New Blogger, Movable Type

Thu May 13 2004

I'm more of a Movable Type and LiveJournal kind of blogger these days (the former for finely-crafted publishing, the latter for communicating with friends), but I am quite impressed with the new look and features that were added to Blogger last weekend. In addition to all the usual Blogger goodness, you get individual post pages (finally catching up with MT and TypePad) and some great new templates by some great old designers.

Meanwhile, Six Apart has announced the pricing for Movable Type 3.0 (which is out today in a post-beta, pre-release Developer Edition). Yes, I said pricing: Movable Type is no longer a free, open hunk of Perl code. There is still a free version (called "Movable Type Free", natch), but it allows only one author and up to three blogs. Need any more authors, or any more blogs? Personal licenses start at $99.95.1

However, this assumes that one's blog is absolutely, positively personal -- if you are using Movable Type in "a business, organization, or institution, or in any income producing activity" you are therefore a commercial user and must pay for a Commercial License, starting at $299.95, for which you don't get any more blogs than a personal site does (5), but an extra two users (for a total of 5).

Is there education pricing? Yes, but you have to contact Six Apart for a quote.

Paid licenses include tech support (the free version is not supported at all), a Recently Updated key (so MT will tell Six Apart when you update and list your blog on the Movable Type home page) and guaranteed access to future upgrades. This assumes that a lot of people don't just run back to Blogger upon seeing those prices.

Bloggie Award-winning site Tenth-Muse is not at all happy with the announcement. This guy is pissed off too. And assuming that Six Apart is down with the whole 'don't be evil' meme, the trackbacks to Mena Trott's blog post announcing/discussing the new pricing are pretty much venomous.

Why this is so fucking strange: MT doesn't do anything that can't be done just as easily with a competing, free package like pMachine or Textpattern, or very quickly and easily written by anyone with PHP-MySQL programming skills. What MT provides is a robust feature set with an easy-to-use web-based interface for administering one's blogs. It's not that it does anything earth-shattering; heretofore people have used it for convenience and because Ben and Mena are so damned cute.

Of course, if for $99.95 one got all the functionality of the current version 2.6x (unlimited users and blogs) for use on personal sites and they threw in a Recently Updated key and a registered copy of Ecto (the desktop client for MT and TypePad that is owned by another Joi Ito-funded company), and perhaps also that Palm client they've been alluding to so that Treo 600ers can moblog, then you have something worth the money. A total blogging solution for $100? That may still send a lot of MT users running to Textpattern or Blogger, but it would provide an incentive to stick around, as opposed to a stick shoved up our...um, yes. But to tell people that they will have to pay for the privilege of losing some features...well, that's not at all kosher.

1 There is promotional pricing on all MT 3.0 Developer Edition licenses; the Personal License starts at $69.95, and Commercial Licenses start at $199.95.