One little known fact from the early days of blogging is that WordPress is actually a fork of a previous CMS, b2/cafelog, and we know what happened next. In 2010, there’s a new fork in town: Open Melody, a MovableType derivative. Can history repeat itself?

According to their about page, Melody “is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.”

The project has as it goals to
- Make personal publishing easier and more enjoyable.
- Create the most progressive and innovative personal publishing application available.
- Inspire a thriving community of users, developers and contributors.

Doing it right from day one (vs WordPress) the contributions to Melody’s code base is held in trust by The Open Melody Software Group, a non-profit created expressly for this purpose.

There’s not a lot about the backing for Open Melody except for the board of directors, and one name stands out among the five names: Anil Dash, longtime SixApart employee and MovableType guru extraordinaire. We’ll investigate more about the group backing the effort in coming weeks.

Forks aren’t completely new in the world of CMS’s…indeed, they’re fairly common, and in the broader CMS field many never really get that far.

But Open Melody might just be different.

The market desperately needs a strong competitor to the dominant WordPress, and although SixApart previously open sourced the MovableType code base, the effort was still stuck within the walls of a for profit company, one that really couldn’t dedicate a lot of time or effort to the development of the code, particularly when their primary focus was elsewhere. Of note here is that Automattic can dedicate more time to the WordPress codebase because it still delivers the backbone of WordPress.com, where as SixApart’s TypePad had long since diverged from the MovableType code it was founded on.

One thing that may hold Melody back is the Perl code base; I don’t argue that Perl is a better or worse language for a CMS, however the superiority of WordPress in part comes down to ease of use as PHP is (according to many) a far easier language to build around, particularly when it comes to templating and plugins.

Melody already boasts that there are 163,444 lines of differences between Melody 0.9.15 and it’s corresponding MT version 4.34, and they are looking at radical changes in the plugin structure from MT; both positive starts, although ultimately the proof will be in the product delivered as to whether these changes constitute a more desirable, easier to use platform.

We look forward to watching, and following how Open Melody progresses and wish the team the best of luck. There’s no word yet on when the first official release will be available, but things do seem to be progressing. If you’re interested in contributing to the project, get details on the Melody site here.

(via Blog Herald)

MovableType Forked to Open Melody: Can History Repeat Itself? is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of the blogging worlds best known brands is no longer with news today that SixApart, the company behind MovableType and TypePad, has been acquired by VideoEgg.

Founded in September 2001 by husband and wife team Ben and Mena Trott, SixApart drove the first great growth wave in blogging through its blog content management platform MovableType.

After taking an initial round of funding in 2003, SixApart launched TypePad, a hosted blogging service based on the MovableType code that for many years became the most popular paid/ professional hosted blog service in the market, attracting pro bloggers and media companies alike.

The company continued to expand, acquiring LiveJournal in 2005, then later launching Vox, a social media oriented hosted blogging solution that was meant to compete with the rise of services such as Tumblr and WordPress.com.

A critical mistake in the early history of the company was to force paid licensing on users of MovableType. It was a move I was highly critical of at the time, and it alone created the rise of WordPress, then a rarely used CMS with little interest in the blogging community, and subsequently drove the rise of Automattic. The effect of that move can’t be underestimated in the long term: although SixApart went on to be successful in other areas, its decision to cut off its community in an attempt to raise money was a mistake. A decision in later years to open source MovableType, while welcomed by many, was sadly for the company a case of too little, too late with WordPress having by that time become the defacto standard in self hosted blogging, and most importantly, the platform with the strongest (free) community development.

SixApart did attempt to branch out into new markets, including blog advertising, with mixed results. The rise of social media sites including Facebook saw a switch in the rapid growth in blogging to one of a mature market, and its products suffered at the hands of trendier, and usually free or freemium competitors.

Although the company isn’t going badly today, it’s once greatness has been sadly dwarfed by others.

Under the acquisition, the combined SixApart/ VideoEgg will be known as SAY Media with VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez at the helm. Statements from both companies say that they intend to retain MovableType and TypePad, however speculation is rife that at least one service may be sold off.

Regards to the team at SixApart, including the brilliant Anil Dash, Ben and Mena Trott, and the rest of the team. I may not have always been your greatest fan, but there is little doubt that without your contributions to blogging, this great space may not have risen to what it is today without you.

End Of An Era As SixApart Is Acquired By VideoEgg is a post from: The Inquisitr

Blogging platform and service provider SixApart have announced an 8% cut in its workforce, along with a management pay cut.

The cut amount to 16 employees from a workforce of around 200 people, 90 of whom were employed in the last 12 months. The job cuts are accompanied by a company wide restructure, including the amalgamation of SixApart’s marketing, community, and support groups in a new “genius group;” an increase in staff via internal transfer into SixApart services, the professional services group that caters to commercial customers; and a renewed commitment to SixApart Media, the launched in April blog advertising arm.

