I was surprised but also pleased to read that SixApart has announced that they will open-source their trademark blog platform Movable Type. When we first started doing blog hosting in 2002, Movable Type was hands down the most popular blog software. Although it was not released under an open source license, the software was free for personal use. The company later pulled in the reins and started charging for updated versions of its software. This alienated a lot of MT’s user base, and fueled the growth of open source Wordpress.

New features in Movable Type 4.0:

• Open source license, commercial support available
• WYSIWYG editor allows for pictures, videos, etc
• New dashboard - but it sounds like the Wordpress dashboard

One big advantage MT has over Wordpress is that you can run multiple independent blogs from one centralized MT installation, allowing for one single back-end system.

links

• New features in MT 4.0
• Info on the MT Open Source effort

In other news, Google is now offering Radio Ads to its adwords advertisers.

New version 2.2 of popular open-source blog software Wordpress was just announced. Wordpress is the blog app of choice here. Wordpress is freely available, open source, and written in php with a mysql database. Wordpress.com also offers a hosted blog application, in the spirit of the Blogger.com model.

I think the coolest feature in the new version is a Blogger.com import wizard, allowing for a quick transition to Wordpress from Blogger. Blogger is a good service, but doesn’t let webmasters tweak things under the hood like we can, running Wordpress on our own servers.

The short list of what’s new:

Blogger.com importer
Protection from plugins and template edits that will break the site - I’d like to see how well this works!
speed improvements
goodies for developers - better documentation
improvements in API will allow other web tools and applications to update your Wordpress blog for you