Category: Blogging

While we were in the Netherlands last week, we spent an afternoon in Amsterdam. Abi and Alex went on a boat trip, and I met up with Frank Schaap of Fragment.nl fame. I know people who have started blogs since I’ve known them, but Frank is the first person I’ve met in person after getting to know him on-line first.

We ate pancakes, walked around the city for a while, and had a great chat about blogging, games, on-line life, and Dutch culture. I took a photo to mark the occasion. Believe it or not, the signs in the background were actually a complete coincidence.

I don’t get much comments spam myself right now (maybe a message a week or so), but the problem is definitely getting worse.

For Movable Type installations, there are several solutions available, such as an option to provide a “delete this comment” link with every “new comment” email, and a combined url blocker/comments hider technique. Also, some people have proposed collaborative blacklists, or collaborative authentication for comments posters.

I’m surprised that no-one seems to have suggested Bayesian filtering for comments, though. I get about 15-20 spam messages via email every day, but the SpamBayes plugin for Outlook routes almost all of them straight into a “Spam” folder. I never see them in my inbox. Maybe one or two message in a hundred make it through the filter, and I haven’t had any false positives for ages. It doesn’t involve maintaining blacklists, and it’s a lot less effort than deleting every single junk message.

In Movable Type, it you could have a “bayesfilter” property on the MTComments template tag: <MTComments bayesfilter="1">. All comments would have to pass through the filter, and only those that were not spam would make it on to the page.

You’d need some additional mechanism to “train” the system, and somewhere to put the statistical knowledge base the filter uses to tell spam from genuine comments. Finally, you’d need a way of correcting the system after the initial training, so that any spam that does make it through can be deleted with prejudice, and so that false positives can be corrected.

This would be a nice anti-spam comments system. It would involve a Movable Type plugin, and some hacking to the Movable Type application itself. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do this right now, and even if I did have time, I’ve sworn off perl. (Did you know that “perl” is an anagram of “pain”?) But I wonder if the Lazyweb could do it for me, or if the nice people at Six Apart would be so kind as to include this feature in MT Pro?

The folks at TypePad have just announced the launch date for the service: Monday 4th August at 11:59 pm (Pacific Time).

They have also announced the full list of features, and pricing plans. You can get their “Basic” service for $4.95 a month, or $49.50 if you pay a year in advance. The “Plus” service, which is the first price plan that allows you to do Photo albums weighs in at $8.95 a month ($89.50 / year), and the “Pro” service, which gives you full control over all of your page templates, is $14.95 a month ($149.50 / year). All plans give a 30-day free trial, but note the absence of a “free” or “ad-supported” option. Smart.

These prices seem very good to me, especially when you see that they include 50, 100 and 200MB of disk space, and 1, 2 and 3GB of monthly bandwidth respectively. If you were just looking at web hosting providers, those prices would be competitive. When you consider that you’re getting the TypePad managed blogging service included, it’s a bit of a bargain.

I’m now wondering if my previous $145 estimate for the cost of Movable Type Pro might not be a bit on the low side. At $145, it would cost about the same as a year’s subscription to TypePad Pro. Considering that a subscription includes the cost of web space, TypePad sounds like a great deal for light and medium MT users. For these users the “Domain Mapping” feature (Plus and Pro only) will be a particularly important selling point, as it means not having to change your blog’s URL if you migrate to TypePad.

Heavy-duty blogging users may want more customizability than TypePad offers, or the ability to run custom scripts, or they may just prefer to keep tighter control of their own web space, and so they are more likely to want a slice of MT Pro.

I’d probably say that if Six Apart pitch MT Pro at anything less than $145, they will be cannibalizing sales of TypePad subscriptions. Subscriptions provide a reliable income stream, which leads to a more stable business model in a rapidly evolving market (like blogging). On the other hand, the potential user base for TypePad (people who want to blog, but don’t want the hassle) is much larger than the number of enthusiasts who have the time and knowledge to tweak an MT installation on their own servers. So even if MT Pro sales do eat into TypePad subscriptions, it won’t be by a significant percentage.

Also, given that the market for MT Pro consists mostly of individual bloggers rather than business users, there’s the question of how much higher the price can be before it becomes unattractive even to these enthusiasts. $145 is already quite a lot to pay for a piece of software. But enthusiasts can often be relied upon to lay down a lot of cash for good software. Take Photoshop, for example. A brand-new license will set you back $550, and an upgrade is $135. Yet non-corporate users continue to buy it.

My current guess is that they’ll put some kind of multi-tier pricing structure in place. Something like:

• MT Basic (version 2.x): Free.
• MT Basic (commercial use): $150
• MT Pro (upgrade, only for users who have already donated to MT, and may be reduced by the amount of prior donations): $150
• MT Pro (new license): $200 – $250
• MT Pro (commercial use): $500+

However, Six Apart have a staff of three right now. With the launch of TypePad, they’re all going to be phenomenally busy. I don’t quite see how they’ll to be able to stage a release of MT Pro anytime soon….

I don’t think a web site has actually made me physically moan with anticipation and pleasure before now. But for goodness’ sake just take a look at TypePad.

For those of you who don’t know about it, TypePad is the “managed” blogging service from the people who developed Movable Type, the software that makes this weblog–and thousands of others across the web–work. When TypePad goes live, you’ll be able to sign up for an account, pick a couple of basic settings, and be up and running with your own blog within a couple of minutes. No need for your own server, no complicated setup, and no worries about having to maintain your own backups and stuff.

Details have been scarce for those of us who haven’t made it into their closed beta programme, but they’re currently in the middle of “Five Days of TypePad,” a teaser campaign for some of their drop-dead, eye-popping, killer app features:

• Template Builder
• Moblogging
• Photo Albums

Droooool. Much though I love tinkering with Movable Type on my own domain, unless Movable Type Pro is going to have all of these feaures, too, I’m going to be seriously tempted to move to TypePad myself.