CEO Chris Alden said in a post to the SixApart blog that management would be taking a 15% pay cut as part of the restructure.

More details on the SixApart blog here.

(img credit)

SixApart cuts 8% of workforce, management take a pay cut is a post from: The Inquisitr

The offers from both WordPress (WP) and MovableType (MT) are positive steps forward in the evolution of the self hosted blogging platform, but availability doesn’t equate to takeup. Some social networks in the future may well use MT or WP, but the next wave of social networks will NOT be powered by WordPress and MovableType.

The reason is remarkably simple, and the evidence is already apparent. Time.

Time on two fronts. People are becoming time poor and are finding it harder to split their time between competing services. A new wave of social networks based on WP or MT will only add to the noise, and unless there is a compelling reason to join, most will simply ignore these new networks. The move is on to aggregation, not separation. Then there’s the need to maintain separate logins on each install. There are some OpenID solutions for WP and MT, but they are neither commonly installed nor is OpenID yet commonly used. There appears to be no interoperability between installs like Indenti.ca, so each install will be a walled garden of content, unique to the site, but unable to communicate with other installations.

The second time point is administration. The ability to add guest blogs or forums to blogs has been available in various forms for years, but how many installs do we see? A full blown social network is an administrative nightmare for all but large blogs with a lot of money to throw at staff to take care of that side of the business. And even then, is there a compelling business case to be had in administering these installs? Then there’s the real possibility that these social networks will be spam honey pots. Even in 2008, most still face comment spam, imagine dealing with spam across a full social network.

Of those sites who currently run social networks or even forums, how many are truly successful? Mashable is the only blog I can think of in this space who runs a remotely successful social network, and even then, it’s not exactly a hive of activity. TechCrunch runs a forum that at least while I was there was prone to spam and wasn’t heavily used, at least when considering the traffic of the site itself compared with the activity on the forum.

The Ning Solution

The true success story in the hosted social networking space is Ning. The site has 370,000 social networks as of July, but only manages 3.5 million to 4 million page views per month, or roughly 10 visitors per social network. That traffic aside, the selling case between a local MT or WP install vs Ning is strong. On Ning, your login works across every social network on the site, it is fully hosted so you don’t have to worry as much about spam and abuse, it’s tested, and for the basic service it’s completely free. There are plenty of Ning competitors out there as well, so choice isn’t lacking. You can also pay to map the Ning social network to your own domain and to show ads, so the control argument with a self install is negated some what. If your site did have a compelling case for including a social network (and few statically probably do) I don’t see why you wouldn’t sign up with Ning or a similar service.

Conclusion

I don’t want to sound to be too harsh on either WP or MT for these features being available. They are a positive progression in the evolution of blogging, and no doubt that some will seek to add social networking features to their blogs. However, given these features are in the most part already available both externally and within each site (BuddyPress isn’t new), and similar features such as forums are old school but are not widespread, there will be no rush of MT or WP powered social networks. Nor perhaps should there be.

The Next Social Networks Will Not Be Powered By Blog Platforms is a post from: The Inquisitr

Zemanta is a Slovenian blogging tool that automatically suggests contextual photos and links for any post.

Webware describes Zemanta as “a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers” and it’s a fair description. The tool is offered either as a plugin for hosted blogs (WordPress and MovableType), as a browser extension (IE and Firefox) or with hosted platforms including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal.

Image by Roebot via Flickr.

The video above walks through what it looks like on a Blogger blog, on a WordPress hosted blog I’m currently seeing a Zemanta box directly below the publish options on the right hand side. The plugin updates every 300 characters automatically, offering a gallery of context and legal pictures I can use on the this post. Below is a list of contextual articles I can place in the post at any time. Below the WordPress post box is a box labeled “links” with suggestions for links that can be inserted into the post base on words in it, for example with this post it’s showing Firefox, LiveJournal, WordPress, Zemanta and others. The tag box also gets contextual suggestions as well.

I’ve only just installed it, and have really got to give it a more serious workout, but my first thoughts: this is a really useful tool and I can see myself using it and even recommending it to others. Not having to dig around for pics (well at least less often), less stuffing around with link insertion, tag reminders, even related articles. My only two negatives: what are they getting out of this (where’s the catch) and secondly, it insists on inserting a Zemanta button at the bottom of every post every time you hit a button, so if you’re half way through you’ve then got to deal with code stuck directly after your last word. It’s easy to delete it prior to posting and ultimately it’s only a small annoyance.

Example of a contextual link below, the Zemanta button that the tool auto inserted, and the laptop picture above from their gallery suggestions.

One Word For Zemanta: Useful is a post from: The Inquisitr