Successful Blogs

Earlier, Anil Dash from Movable Type commented on my Movable Type Running Scared post. I was going to reply in comment, but I had too much to say for myself (SHOCK!), so thought I’d make a blog post about it.

The “losing ground” assertion is based on comments made on several blogging forums i frequent, and comments from other bloggers. LiveJournal may be the largest O/S community, but how current is that community? How many people are actively using their journals, and how many are dormant (like mine)?

My feedback is that many prolific bloggers are using Wordpress. Take a look at: Top 25 Blogs About Blogging. The top 3 listed (I haven’t got time to go down the whole list) are: Problogger, Copyblogger, and John Chow - ALL use Wordpress. These are bloggers read by bloggers, and are hugely influential. Take a look at Darren Rowse’s comments: Wordpress vs Movable Type. So, yes, SixApart may have a massive user base, but I’m guessing it’s fairly stagnant.

It may also be that Six Apart are very strong in the coporate sector, but I suspect that’s more about the corporate psychology of “buying something because it must be better than something that’s free” rather than on performance or ease-of-use improvements. There’s no doubt that Movable Type were early into the blogging software sphere, which then would create a critical mass of professional users of the software.

Remember the early days of PCs? When IBM were selling bucketloads of slow, heavy, overpriced boxes. Why? Because of the phrase much-quoted at that time: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. Corporate pressure was brought to bear on purchasing decisions. It was the safe option, all round. No one wanted to risk their job to buy one of those new-fangled Toshibas or Compaqs.

And why suddenly give it away for free? Is it, as I read somewhere, “to get back in touch with our core Open Source user base?” This makes very little commercial sense, unless you need to start grabbing back market share from Wordpress upstarts. No commercial organisation gives anything away if they think they can charge for it. Or is the O/S version going to be cut-down or ‘knobbled’, encouraging users to pay for a commercial upgrade?

I stand by my statements. Good luck to Six Apart, and I will certainly look at the O/S version of MT when it becomes available. However, I think they’ve got a lot of work to do to move people away from a platform that they’ve learned to trust, and for which there are so many third-party additions.