Six Apart News & Events: January 2007

If you ever see a stranger in public and you’re not sure if they’re a blogger or not, keep a look out for a Moleskine notebook — it’s a pretty good sign that you’ve spotted a member of the blogosphere.

That overlap between online journals and the ubiquitous little black journals is ripe territory for, you guessed it, a blog called Moleskinerie. But as Armand Frasco has been maintaining and growing the blog on TypePad, the site’s success has made it obvious just how much Kikkerland, the U.S. distributors for moleskines, needed to participate in the conversation themselves.

So, it was a treat to see that Kikkerland has acquired Moleskinerie. Armand shared the news with his community in his own distinctive style:

Kikkerland believes that by making its support of Moleskinerie.com permanent it will encourage and keep a conversation going between the products’ users and the company on issues such as quality control, product development and design trends in general. With this acquisition, Moleskine aficionados are reassured that the thriving worldwide community it has fostered will remain a vital gathering place to share the latest news and tips about their beloved notebook. Other than previously planned events and product releases there are no changes in the management and operations. The blog will essentially remain the same, down to its trademark offbeat items and tangential posts mirroring Kikkerland’s offbeat and cool design philosophy.

Thanks to Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba for calling our attention to the story with their interview of Armand. And stay tuned for an upcoming TypePad Books feature and podcast about the pair, in honor of their new book Citizen Marketers.

(Moleskine image above is courtesy of Tim Boyd.)

Over the past year the Movable Type team and community has gone from playing with FastCGI to recommending to everyone to use it. Why? Because running Movable Type under FastCGI can yield up to a 15x performance increase. And now, with the release of Movable Type 3.34 FastCGI support fully integrated into Movable Type.

So why FastCGI? Here are just a few of the reasons why FastCGI means, a faster, more scalable, more reliable Movable Type:

• Increased Application Performance – FastCGI has shown to increase application performance by almost 15 times. The performance boost is so dramatic because the application is persisted in memory, allowing information to be cached between page requests reducing page load time and database load.
• Increased Commenting Performance – Movable Type routes incoming comments through the application in order to filter out comment spam and to store them in the database for moderation or publication. Therefore, the time it takes to process a comment is greatly enhanced for all the same reasons the application performance is increased.
• Increased Reliability – Fewer resources are needed to load a single page within the Movable Type application, reducing web server loads and database load, taxing your system less and freeing up those resources for other applications and system components.
• Increased Resiliency During Spam Attacks – When a blog is undergoing a spam attack its resources are put under tremendous load. Under this kind of attack any application has to process each comment in order to determine whether it is spam or not. Under FastCGI, comment spam can be processed and filtered much faster because the Movable Type application is resident in memory lowering database load and network overhead.

Keep reading to find resources to help you get up and running using Movable Type and FastCGI.

Continue reading 'Make Movable Type 15 times faster!'...

Wired has just launched Wired Science, a new one-hour primetime TV series on PBS. And as you'd expect, the new series has an exceptional presence online. Not only can you watch the pilot, there's a well-written TypePad-powered Wired Science Blog.

Of course, Wired has dozens of blogs that they've switched to TypePad -- you could read about the iPhone from now until it's finally available, and still have plenty of content left over. But we think this integration of TV and blogging as complementary media, right from the start of a series, is pretty exciting. (As we mentioned a few months ago, every TV show needs a blog.)

And the use of blogs for explaining and promoting science is a well-established trend: Nature identified the 50 most popular science blogs last year, and most were powered by Movable Type.

We'll be tuning in to PBS to check out the new show, but we wanted to take a minute congratulate the Wired team on their newest endeavor. (Thanks to Chris Anderson for the link.)

If you can get to Mountain View, CA tonight, you should swing by Looking Ahead at Web 2007, an event being held by the Jewish High Tech Community. At 6:30 tonight at Fenwick & West's offices, I'll be joined by Chad Dickerson, Evelyn Rodriguez and Jason Hoffman as we talk about our predictions for web technologies this year.

Time made a big splash (and caused a few rolled eyeballs) when they named “You”, the citizens of Web 2.0, as the Person of the Year for 2006 a few weeks ago. But amidst all the congratulations and second-guessing in the blogosphere, one critical point was overlooked:

They should have said “us”.

Because the distinction between Time and the rest of us who blog is imaginary — Time’s writers are bloggers too. And they’ve got a whole bunch of real, honest-to-goodness TypePad blogs, not just some token cobweb-covered corner of their website that’s called a blog. They’re complete with RSS feeds, comments from the community, and tons and tons of regular updates.

