bq.Movable Type 3.0 and on will not be the solution for everyone, and that’s okay. For some users, TypePad makes more sense. For others, non-Six Apart tools make more sense. – Mena Trott Many of us at the time and many more since have made the choice to use “non-Six Apart tools.” Six Apart is making an effort to change that.
bq.As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type. – Anil Dash As you might expect, there was a response.
bq.Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page. For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community. – Matt Mullenweg I consider myself semi-neutral in this since, at this point, I don’t use either product much although I still have sites that are running both. Six Apart made a strategic mistake four years ago and the open sourcing of the product is a good first step toward a remedy. But just like Leo Laporte noted recently, it isn’t that Twitter is better than Pownce or Jaiku (most of them have more features), it is where the community resides. What Six Apart is going to have to do to make Movable Type a force once again is restore the user community that once surrounded it. And that, I think, is going to prove very difficult to do.

bq.In lieu of more flexibility on pricing, NBC U sought a cut of Apple’s hardware sales. “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money,” Zucker said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.” NBC Universal programming accounted for 40% of iTunes’ video sales. Zucker used iTunes as an example of the kind of digital business model that, he asserted, is corrosive to the media business. “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side,” he said. Apple did not return calls for comment. – Michael Learmonth When you make a purchase in a brick and mortar store, there are a certain amount of costs that accrue in producing the item and getting onto the store shelf in order for you to make a purchase. And one cost that has to be considered: no one will ever actually buy that item. When you purchase something, you are also paying the store for everything that will never be. Their goal is to offer the maximum numbers of items at the highest price possible that they can survive and, hopefully, make a profit. Contrast that with iTunes. Inventory costs: there is only one copy of the item. Storage concerns are not existent as well as keeping the item in stock. Distribution costs: These are minuscule and only incurred after an item is sold, not before. And many other costs from above (promotion, packaging, salaries for sales staff) don’t even figure in. A Heroes DVD set will retail for $59.99 for 23 episodes ($2.61 per episode if full price is paid, which is doubtful) but NBC Universal will only see a small portion of that overall cost (otherwise Amazon couldn’t sell it for $39.99 or $1.74). On iTunes, the episode cost is $1.99; we don’t know how much Apple gets to keep but judging from music reports, it is probably around $.60 leaving Universal with $1.39 of profit per episode. It just sounds to me that Zucker is trying to make a case he is deserved money for profits he lost when he never actually had them in first place.

As a one-time user of Movable Type (who still owns a full license for 3.x), I thought this was great news.
bq.Six Apart, the world’s leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced the beta release of Movable Type 4, a blogging platform designed to meet the website content management needs of growing organizations and to serve as a social media platform that enables businesses to create community-driven websites. This beta release continues Movable Type’s tradition of powering many of the web’s most popular blogs for over five years. – Six Apart But I do have admit I found this article rather amusing on a couple of points.
bq.There’s a lot of history between MT users and SixApart. Although Movable Type was never an open source platform, prior to the release of MT 3.0 many treated MT as if it was open source. The decision to enforce licensing with the release of MT 3.0 caused widespread outrage in 2004 (including rather vocally from myself) and in many ways was a tipping point that delivered WordPress from relative obscurity to being the popular blogging CMS it is today. Dash said that commercially SixApart had no choice other than to enforce licensing at the time. However SixApart in 2007 is a thriving company with a broad suite of popular products, including TypePad, Vox and LiveJournal, and today can afford to give back to the blogging community. – Duncan Riley It wasn’t the fact the licensing terms were being enforced for the first time, it was the fact that they were being changed.
bq.With 3.0 we have revised our licenses and pricing structure to address this issue. We feel that with this new release we have created licensing that allows and encourages the development of software and services paid or free. – Mena Trott Which led to moments like this.
bq.And yesterday I learned, as most of you have probably also learned, that Movable Type 3.0 comes with a new licensing plan. 1 author and 3 sites is free. Up to 3 authors and 5 sites: $100. Up to 6 authors and 8 sites: $150. Up to 9 authors and 10 sites: $190. I have 11 Movable Type sites. To upgrade to Movable Type 3.0 would cost me $700. But wait! If I act now, I can take advantage of the special introductory price of $600. Also, all the voluntary donations I’ve made over the years also count towards my purchase. That was $20, and later $45. That brings the price down to $535. $535 for comment moderation. – Mark Pilgrim Some people were even harsher.
bq.I also think that it’s pretty much a given that when SixApart announced MT 3.0 they abandoned their then user base as well. – Duncan Riley Of course, some concerns were certainly addressed.
bq.We’ve updated the site with the new pricing and licensing options. – Mena Trott And addressed again.
bq.We also continue to make our personal license for Movable Type even more open: The personal version of Movable Type is now completely free, and supports as many blogs and authors as you want. – Jay Allen These days, I still prefer to use Textpattern for most projects. I have never been comfortable with the way WordPress does things. But I still miss some of the power and flexibility that Movable Type offered. So perhaps I will take another look (I downloaded the Beta while I was typing this).

