Six Apart News & Events: May 2003

Being longtime geeks ourselves, we couldn't help but love the project that longtime contributor to the Movable Type community Adam Kalsey has created: Newly Digital. In this experimental writing project, a number of great online writers recall their first experiences with computing technology and recount their stories on their individual weblogs, providing a distributed historical anthology of the "personal" part of personal computing.

Stories have already been posted by a good number of Movable Type weblogs, including Anders Jacobsen, Andre Torrez, Andy Baio, Bill Zeller, Brad Choate, Cameron Marlow, Chris Pirillo, Jeff Nichols and Steven Garrity. Best of all, these stories will undoubtedly prompt others to contribute their own stories as well, and Adam's set up TrackBack on his entry to keep a list of all the people who've contributed. So be sure to let everyone know how you first discovered computers.

This weekend's BlogTalk conference in Vienna gave rise to a lot of interesting ideas and brought many different members of the weblog realm together, but perhaps the most entertaining milestone was the first meeting of Haiko Hebig and Heiko Hebig. One's hebig.org, the other's hebig.com, but they're both powered by Movable Type.

Today's New York Times has a nice feature on photo blogs, giving a bit of background on how they're used and how communities are developing around the images that people are sharing on the web. One of the featured starting points for finding great photo weblogs is Movable Type user (and unofficial Six Apart company photographer) Rannie Turingan's Photoblog Awards.

Like an earlier Slate story from last year, which featured sites like Rion.nu, the Times piece discusses the creative and beautiful ways that people are starting to use the weblog format to present their photos with a narrative context and a sense of community.

We love the unique and innovative ways that weblogs are evolving to better accommodate photos, and we'll be discussing in the next few weeks how TypePad has been designed to make photoblogging a lot easier.

We've posted some additional details and some system screenshots over at the TypePad site. Today's announcement is really more a peek into the system, but one that is pretty significant since it provides a first look at the new interface.

We'll be sharing more information soon -- including a detailed walkthrough of the features. And, the beta is just around the corner.

This month's Wired, guest-edited by Rem Koolhaas, is an exploration of different types of space, both physical and mental. And one of the spaces they saw fit to discuss was Blog Space, as described by Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, Interface Culture, and an upcoming book which he'll be previewing on his Movable Type-powered weblog.

The fundamental idea of the piece is that weblogs represent a space mapped out by human minds, but to get the whole idea, you'll just have to take a look for yourself. Also mentioned are Cory Doctorow and Dave Sifry, who've both been incredibly innovative with their MT weblogs and the projects they've launched around them.

After a long few months of development and a couple of name changes, the Mozilla team has finally released Mozilla Firebird 0.6, a terrific, streamlined browser that keeps all of the powerful features of Mozilla but loses a lot of the sluggishness and bulk. The Mozilla team recently announced that this will be the basis for future releases of the core browser, which bodes well for the project's future.

Even better, Ben Goodger (a Movable Type user who contributes to Firebird) has put together a simple and attractive list of reasons why you should switch to Mozilla Firebird. This new browser is definitely worth a look.

We'd like to publicly welcome aboard our new Network/Systems Architect, Paul Sharpe. Paul worked previously at KnowNow, where he worked on everything from the product's security architecture to cross-platform implementations of the client and server. He brings a proven track record in designing and deploying high availability services and really rounds out our team.

(And as an added bonus, Anil doesn't get to complain about being the third Trott anymore.)

On Scripting News, Dave writes:

We could establish a profile of RSS 2.0 and implement strict compliance with that profile in the major blogging tools.

This has been followed by a discussion of the issues on Sam's weblog, with a lot of discussion over whether the core profile should be based on RSS 1.0, 2.0, or whether it's really necessary at all.

What we need is a profile of RSS specific to weblogs: "RSS for Weblogs".

Continue reading 'A Proposal: RSS for Weblogs'...

Our upcoming TypePad service got a nice writeup in the New York Times today, including a lot of basic information on the service. We're still figuring out pricing, so we'll probably end up a little bit cheaper than the prices they mention, but we're just happy that they mentioned our "powerful features and elegant design"!

Best of all, one of the main ideas behind TypePad gets explained: We wanted users to be able to take advantage of all the important parts of weblogs, like categories, comments, blogrolls, and TrackBack, without having to string together the pieces themselves. It's still not too late to sign up for information about the service, and to be the first in line for the public beta.

Diego Doval has put together an excellent comparison of the various weblog APIs out there, and has already gotten feedback from most of the major weblog tool creators. It's a nice example of the possibilities of distributed conversations around a topic, and anyone interested in shaping the way that weblog APIs grow in the future ought to contribute.