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May 18, 2004

How Do You Use The Tool?

Mena of Six Apart, trying to get more information on the MT3 announcement reaction, is asking people how they use the tool in ways that the license doesn't cover. I'll refer to this, which discusses the three blogs I've set up at work - one of which is single author and presents as a webzine, and the other two being news/events aggregators for the College of which will potentially have over a dozen authors each (especially the events item).

The capability of MT3 to make nigh-infinite authors made a lot of novel uses possible beyond the personal journal. Project blogs, collaborative fiction, family journals. The sudden change from a "donate $20 and use it to the limit" model to a model that makes heavy use of blog/author metrics will severely restrict the tool flexibility that had made MT such a popular tool.

I'm afraid I don't have an answer for the SA folks as to how to create a reasonable tiered pricing scheme that can doesn't create these arbitary limits. But it's a massive sea-change in how people approached the tool...

Posted by jim at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2004

MT3 - you just stepped in it.

Six Apart screwed the proverbial pooch earlier this week when announcing the release of the “Developer Edition” of Movable Type 3.0 and the new pricing and licensing conditions thereof.

Less than 48 hours later they were apologizing to beta testers and struggling to reposition and clarify their announcement. Many users (some rather prominent) of MT have already started the exodus to new software, what with the MT3 announcement being foolishly close to a new release of WordPress and the Google-powered Blogger relaunch.

The announcement - timing, content, and tone - shows a stunning lack of business and customer relationship acumen, especially when understood in the context of what was aparently a very rough beta period and many public statements on what MT3 would be. Scary, really.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has what is likely the most intelligent and concise commentary on the matter.

Mark Pilgrim and Brad Choate also have intellgent things to say and good point to make, even if they’re ultimately on different sides of the fence.

Me? I don’t know. I’ve already been considering some site overhaul ideas of my own, preparing for work on littlejenni.com, and starting to examine publishing systems for work implementations. This just throws more questions, rather than answers, into my plans…

Posted by jim at 10:46 PM | Comments (0)