MT 3.0

Movable Type, the software that runs this and thousands of other blogs, is no longer going to be free. (See a sample of the discussion here and here, via Scripting News.) See also the posts linked via trackback to the announcement of these changes. Many people are unhappy, for various reasons. I guess I'm one of them.

Six Apart, the company behind MT, claims its new licensing scheme will satisfy 85% of its users. I guess those of us in the other 15% should look elsewhere for a personal publishing platform. That 15% includes people who maintain or "host" more than 10 blogs on their MT installation, or who have more than 9 authors contributing to those blogs. I currently have at least 10 different weblogs running on my installation of MT, about half of which are dormant or experimental and rarely updated. Those blogs have close to a dozen authors, again, most of whom don't post frequently, if ever. To maintain this level of use, I would need to pay $150 at the introductory rate, or $190 at the regular rate. But since most of those blogs/authors were temporary or experiments, if I cut back to just what I really use, I'd still need to pay $70 at the intro rate, or $100 at the regular rate. That's not so bad, but then, what if I want to add a blog or author down the road some time? More money, more hassle.

Or, what if I wanted to start a co-op for law bloggers? Can't do it with MT anymore, I guess. It was probably a silly idea anyway.

As for Six Apart's other options, TypePad Pro offers unlimited blogs and authors, it looks like, but that will cost you $15 per month! That's $180/year. That seems like an awful lot of money to be spending for the life of your blog, doesn't it? Maybe not. Maybe this is just the price we'll have to pay. (Or, for most people, only $60/year for just one blog/author, or $120/year for three blogs and one author.) I don't really think an idea like BlawgCoop could really work even w/TypePad Pro because, although it allows unlimited blogs, the "authors by invitation" thing makes me think different authors can't have their own blog, but can merely post to yours. That's not the idea.

So you see, my objections to charging for MT are not on principle, or because I think it should be free. I've donated to MT and would be happy to pay for the software—even for updates every year or three. I understand developers can't create software for free; they need to eat and have lives, as well. Great. However, the success of MT created a large group of people—dare I say a "generation" of bloggers—with the expectation that, even if the tool would not always be free, it would always allow them to create as many blogs as they wanted with as many authors as they wanted. That was one of the cool features of MT, and it's a feature that's critical because it allows the imagination to run free—knowing I could add a new blog/author at any time with almost zero hassle and no cost has allowed me to experiment in ways that just wouldn't be possible otherwise. It allowed me to at least consider an idea like BlawgCoop, and even if it was a bad idea, a better one might have followed close behind. MT in its current incarnation (pre-3.0) offers more flexibility and choice than 3.0 will, and that's one of the big things I'd be happy to pay for.

If I switch tools, that flexibility, the openness, the opportunity to dream about new ways to use blogs and to experiment with those ideas or even implement them—that will be why. It's not because I don't want to pay, but because I don't want the blogging software I use to stand in the way of what I want to use it for.

A quick survey of other options for people who want more flexibility:
TextPattern
WordPress
iBlog
GeekLog
pMachine

Others?

UPDATE: Jason Kottke is in about the same boat I'm in. He's got a great solution:

y not make the personal edition a flat fee of ~$60 for unlimited users and weblogs (in addition to the free version with 1 author/3 weblogs)? Here's the reasoning. Tiered personal use (per above) doesn't make much sense. Trust that people using the personal edition will use it in a personal way. The guy offering 50 of his friends MT weblogs on subdomains isn't going to pay for MT, not what you want him to pay anyway. If people start using it in that way, suggest an upgrade to the non-personal edition might be appropriate. If they refuse, they weren't going to pay you anyway.

It wouldn't cover an idea like BlawgCoop, but it would still give users room to move. See more today on Scripting News.

Posted 07:47 AM | Comments (6) | meta-blogging

BlawgCoop.com

Ed note: This entry was written a few weeks ago but never posted b/c of other pressing events (a.k.a. final exams). It discusses an project that will either be abandoned or postponed because of recent changes to Movable Type. Please see the next post.

A week or two ago Buffalo Wings & Vodka migrated from Blogspot to Typepad, which was a welcome change for his readers for several reasons: now we no longer have to see ads on his page, we can subscribe to an RSS feed, the comments work smoothly and are built in to the content management system, and generally the page will probably load faster and more reliably. Plus, the site just looks a lot better, so it's more of a pleasure to read. This seems true across the board for TypePad sites—they look nice.

TypePad also appears to offer additional advantages, I think, although I'm not sure what they are. But the main thing is the reliability. Blogspot blogs are just interminably slow most of the time, and that's if they will even load at all. Was it just me, or have many Blogspot blogs been unreachable recently?

Movable Type shares most of TypePad's many advantages over Blogspot, with one crucial additional advantage: It's free. Ok, it's not free, because you need a host and a domain and all that. Plus you have to set it up and maintain it. But wouldn't it be great if novice bloggers (especially law students, law professors, and practitioners) could get all the advantages of a MT blog without the hassles?

As a reader of blogs, I think it would be really great. So here's the idea: Let's start a "Blawg" Co-Op—a server to host law student and other law-related blogs running on Movable Type.

First, we chip in to register a domain to host the blawgs. Blawgs.com is taken, as is blawg.org, so let's call it "blawgcoop.com" ("blawg co-op," see?). We'll install MT, then open it up to any law student, professor or practitioner (for starters) who would like to run an MT blawg there. Users will get their own password and an account and we'll assist where we can w/setup and basic design issues. Some or all users could have subdomains (myblog.blawgcoop.com), or they could just get their own directory w/in the main domain (blawgcoop.com/myblog). The only thing we'll ask in return is that users contribute equally to maintenance costs (hosting and annual domain registration at an annual cost of around $150/year to start). So if there were ten users, each one would pay $10/year. That's it. If we had 20 users, each one would pay $5/year. And what users would get in return would be far superior to BlogSpot (or Blog City, for that matter) in terms of quality of blogging environment and dependability, and it would also be far cheaper than TypePad.

People in my blogroll who use BlogSpot who I'd love to see on a better platform include:

Mixtape Marathon
L-cubed
Half-Cocked
So Sue Me
Musclehead
a mi parecer
Jeremy Blachman
Naked Furniture
Althouse
Tbagged
Undeniable Dilemma
Screaming Bean
Veritable Cornucopia

See, there's over a dozen candidates right there, plus all the new "blawgs" coming online all the time—if they started up at BlawgCoop, they'd automatically connected to the community of existing law bloggers. So what do you think? Is anyone interested in such a "service"? Would anyone like to set up an MT-powered blog and pay something like $10/year or less?

Of course, a new option I just learned about for people wanting to switch to a more stable and reliable system and have their own domain is bloghosts. Their plans start at $3/month, plus annual domain registration fees ($20-$30), so again it begins to add up, but you would get your own custom domain, which is certainly worth a bit more.

Possible drawbacks to the whole "blawgcoop" plan include scalability—if the "service" attracted a lot of users, costs would go up as bandwidth and disk space increased. But then, if everyone's sharing those costs, they wouldn't be too high for anyone. Theoretically the cost per user could vary depending on bandwidth/disk space, but that would only come into play if one user started using dramatically more than everyone else. Also, support would have to be limited so it didn't become a huge time drag on anyone, but perhaps support responsibilities could be shared as well among users w/varying levels of expertise. I'm sure there are other drawbacks, like security weaknesses I'm not aware of perhaps.

On the plus side, another potentially fun thing we could start with the "service" is an optional group blog to which all users would be invited to post. Welcome to the BlawgCoop. You will be assimilated. ;-)

Posted 07:46 AM | Comments (2) | law general meta-blogging