June 2007 Archives

On the sixapart pronet mailing list, Tim Appnel pointed to this post by Brad Feld about getting his movable type installation to produce proper permalinks.  Some remarkable points from the post itself:

• Brad is a noted venture capitalist.  He doesn't make his living as a Movable Type consultant, yet he spent a considerable amount of his time on what some might consider a technical, down in the weeds detail.
• Brad is running three blogs, and he has a presence on numerous social networks for sharing things like links and contacts.
• In blogging, one of the main things Brad is concerned about is his search visibility. 

• Brad has over 1500 blog posts in three years.  That's over one post per day with no breaks for weekends or vacations.  Assuming that each post takes around 15 minutes, that's on the order of 400 hours in posting over three years, or 6% of his time.  Assuming that posts take closer to an hour, Brad is spending 24% of his time blogging.
• Looking at his entires set of operations, Brad's crew likely consists of somewhere between 7 and 20 people, in other words a small shop.
• He has an extensive technology background, having founded tech companies and serving in the role of CTO.
  

With this set of facts, it's clear to me that one of Brad's main business generating strategies is to leverage his online presence.  Looking at a search for "venture capital", a highly competed for term, Brad's blogging group comes in number 11, a respectable showing.  Looking at his series on "term sheets", a stock of the VC trade, Brad ranks number one and two.

Bottom line, Brad Feld has created an important entry way into his business via his blog.  That entry way is all through search and links.  He has built a reputation as the source of information for some of his key topic areas.  His attention to details like permalinks indicates the value he places on that asset.

I've been using Movable Type for years now, and I signed up for Sixapart's Typepad service within a month of it's availability.  Lately, I had contemplated moving off of Movable Type.  It just wasn't serving me for blog community projects like the Learning Remix.  Web sites in general, and blogs in particular, really only have value inasmuch as they are connected to other web sites.

So, I'm glad to see Sixapart making two moves.  First, they are making a big step toward supporting community features out of the box with Movable Type 4.  Second, and much more importantly, they are open sourcing the product using this updated code base.  It's hard to imagine the company was making money off of selling Movable Type licenses alone (see this comment by Anil Dash suggesting that the real money is in services).  Open sourcing the product will both make it more valuable for Sixapart by widening the developer base and more valuable for the community that will be freely able to modify this code base to its own ends.  Like Sixapart, much of the community around this product makes it money off of providing services, and the closed source model just was not serving them.

As I noted in a recent comment to a post by Byrne Reese, Movable Type's product manager:

I agree. I've seen the knowledge content of the community resources shoot way up, and that's what was needed. The constant decline was depressing.

I'd like to see a post where you identified what parts of MT 4 are actually in production at 6A. It seems like MT was the initial basis for a lot of the services 6A started (like Typepad where I begain using it within a month of it launching) but then the codebase for the products started to diverge rapidly.

The reason I ask this question is that it seems you are creating the basis for an ecosystem where 6A and the community mutually reinforce each other. My guess is that you'll look back on this time and see it as the point where close sourced MT stopped being a drag on the company and open source MT started being a contributor.

Your business is a service business, not a packaged software distribution business.

I suspect that making this transition will be hard because people will have to adapt to a new business model, but I really do think it will be worth it.

We're honored to have Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations as our first interview. By my reckoning, I've known Rich for over 6 years, right about the time he started Menlo. Since he's appeared on the cover of Forbes and been featured in the Wall Street Journal. He's also developed a wealth of contacts as he has developed Menlo's business.

In the interview, Rich discusses Menlo's work with Accuri Cytometers, a high tech start-up on the west side of Ann Arbor. A cytometer is basically a cell counter, and the equipment plays a pivotal role in some parts of medical research. Software is a key component of Accuri's product and should allow them to deliver the same quality as competitors at a fraction of the cost.

I tried downloading Movable Type 4 Beta 1, but had no luck installing it.  However, I did manage to try out the new interface at this demo site.  My general read is that it is very much a work in progress.  Beta 1 is really still in alpha.  A number of people are reporting various issues with the install, though with effort and persistence you can make it through.  I just don't have the time.  Sixapart estimates 6 to 12 weeks for the beta period.  I would not be surprised if it was closer to 12.

I'd say I have just about the patience of Richard McManus for the Movable Type platform.  I want to use it produce content for my domain.  I would like to install and be ready to publish.  I'd like to be able to add the functionality that typically gets spread out in multiple plugins easily.  I'd really like the posting and aggregating from other blogs to go easily.

My quick play with the beta site tells me it is pretty promising.  Posting seems to have taken a big step forward, and big improvements in aggregation are promised.  I'm pretty interested to see whether enough of a community will return to Movable Type to keep it going.  People over in Shelley Powers' comments seem to think it will.

Well, for the time being at least.  I decided to follow Byrne Reese's practice and reference cutline in the footer.  I'm not sure it's the best design. 

I like the three column idea, but it may be overkill for individual entries.  I note that the New York Times does individual entries in two columns.

Also, I may want to use more color to define different areas of the site both making it a little less spartan and indicating different areas with different functionality.  It's going to be an iterative approach.

One tool I'm going to be testing out as I iterate is google analytics.  It appears to have great promise, providing all sorts of potential tracking features that I can use to help me figure out which parts of the site are working and which not.  However, Google analytics is a pain to set up, rather finicky in how it accepts the web site URL you give it.  We'll see how useful it actually winds up being.

The grand plan is to set this site up as part of a network of sites including Michigan Innovators and the Learning Remix site.  It will be interesting to see how it is all working a year from now. 

Diana Wong and I should be starting Michigan Innovators site shortly.  I'm looking forward to getting this thing off the ground.  The basic idea of the site is that there's a lot of business and technology innovation taking place in Michigan.  We want to provide a place for people to tell their stories and have it recorded on video.

In my experience, gained from undertaking similar efforts at Muscle Ventures, the real issue is going to be to get people to move from thinking this is a neat idea to actually participating.  Generally, there's all sorts of cajoling that takes place.

Alex Iskold has a provocative piece over at Read/Write Web in which he claims that adding offline storage to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) might be irrelevant because, soon, we will all always be connected to the Internet.  Just to be clear, an example of a Rich Internet Application is Gmail, Google's highly interactive web-based email service.  Going offline in this context would mean being able to use Gmail to read downloaded emails and compose new messages when not connected to the Internet, something people who use email programs like Outlook do all the time.

The idea that one would be constantly connected to the Internet is simply preposterous on its face.  Further, there are various versions of being connected to the Internet, a whole class of which downgrade the interactivity of RIAs to the point of being unusable.  Take my recent trip to China as an example.  We had the following blocks to RIAs or just plain web applications that dramatically altered our ability to use the Internet even though we were only officially disconnected for less than two days:

• The Great Firewall of China:  Blocks Google Groups, if as with new groups, you need to click OK to potential adult content.  We had been using a Google group to manage our group.  It also blocked EMU's web mail client.  We moved all communication to paper.
  
• The constricted data pipe going into many Chinese locations: Brings the rich interactivity of RIAs to an almost complete standstill.  Suddenly the bright idea of only loading functionality as needed to increase responsiveness makes the whole experience run at a snail's pace because the data pipe to bring that functionality in is full.

Of course, these two items raise the question of whether you should depend on web based applications at all, not just Rich Internet Applications.  BTW, I do use RIAs all the time but have found I can only depend on them for work flow in fairly circumscribed circumstances.  My general opinion is that many US commenters are living in a well-powered Internet bubble, mainly enabled in the United States, and missing the big picture.