From Andrew Sullivan to Ana Marie Cox to countless other stalwarts of the newsmagazine’s writing staff, Time is doing the right thing on the web. And it’s all capped off with The Ag, accurately described as “a concise summary of the day’s most important news stories”. As someone who’s read Time my entire life, this is exactly what I wanted the magazine to be doing online, even back when (as old-school web nerds might recall) they were wandering around with efforts like Pathfinder.

As we pointed out when The New York Times redesigned, the influence of blogs on conventional media is unmistakeable. Now, with the relaunch of Time’s site, the influence is explicit. Managing Editor Richard Stengler describes A Changing Time:

Starting on Jan. 8, you will see a different TIME.com We’ve given the site a long-overdue face-lift, and you will find a sharp, dynamic, constantly updated news site within a new but familiar red border. You’ll see more space to show off our world-class photography, our superb writers and columnists, and now you can start your day by checking our news blog, The Ag, which smartly aggregates and summarizes the most important stories from daily newspapers and blogs around the world. This issue contains some new sections and departments that reflect our determination to bring you a regular roster of voices and experts on the most vital ideas and subjects under the sun. We are inaugurating a regular history section, which will put today’s news in the context of relevant historical events.

This is the ideal of traditional media companies embracing blogs: Honoring the human voice, personality, and interactivity that typify the new medium, while offering valuable perspectives like historical context and resource-intensive research based on a long-standing tradition of journalism.

So, Time, the next time you want to recognize the world of bloggers and people creating personal media, don’t be afraid to include yourselves in the mix. It’s not “You”, it’s us.

Okay, show of hands — how many of you have had the best moments of your life happen in front of a computer monitor? (Those of you with your hands up — that’s sad. Please stop reading now.)

For the rest of us, real life, the kind of things we want to remember, happen when we’re out and about, spending time with our friends and family or out in our neighborhood. And hey: Friends, Family, Neighborhood — that’s exactly what Vox is about.

As a lot of people have noted, Vox isn’t just blogging, it’s blogging enhanced by the power of a smart social network. But if your social network doesn’t work when you’re not sitting in front of your computer, your social network doesn’t work.

That’s a pretty big problem for us — we want everybody to be able to connect and share and blog with the people they care about. So we have been working with our friends at Nokia for a few years to improve the experience. And today, we are extremely excited to announce a huge step forward for Vox, for Nokia, for mobile blogging, and for you actually being able to share and record your life while on the go.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Nokia announced a bunch of sexy new thin phones. But while the press releases and gadget blogs will cover the tech specs of megapixels and memory cards, we think the biggest milestone is that the new Nseries phones will let you connect directly to your personal blog on Vox. Vox is now Nokia’s global partner for blogging and video sharing.

This is great news for our entire Vox community — your family members who’ve never blogged, or your friends who don’t want to sit down in front of the computer just to send you that video clip, can now just access Vox directly from their phone.

Best of all, this works for existing Nseries phones, not just the new ones announced today. So there are millions of people who can use Vox on the go today, and millions more who can join them in the future. Vox is free, and the Vox client for Nokia phones is free, so all you need to do is sign up to get started.

So now we need your help. We’re going to keep doing whatever we can to bring the potential and excitement of blogging to as many people as possible, and we’ll partner with whomever we can to make sure it’s simple and accessible. And we’ll ask you to explain to your friends and family that blogging is something that can change their lives for the better, helping you stay in touch and make connections that couldn’t happen any other way. And even better, blogging can happen from wherever you are.

Want to find out more? Check out the Vox - Nokia Nseries information page, which includes a video introduction to the new features, descriptions of the newly-announced Nokia Nseries phones, and a link to download a settings file if you already have an Nseries phone.

Some more resources:

• Sign up for Vox — it’s free
• Information about Vox on Nokia Nseries phones
• The press release from Six Apart and Nokia

And stay tuned the rest of this week — as the Consumer Electronics Show rolls on, we’ll have more info from our Six Apart team in Las Vegas.

On Friday we released Movable Type 3.34 Beta 1 to the ProNet mailing list. Today we are announcing the general availability of the beta to the broader ProNet community. Movable Type 3.34 contains some important bug fixes and security patches. Users and administrators are encouraged to upgrade when it is released the week of January 15th. To learn more about the release, visit the Movable Type Beta Blog and read the release notes.

If you would like to help us in testing this release download the beta from the Beta Blog and please report any problems you find.

All of us in the technology industry in San Francisco were particularly moved by the Kim family's ordeal last month, and inspired and heartbroken by James Kim's brave last days. So we wanted to take a moment to note a beautiful act of support from the community, the Kim Family Benefit Art + Craft Auction.

Featuring the work of a wide range of artists who've contributed works, the proceeds of the eBay auctions will be donated in their entirety to support the James Kim Memorial fund. With dozens of creative items, we're sure you can find a way to support the Kim family.