take a deeper look at Twitter and its revenue potential as publicly hinted by its founders.

Six Apart widget podcast with Byrne Reese

Last Friday I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart’s four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox. Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below. Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart…

Movable Type turns 5

Five years ago today Benjamin Trott and Mena Grabowski Trott released Movable Type 1.0. About 100 copies of the blogging software was downloaded within the first hour of availability, and over 500 people had requested notification of each release. We’ve never claimed to be the best. We’ve never presented MOVABLE TYPE as the program that will revolutionize weblogging. We’re just developing a system with a lot of the features that we’ve heard users are looking for. Luckily, we’ve received a lot of good word of mouth. People are hoping that MT will be THE program and THE solution. A…

Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks

Blogging company Six Apart has acquired online feed aggregator Rojo Networks. Rojo technologies will be integrated with the Vox blogging tool allowing users to browse updated content and create more blog posts. Rojo co-founder Kevin Burton confirmed the news on his blog this morning. A press release from Six Apart names former Rojo CEO Chris Alden as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type and former CTO Aaron Emigh as executive vice president and general manager of core technologies. Chris Alden is the fifth general manager of Movable Type in the last year. The press release is…

WordPress.com adds paid upgrades

Free blog hosting site WordPress.com introduced its first paid feature this morning, allowing customers access to their CSS for $15 a year per blog. Free members can still access 40 built-in templates for free and customize their image header and sidebar widgets. Payments are processed through PayPal. The site is currently testing custom domain mapping, a likely next upgrade. The combination of custom CSS and domain mapping a la carte upgrades puts Automattic’s WordPress.com in direct competition with Six Apart and its TypePad product currently charging $90 a year for a similar feature set….

Windows Live Spaces launches

Windows Live Spaces has just launched, tying new social networking features into the blogging service. The new release features an integrated friends module tied into your contacts defined in Messenger and elsewhere, and adds new customization options using Microsoft Gadgets. The new friends integration is the real hotness, allowing users to define their relationships and see more information about the people who matter most. The friends module shows Messenger presence and status messages and adds a “gleam” next to any contact with a recently updated space. Friends lists are browsable within a Spaces web page as well as within that…

Zune blogs powered by TypePad

The two Microsoft blogs discussing the upcoming Zune product suite, Zune Insider and Madison and Pine, are powered by Six Apart’s TypePad blogging software. That’s Apache on Linux using Perl and PostgreSQL. Microsoft is heavily into “dogfooding” everything, from Windows Mobile smartphones to the latest build of Vista. It’s good to see the Xbox team step out and blaze their own path….

BloxPress personalized blog sidebars

BloxPress is a theme and template engine for WordPress that allows viewers of your blog to configure their own widget modules in your sidebars. If Bill likes to view the last 10 comments and Jane likes to see your latest Flickr uploads, they can have both at once with their own configuration. Individual user preferences are stored in a cookie and anyone can create their own “blocks” for the system. Check out the demo to see the system in action. It’s too bad the blocks do not seem to interoperate with any other widget definition format. I’m glad Spaces…