UPDATE: See an update to this post here.

As I noted, I’ve been on vacation in the last week, so this topic has been pretty widely noted in the blogosphere already, but for the record, the popular blog publishing software Movable Type, from Six Apart, has released a new pricing plan for the new 3.0 version of its software.

I’m not going to get into this in detail for a few reasons, including A) it’s past midnight and I have to get up early tomorrow, B) I’m so frazzled from too much vacation and too many project deadlines that I haven’t really thought hard about this yet, and C) there are indications that Six Apart is about to revise the pricing policy (see below).

In summary, however, suffice to say many bloggers have expressed their annoyance at the pricing policy. To oversimplify, the new pricing now costs a flat licensing fee of $100-190 for personal weblogs and $300-700 for business blogs. The price ranges have to do with how many blogs you are publishing and how many blog authors are using a single license of the software. The prices include “introductory” discounts, though it’s not clear to me how long that introductory price applies.

These prices compare to free for personal licenses and $150 for business licences for the prior version of the software.

In no small part, the criticism Six Apart has received for the new pricing scheme stems from the fact that the new 3.0 version did not introduce many new features, but rather it concentrated on scalability and openness for developers, which are not benefits that most users will readily appreciate.

My own high-level reaction to the changes are that I feel Six Apart made a mistake in not adequately testing user sensitivity to the pricing (surprising of them to get caught so unawares by the potential for bad PR from bloggers, who do nothing if not express their minds), and they also made the pricing scheme unnecessarily complicated. That and they probably also did over-price to an extent. Compared, for example, to TypePad, Movable Type does seem too expensive.

That said, I personally believe the value of the software is worth paying for. My experience of blog publishing platforms is limited to Blogger, TypePad and Movable Type, but all in all, I have found Movable Type to be a great tool, which I do recommend to clients. As a personal publishing tool, it’s still really not so expensive at under $200. For personal purposes, I consider blogging a hobby, and as hobbies go, it’s an extremely cheap one (compared, for example, to my other hobbies of bicycling, photography, cooking and others, on which I have spent a lot more than $200). If you’re too cheap for even that, use Blogger or any of the number of other blog publishing tools that are cheaper or free. For businesses, $300-700 is inexpensive for a fairly powerful content management tool.

The biggest risk of the new pricing is that Six Apart risks killing the goose that laid the golden egg. As good as the software itself is, what makes it really great is the extensive support and developer communities for it. If this new pricing proves to alienate much of that critical group of users (and some outspoken folks have already made a show of quitting MT), then indeed something very valuable about this platform could be lost in this new upgrade.

As I said above, however, there is reason to believe Six Apart is rethinking its pricing strategy in light of the criticism — notably, because Mena Trott, the company’s president, has said as much. So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, to catch up on what everyone else has said about this, take a look at the trackback comments on Mena’s earlier post about the new pricing policy. Also of interest may be this 40-minute audio interview with Six Apart founders Mena and Ben Trott (I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet myself).

Finally, I also came across this thorough review of the new features of MT 3.0 by Neil Turner.

Six Apart: Movable Type Personal License Options

So, Blogger.com has upgraded its service. I started my blogging exploits some two years ago using Blogger and still use it for my ExecutiveSummary.com site. In fact, for the last few weeks, I’ve been a beta tester for the new version of the software, although I was sworn to secrecy about it until now.

With all due respect to my friends at Blogger, I’m rather underwhelmed with the upgrade, particularly since the developers have been promising a major upgrade to the platform for more than a year, and even more so since Blogger’s original startup firm, Pyra, was purchased by deep-pocketed Google last year. Frankly, as far as I can tell, there are relatively few new real features, and most of these are fairly cosmetic. Here are what they are touting as the new features, all of which are indeed welcome improvements:

