May 19, 2004

The Great Blogtercation of 2004 : Or on social networks and data mining
by Liza Sabater

UPDATE: Part 1 of 3

Six Apart, the people that created Movable Type, the blogware that runs this here site, released the much anticipated MT 3.0 with a licensing agreement radically different from the ones they've ran up until version MT 2.661 ... and all hell broke loose.

Actually, the above statement is rather misleading. Up until a few months ago, SixApart was a husband-and-wife team, Ben and Mena Trott. Today the company has 26 people and counting. They received venture capital money and with it they launched TypePad, a hosted blogging company for the server-impared. Since then, the've been playing catch with the promises of a Pro version of MovableType (which seems at this point vaporware) and now the much maligned MovableType 3.0 Developer Edition.

I spent the whole weekend perusing the trackbacks they allowed on their announcement page. It well may be a world record. And it is nothing short of spectacular to see how they have been trying to handle the outcry over said licensing.

Basically, they're charging for a product that has been emasculated with its terms of use. People mostly screamed (including yours truly) about how they were limiting the amount of blogs created and the limited of authors allowed. At one point there was a clause that limited the software to just 1 CPU. A cut-and-paste job noted some defenders, but the damage was done. The new licensing structure has robbed SixApart of trust from their core base : The power users that push the limits of the software with their creatives uses and misuses.

Ben and Mena Trott's company did not grow out of business as usual. Ben and Mena Trott's company grew because they created a social network around MovableType. They created a business model that already had it's market share with their loyal users and rabid evangelizers. Most importantly though, they created a company that has what is the #1 reason for the outsourcing of tech jobs: SixApart had a workforce of users willing to freely serve as their R&D (through beta testing, bug reports, hacking of MT, plug-ins and especially the volunteers working at the MT Support Forum), Brand Extension teams (through the community of designers creating templates and community of developers willing to create MT plug-ins and pushing the creative limits of how MT could be used) and free Advertising Marketing & Sells (through the core base of MT evangelizers, myself included).

SixApart could never have been the VC fund catch that it was without all the added value they amassed through the core community of volunteers who enthusiastically embraced their vision of what a good blogging software package could and should do. The Venture Capitalists want numbers. They want metrics. They could care less if the creator of a template was your sister's boyfriend second cousin. All they care is about the bottom line. The less cost there is in the development of a product, a brand and it's market infrastructure, the happier the capitalists are.

Capitalism is based on the exploitation of labor. Capitalism is founded on limited competition. Capitalism is also based on scarcity.

MovableType may have detractors with the 3.0 version, but as blogware goes, it is a remarkably well designed piece of software. Just on its merits, it has narrowed the playing field. Due to the core of volunteers that have helped develop the product, 6A had at their disposal the best kind of labor --skilled, creative and, most importantly, free. So what did they need? Scarcity. MovableType needs to be restricted because it cannibilizes TypePad's market (and not the other way around). They needed to create a market envrionment that further differentiated one product from the other. Hence the much maligned licensing agreement.

Make it appealing to run to TypePad for unlimited blogs vs. the limited amounts with the new MT : Does this make sense to the MT power users, though? Of course not. The only reason why I use MT is because of : (1) Access to the server; (2) Plug-ins, plug-ins, plug-ins.

Why though the limits on blogs in one place and not the other? I think that 6A wants to turn TP into the next Blogger. Make it a palatable heaven for unfettered data mining that, hopefully, Yahoo! will buy in order to rival Google (which bought Blogger).

Repeat after me : Data mining data mining data mining.

Posted by Liza Sabater in Blogs, Commerce, Culture, Social Networks, Technology, Web
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2) | Technorati Cosmos

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