Have you heard about the latest Web 2.0 service?
bq.Online Book Rental Library. Stop buying books when you can borrow new releases and classics with free shipping! Netflix has popularized online DVD Rental. We`re doing it for books! BookSwim is the first online BOOK RENTAL LIBRARY CLUB lending you paperbacks and hardcovers direct to your house WITHOUT THE NEED TO PURCHASE! Whether it’s New Releases, Bestsellers, or Classics, we’ve got 150,000 titles to choose from, with FREE SHIPPING BOTH WAYS! Read your books as long as you want. — no late fees! Even choose to purchase and keep the titles you love! – Bookswim Instead of pointing our the obvious, I will let someone else do it for me.
bq.BookSwim – paid membership required. Public library – no membership required. BookSwim – unlimited “rentals”. Public library – unlimited “rental” (return by due date – usually 30 days). – Derek Punsalan
bq.Or you could, you know, go to your local library. They might not have 150,000 titles, but that’s what interlibrary loan is for. – Brad Linder It isn’t impossible that it might work, though. After all, Netflix has worked successfully even when a lot of libraries circulation materials in DVD format these days. One disadvantage I see though: Netflix, as I understand it, actually licenses the content and produces their own versions of the discs to mail out. BookSwim will be forced to purchase a copy of the book they are sending out. I am not sure if the economies of scale are going to work out the same way. But it is an interesting experiment to watch.

Does this sound cheap to you?
bq.Microsoft will be announcing plans later today to offer a bargain basement $3 version of Windows as well as Office 2007 exclusively to people in developing countries as part of the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Program. The program aims to double the amount of worldwide PC users by 2015 and thinks one of the keys to doing that is cheap software. – Emily Price It does to me. But some people know how to make that even cheaper.
bq.Chasing after software pirates in the US is one thing, but China’s a whole other ballgame. Pirated copies of Windows Vista are widely available throughout the country, for as little as $1. – Brad Linder I am afraid that charging triple what the pirates are charging is not going to have much impact.

Have you ever been to irs.com?
bq.Bad news for everyone out there pretending to be the IRS online: party’s over. The hammer is coming down. Gone are the carefree days when every man, woman, and child could run wild through cyberspace pretending to be Treasury Department without fear of repercussion. ‘Wait’, you ask. ‘Wasn’t this illegal before?’ Apparently not illegal enough, since the House of Representatives voted 407-7 in favor of expanding the the prohibition against using the Treasury names and symbols online. – Peter White I narrowly prevented a patron on one of our public stations from making a $39.95 purchase of a Form 4868 late Monday afternoon. So I consider this a very good thing, if not something that should have already been done.

Microsoft had a problem. They wanted people in the blogosphere to review their new operating system, Vista, and presumably say nice things about it. The problem lay in that fact they most people either do not have a PC capable of running Vista in Ultimate mode, or aren’t willing to sacrifice their personal computer at the moment to do an upgrade. Eventually, they figured out a solution: offer free laptops to their specially chosen set of reviewers. But wait… it gets better.
bq.This would be a review machine, so I’d love to hear your opinion on the machine and OS. Full disclosure, while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like. Just let me know what you plan to do with it when the time comes. And if you run into any problems let me know. A few of the drivers aren’t quite final, but are very close. – Unknown Microsoft Employee So… take the laptop and blog about it or not. Then decide if you want to keep it for yourself or not. Apparently, though, the one thing you shouldn’t do is annoy them.
bq.I strongly recommend you disclose that we sent you this machine for review, and I hope you give your honest opinions. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews. Unknown Microsoft Employee I had been trying to decide how I was going to deal with Vista. My first choice would be to buy 5 copies (1 for my home computer, 1 each for my parents, 1 for my homebrew pvr, and 1 to run inside parallels on my macbook). But since I haven’t figured out if I need home basic or enterprise or ultimate or whatever yet, I have no idea how much I am going to spend or if I should just wait. Or forget the whole thing. And now I have to look at every review with that much more scrutiny. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but right now, I am definitely leaning toward putting Vista off indefinitely. After a year of Sony gaffes and mistakes, it would have been hard to predict that Microsoft was capable of surpassing them with four days left in the year. But I guess we should never understimate their ability to do stupid things. Note: At work, I am still happily operating on a workstation running Windows 2000. I am planning to upgrade soon just so I can test web designs in IE7. Since Microsoft is playing games in that regard as well.

I don’t always keep up with Library Journal like I should, but our Director was pointing out something that caused me to notice Google is Not the Net a few hours ago. Apparently, even Google would agree with that title.
bq.A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device that identifies a particular company’s products or services. Google is a trademark identifying Google Inc. and our search technology and services. While we’re pleased that so many people think of us when they think of searching the web, let’s face it, we do have a brand to protect, so we’d like to make clear that you should please only use “Google” when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services. – Michael Krantz Steve Rubel and Eric Rice point out how silly this whole thing is. And, of course, this isn’t even a new story as Google has been complaining to no avail about this for years. Do try in the future to remember that Google is neither the Internet nor a verb but is instead a trademark. You never know when that sort of information may come in handy.

Tuesday Night I was involved in a discussion about how Second Life would soon exceed One Million residents. Someone said it would happen before the end of the year. I predicted it would be before the end of the week. It turns out we were both right and both pretty wrong.
bq.”When precisely did we hit 1 million Residents?” – Pathfinder Linden The number of new accounts registered yesterday but was about equal to half of all the new accounts that had been registered when I logged in back in March. I would definitely say that critical mass has been reached.