Mercurial

Six Apart doesn't know what a blog is.

I am torn by the decision from Six Apart to dissolve their product. People are saying that MT stand for "Money Talks", and are certainly hurt by the license structure. But the problem is not on the money. I will gladly pay for the product, which I know is good at what it does, and would certainly become even more interesting with more options and major fixes. But I have issues with it.

Six Apart is misunderstanding the blog community, moving from a product made for a collaborative space toward one in which only one voice speaks.

Consider blogs with multiple authors, some of them lurkers. The blog exists there as a collaborative space, an agora in which everybody haves a voice and an opinion. The hierarchy is flat, and the participation voluntary.
That is the community blog.

Now consider the centralized blog, with few writers that spew content and knowledge, allowing (when allowed) comments and trackbacks from their audience. In this case, we have a vertical system, centralized, regulated, and extremely limited in the way in which the participants can express their opinion: comments are moderated and / or controlled through a central database.

And this idea resonates through the license structure and the management system. There are few authors, and the discussion is limited to a few approved places.

This is very good and nice, suiting a big corporation where authors are few and scarce, because they only allow authorized spokespersons to become the voice of the company. In this respect, I would think that the limited installation would have a pretty complex vertical hierarchical chain, from the VP of External Relations down to the poor sod that actually has to maintain the blog. It is not a collaborative enterprise, doesn't want any freedom among authors, and actually benefits from the limitations.

On the other hand, we all bloggers have found that the Blogging Software That Shouldn't Be Named was the perfect tool for creating active groups around ideas, a collection of places that could escalate rapidly into a giant repository, and at the same time remained manageable and intuitive. It was fast and easy to deploy a site, and easy to add authors, opinions, voices. All that is lost.

For what I am doing at work, a place to gather people around projects and concepts. I need far more than twenty authors, because what is useful for a group is not going to be so for other group. What I envision requires many blogs distributed across the company. Naturally, I thought of MT and SixApart, because that meant that they would get a huge contract, I get to travel :), and the company gets a space it badly needs for its projects. Not anymore - the space idea has simply crumbled, being replace by a Corporate PR flack publishing site.

I love the old MT, specially the plugins and community support. I knew I could go anywhere and get info on how to set up a server, fix entries, modify CSS and the like. Now I am seeing all this emphasis in Developers edition, fixes, upgrades and cost strategies.

Not good for a product that has become a commodity.