• A quicker sign-up process — While valuable, this is really of more benefit to Blogger than it is to bloggers, in that it is likely to help more people opt to use the software, but it’s a process any blogger goes through only once.
• Lots of new templates to choose from — Again, nice, but it’s not much help to me, as I’ve already designed my sites and am satisfied with those design. It’s not really an operational feature improvement to the software, though design is a key feature for a successful blog, so I’m sure this well be valued by many users.
• A general face-lift to the back-end editing interface — It is much prettier, but I don’t know that the programming efforts spent in that regard makes the process of blogging any easier or more efficient.
• A built-in comments feature — This is a highly valued improvement, but actually it was such a glaring omission from the old system, it is hard to give them points for adding it in at last, as it’s more a question of them finally meeting a standard of a requirement than it being any great improvement. Also, since many Blogger users have turned to third-party providers of comments (I had been using Haloscan), it would have been nice if Blogger had now provided a means to import one’s existing archive of comments, but as far as I can tell, they haven’t.
• The ability to archive individual post pages — Again, I hate to sound like an ingrate, but this was another serious deficiency of Blogger till now, so it’s hard to see this as a great value-add but more like coming up to par for a blog publishing tool. When I switched from using Blogger to Movable Type on my personal blog a few months ago, I saw my traffic raise fivefold to date. I haven’t been doing much differently in terms of my own blogging, so I attribute that dramatic increase in traffic almost entirely to Google being able to index my archives much more effectively, which is ironic, as Google owns Blogger. I suspect this change will bring similar improvements in Google traffic for existing Blogger users.
• The ability to create a user profile — Fine, but it’s not exactly a critical improvement, IMHO.
• The ability to post via email — In keeping with the mobile blogging (aka “moblog”) phenomenon, I suppose some people will value this, but it isn’t a critical feature for my concerns.

I don’t mean to sound too harsh (I’m tired and under deadline pressure, so hence a bit cranky), but I really don’t think this feature set was worth more than a year’s anticipation. Nice-to stuff, some catch-up stuff, but nothing break-through or otherwise tremendously exciting.

I’ve been keeping notes for a while about a long blog post I plan at some point about all the features I’d like to see in blog platforms, but here’s an abbreviated list of some features I think blog softwares need to supply:

• Photoblogging tools — Obviously, digital cameras and blogs are a natural match. Many bloggers like to take pictures and upload them to their blogs. In this capacity, I’ve played around with photo gallery tools including snapGallery and Express Thumbnail Creator (ETC), both of which leave something to be desired (snapGallery is simple but fairly limited and inflexible in its features, which ETC allows for a lot more customization but it’s more cumbersome to use and somewhat buggy in my experience). With the launch of TypePad (which is what I use to publish this blog), Six Apart introduced a Photo Albums feature, which is my favorite of all photo gallery tools that I’ve encountered. I think a feature like this should be standard issue for all blog publishing tools. I’m really hoping to see it in a future release of Movable Type, though I gather something like it is not yet a part of the 3.0 release of MT.
• Search — When it comes down to it, blogs are little more than crude databases. Search is a fundamental feature for any database, and it should be a basic feature of every blog publishing tool. Movable Type has a search feature, though it’s not very good (e.g., if you search several words that you know are in a particular blog post but don’t necessarily appear consecutively, it’s likely not to find the page in question). pMachine also appears to have built-in search, though I’m not personally familiar with that system (or most other blog publishing systems, for that matter). Curiously, TypePad, also made by Six Apart, which makes Movable Type, does not have search. And, considering that Blogger is owned by Google, it’s a rather striking that they do not yet include a search feature, though I gather they are “working on it.”
• Blogroll feature — Again, a blogroll — that is, a list of links in the margin of a blog pointing to the blogger’s favorite sites — is a fundamental feature of most blogs. TypePad also has a nice feature built into the system to automate this, called TypeList. Creating a blogroll in Blogger requires either kludging it by hand in the raw HTML template files, which is how I’ve done it, or using a third-party plug-in such as Blogrolling. The latter leaves a few things to be desired, to my mind, including that you’re dependant on multiple tools to compile your blog pages, including content served dynamically from another domain, which just invites problems, and also since the links are served up dynamically and are not hard-code into the archived pages (at least last time I checked), it means that Google doesn’t see those links when it indexes a blog, so that they other blogs one links to do not get the benefit to their PageRank. (I could be wrong on that, but I’m pretty sure. Clarification from those who know better are welcome.)
• Categories — Again, this is such a basic feature for blogs, it’s another rather glaring omission that Blogger’s major upgrade still lacks it.
• Email newsletter — This is a feature that, to my dismay, no blog publishing platform that I’m aware of offers. I believe Movable Type may allow you to automatically send new posts via email to subscribers on a post-by-post basis, but what I think would be much more useful would be to let the blogger schedule newsletters at frequencies of daily, weekly or monthly and have the software simply package together all posts in that period as a newsletter that the blogger could then send out to subscribers. Ideally, the blogger could control variables, such as the design template of the newsletter, and before sending it, he could proofread it, delete posts not worth including the newsletter, uniformly set the length of posts to choices such as “headlines only,” “short” or “full posts,” add an optional introduction to the newsletter and otherwise customize it before pressing “send” manually, or, alternatively fully automating the dissemination, as the blogger prefers. It strikes me as strange that all blog publishers are gaga for RSS and have built it into their platforms, spurring many a nerd to predict RSS will be the future of newsletter publishing, yet the present of newsletter publishing — email — has been do completely ignored by blog software makers so far, despite the fact that the client readers for email are universal among Internet users, much unlike RSS readers.

