This was my week to make the conversion to using Movable Type for my weblog. My motivation to make the switch was not in any way a dissatisfaction with Radio Userland. I have been using Radio for a long time and it has served me well. Dave Winer deserves a great deal of credit for many innovations that have gone into Radio and which have found there way into the blogging community at large. I would also like to acknowledge that Lawrence Lee has provided really outstanding technical support. The impetus to move to Movable Type started with Joichi Ito. Joi has been a friend of mine for nearly ten years.
Sometime around 1994 I went to Tokyo to find out what was going on with the Internet in Asia. My IBM friend and colleague, Shigeru Inatomi, introduced me to several important thought leaders in Japan including Jun Murai, Professor of Faculty of Environmental Information at KEIO University and General Chair Person of WIDE Project, and Joi Ito. Joi is a serial entrepreneur and is now president and CEO of a company called Neoteny. I became a member of the Neoteny advisory board in May 2000.
During the first fiscal quarter (March through May of 2003), Neoteny made an investment in SixApart, one of the leading weblog software companies in the United States. Neoteny thinks of weblogs as a tool for " very-easy-to-use web publishing and communication". There are currently several million "webloggers" (or "bloggers") in the United States, and the phenomenon is starting to take off in Japan. Neoteny is focused on technologies that allow individuals to create their own content (publishing on the web) and distribute it via links to other weblogs. Joi’s blog is an excellent example.
SixApart Inc.was founded in 2002, and is one of the top three weblog vendors in the U.S. Their flagship product is called Movable Type. The company is very focused on development and marketing of its new hosted blogging service called TypePad. It is not only the relationship with Joi that has motivated me to make the conversion to Movable Type. The design of Movable Type is not random or a "hack" from prior ideas. They have really thought it through. they have provided an architecture that allows for plugins (such as Newsgator — which I use), is built on open standards, and works with multiple IT vendor databases. I expect to see much more integration with enterprise systems.
So, I am on the journey to convert hundreds of weblog postings to Movable Type and begin to learn the new blogging environment that it offers. Lastly, I would like to extend my sincere and heartiest thanks to Brenna Koch for her assistance in getting me through the conversion process.
