Blogging News & Articles

Today’s enterprises are inundated with strategic questions as they pertain to Web 2.0 tools. If some of the options make sense some of the time for some of the enterprises, do some of the tools make sense ALL of the time for some of the enterprises?

From time to time I revisit the arsenal of old commentaries, tips and articles that I’ve come across from the random Google search about “mentors” or “morale at work” and other workday malaise-related keywords that I use.

I keep these things in case I ever have the opportunity to present my new “big idea” to The Powers That Be and need to throw together a memo of sources supporting my nutty new approach to keeping employees happy.

It’s not that I’m not happy, mind you. Sometimes I’m just stifled. And like many of you, dear readers, I am a department of one, Jane-of-all-trades, over-tasked and overwhelmed with responsibilities. And when I think of all the possibilities that might once again invigorate my ability to create, innovate and inspire, the one outcome that seems most reasonable is the presence of a mentor. Someone who can shower me with wisdom and advice; ensure me that I am on the right track or help me steer clear of disaster.

Yet, where does one find such a sage adviser? In my quest to answer my own question, I provide you with some of what I’ve uncovered.

Our coverage of the Executing Social Media Conference continues as Dan Greenfield presents the Five Immutable Laws of Corporate Blogging and Alicia Dorset shares a corporate blogging case study for one of the largest companies in the world.

Atlanta welcomes the leading minds in marketing and public relations for day one of the Executing Social Media Conference, which we’ll be covering live.

Executing Social Media is a two day event with the ambitious goal of bringing together experts on the use of social media: blogging, RSS, podcasting, online video, virtual communities, and consumer generated content.

Day 1 started off with an session on how communications between company and customer/consumer have changed in recent years. Of primary interest were three major guidelines for starting a corporate blog.

The buzz surrounding the Enterprise 2.0 space grows louder today with HiveLive’s announcement of its LiveConnect Community Platform.

This week saw an event that somewhat mystified a number of us. When WordPress was awarded Packt Press’ Best [Open Source] Social Networking Web CMS this past Monday there were a fair few of you scratching your heads.

WordPress, a social networking platform? Hmm.

Actually, most folks think of WordPress as a blogging platform. And then, when a lot of us hear the word WordPress, we also think of Movable Type and ExpressionEngine. These too are most often considered blogging platforms, or in terms of the CMSWire topic taxonomy, micro cms platforms.

Now with the three projects being arch competitors, we do enjoy stirring up a bit of the respective camps’ enthusiasm by presenting things like head-to-head comparisons (here, here, and here). But that’s not what we doing today.

The blogosphere is, as usual, evolving. Web publishing is transforming. And the nature of publishers’ interaction with the public has dramatically shifted. With a troubling lack of grace we’ve attempted to capture the conceptual elements of these changes in that Web 2.0 basket.

The Web 2.0 thing has had a big impact on the CMS world. More traditional Enterprise Web CMS projects have been pulled down into the micro CMS world, rapidly. And all those suddenly vital functions previously only found in blogging platforms have pulled the micro CMS crowd into the enterprise. This has all not been what I’d call a match made in heaven, but it has been fun and a little dramatic to observe.

During a recent visit to the Six Apart offices in San Francisco, we had a chance to pick the brains of one of the fine gentlemen sitting in the eye of this storm. Byrne Reese is the lead product manager for Movable Type. He’s the person primarily responsible for the release of Movable Type 4, and has been intimately involved in what’s now called the Movable Type Community Solution. Byrne is presently heads-down on the open source version of Movable Type (MTOS). As perhaps only a consequence of timing, MTOS’ unhatched state prevented it from being considered in Packt’s recent contest.

Nevertheless, if WordPress is to be labeled a leading Social Networking platform, then it bears mentioning that products like MT are angling quite aggressively in that same direction. I’ll stop typing there and let Byrne take the next 3 minutes of your time explaining how and why the blogosphere is transforming from streams of thought to clusters of participants.

We’ve done a lot of talking about the democratic benefits of the ‘net. Because it’s so easy to become a web publisher, everybody’s got a soapbox, right?

But what can web two-dot-oh do for opinionated people who don’t blog and have no intention to start?

coComment may answer that question.

So what if installing third party software on your iPhone may void your warranty. A blogger’s got to do what a blogger’s got to do, and what could be more enticing than the ability to blog from one’s iPhone?

Once upon a time, in a TCP packet not far from here there was no blogosphere. A web-based journal was not known as a blog, or for that matter known much at all, not to mentioned considered a sane spend of one’s precious time.

Back then internauts given to verbosity had to either hack their own blogging platform together or nag a nerd to do it for them. My, how times have changed. And now we have so many choices.

Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind Design (and a serious MT fan) has just put out a punch list detailing why, in his plastic mind, Movable Type 4.0 trumps WordPress 2.3 when it comes to features, the pleasure of ownership and the pains of maintenance.

Komet Digital has built a Dreamweaver extension for Movable Type template tags. Download it here.

The extension brings code coloring and code hints to MT 3.x template tags, as well as their tag attributes and global filters. Code hints for the custom tags of more common plugins are also included.

Apparently code hints only work with < MTTagName > style tags, however. Gee, that’s good to know.

The results of a new study about blogging behavior were released last week.

According to the study, a surprisingly small eight percent of us have our own blog, but “8 out of 10 Americans know what a blog is and almost half have visited blogs.”

Nonetheless, progress is progress.

Some rivalries run deep: Army vs. Navy, Mac vs. PC, and dogs vs. frisbees. With the release of Moveable Type 4 and the near-simultaneous release of ExpressionEngine v1.6, it's time to to examine this perhaps less well-known rivalry.

Socialtext has just released a plugin that supports Movable Type 4. It enables users to post on both MT4 and the Socialtext wiki simultaneously — tags included.

The plugin only requires server name, workspace name and username and password to unite with your MT4 account. To start your blog-and-wiki dual post extravaganza, download the Socialtext plugin here.

Boing Boing, one of the more influential blogs out there, has just launched on Movable Type 4.

And boy does it look cool. The site is not only faster and easier on the eyes; it also boasts a new design by Studio Sans Nom and a rekindled comments feature.

There’s also a new personal technology blog which you probably want to check out if you want to be all opinionated about the latest and greatest in front of all your friends — even if you cannot have said latest and greatest.

Way to hit the ground running. Cheers to Boing Boing and Six Apart (Movable Type’s parent company)!