In conversing about all of this tonight with my friend and house guest Olivier Travers, he points out a significant flaw in my reasoning in all of the above: Blogger.com is not a real competitor to the would-be commercial blog publishing platforms like Movable Type. It is, as he said, “the new Geocities for Google.” In shutting down the Pro version of Blogger months ago, Google clearly signalled that it wasn’t interested in producing a competitive high-end tool for serious blog publishers but rather something free for the masses to help create more inventory for Google advertising. Along with Gmail, Blogger is just another free service Google can offer its users in its inevitable morphing into an online media portal service.

As a freebie service, Blogger will set the standard for the basic features of a blog publishing tool that the fee-based services will have to out-perform, but it probably doesn’t make sense for Blogger to try to stay competitive with all the features in those more robust platforms if its revenue model remains indirectly tied to the users of the tool. Evan Williams, Pyra’s founder, may not like that analysis, but I suspect Olivier is right.

(Meanwhile, I should note, TypePad and Moveable Type sorely need a friggin’ spell checker, as well as automatic post saving, among other features that Blogger already has…)

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One of the things about the whole blog trend that I find so exciting for business is effectiveness and power of these simple publishing tools to accomplish a great degree of what “content management systems” such as Interwoven and Vignette have required tens of thousands of dollars and months of training to match. Of course, give us an inch and we’ll take a mile, and with that in mind, I am taking notes on a long list of features I’d like to see introduced to the next generation of blog tools to make them that much more effective (risking contradicting, perhaps, the beauty of their simplicity today, but I’m willing to take that risk).

Meanwhile, the movement towards powerfully simple and cheap tools continues apace. The folks from 37Signals have now released Basecamp, a web-based project management tool with “blog simplicity” that includes features such as scheduling, to-do lists, file sharing, RSS, iCal, and Mozilla Calendar integration, among other features. Priced at $19/month.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

37Signals, a fantastic web-dev company, has produced a new project-management app called Basecamp that looks like a winner. Not only is it extremely pretty and easy-to-follow — I’d expect no less from the usability wonks at 37Signals — but it’s also open: information flows out of the app as RSS and can be bulk-exported in XML, so none of your precious project-management material becomes a lever to lock you into paying the (surprisingly reasonable) monthly rates.

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Slightly geeky for what you’ve seen of this blog so far, but I’m a wannabe nerd, and this seems really cool to me. Paul Frankenstein innovates a simple way Movable Type users can assign different CSS styles to different posts using categories.

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Updating my earlier comment about the beta release of Movable Type 3.0, Six Apart’s president Mena Trott shares some details here about the philosophy of the 3.0 version of the software. Basically, it is more of an overhaul of the underlying platform, in terms of extensibility and support for outside plug-ins than it is a big update of new features. Sounds a bit anti-climatic, but probabaly better for us all in the long-run. She suggests that incremental 3.x versions will see new features added. In the meantime, you can probably expect to see more features popping up in the independent developer community.

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I was surprised, last night to log into TypePad and see a new logo. And that wasn’t all — some new features (click link in the headline of this post for details):

• File management – Nice. Let’s you navigate all the stuff you’ve uploaded accidentally and now want to delete. Valuable, seeing as you don’t have FTP access to your account.
• New photo upload process – This I’m less thrilled about. I had my routine down, and the new default settings cause more work for me. I use a CSS class to format my photos so the text flows around them, but perhaps the masses aren’t so sophisticated. More clicks for me, but probably better for the average Joe. I wish, however, you could configure the defaults (or maybe you can, but I don’t yet see how).
• Moblogging support – Cool, I guess, though I don’t yet do it.

Anyway, it’s nice to see it’s a living application and that Six Apart hasn’t taken it’s eye off of TypePad in the midst of rolling out the new version of Movable Type (which I’m only too eager to beta test).

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The popular blog publishing platform Movable Type, from Six Apart, is starting to accept beta-user accounts for its long-awaited version 3.0 upgrade. Much excitement in the blogosphere for this announcement.

(Updated info on the 3.0 release here.)

Business Blog Consulting uses TypePad, which is also by Six Apart.

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