Comments by Anil Dash

Sorry for the frustrations here, Euan -- we did get your feedback and the good news is the TypePad Connect team is working feverishly on a whole bunch of upgrades for the service. I'm sure we'll get to all of your requests over time. :)

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I love you guys.

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Penelope is a very generous little person!

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I can't believe how wrong you are about Single Ladies. That video is the dirtiest thing to happen in popular culture since Elvis' pelvis. It is amazing. It is inevitable.

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Richard, thanks as always for an astute analysis. I agree wholeheartedly with the trends that Forrester is identifying, but as you might expect, I would argue strenously with the effect you're describing for Six Apart.Put simply, the downward pressure on Enterprise 2.0 platform pricing is something that we're aggressively driving at Six Apart, especially with Movable Type, and as a result, I think we'll be the biggest beneficiaries.For example, the social features on top of the Movable Type platform were previously available as a higher end solution called the Community Solution. With our last release, we folded them all into MT Pro, which starts with simple commercial pricing and only ramps up if a client wants to purchase an Enterprise license for additional management features. That's a model we've followed for years, with innovative features falling down the price curve from the high end to the standard commercial license and then eventually into free or open source offerings.At the same time, as you've outlined, we're providing deeper and deeper integration. Oracle's blogging community, for example, is powered by Movable Type because it offers integration with key platform pieces like Oracle's database layer. That's something unique among serious Enterprise 2.0 platforms and again drives adoption versus the less complete, more expense, more complicated Enterprise 2.0 suites offered by traditional enterprise vendors.And that, perhaps is the biggest thing missing from your comparison of the factors driving down adoption costs for this tech: We can do this because Six Apart is a smaller company with less overhead than the traditional tech vendors, who are optimized for suite sales that cost millions of dollars for software licenses, and millions more for integration and deployment. Our typical engagements are a fraction of that cost, even when you factor in the increasing popularity of our professional services.So we think it's fantastic news if the cost-per-seat for enterprise blogging software is dropping -- that's happening in large part because Movable Type dominates this space and lets you power an unlimited number of blogs. And it does so at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to build even a portion of this capability on, for example Sharepoint.Finally, I'd argue that, with all due respect, Automattic and WordPress are almost entirely irrelevant to the conversation about Enterprise 2.0. Popular as they may be for tech geeks or individual bloggers, no serious enterprise would consider that platform. WordPress is consistently insecure, meaning an average of a constant two to three week upgrade cycle just for maintenance, without adding any new features. Worse, the vaunted partnership that you'd mentioned as "taking on Six Apart" less than two years ago has completely collapsed. Despite Automattic's own founder and CEO assuring your readers of their interest in this market, and despite KnowNow being the sole provider of enterprise support for WordPress, KnowNow has gone completely out of business and their site doesn't even redirect to any other options. Frankly, I don't fault Automattic for focusing on other markets, as the enterprise is a tough market to break into if you're not serious about it. But I think it's pretty clear that enterprises would never choose a platform with that kind of track record.The good news is, there is still plenty of great competition in the enterprise 2.0 space, and nobody's further ahead in creating a great social publishing platform than we are at Six Apart. In a tough economy when businesses are running very tight budgets, we think that strongly favors Movable Type as the platform of choice for driving down the costs of collaboration.

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Guess what city has restaurants that are already doing this? I will give you one guess!

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Yeah, Clay's recent exhortations about the cognitive surplus were definitely an influence on me wanting to write this up. But I feel like there's such a distancing, such a sense of it being academic, when we describe it as "cognitive surplus". Like most of us in our peer group, I only watch TV by appointment, so it's not that simple example Clay has of me no longer wasting time on TV.

Instead, I think it's a lot more about *motivation*. Perhaps more akin to Clay's other conversations where he describes Perl as being an "Act of Love". Whether you call it love, or fandom, or passion -- that's the thing that drives this collaborative creation, and I just don't want people to think of it in the purely economic terms of "surplus" when it's something we actually can create in almost infinite volume, if we desire.

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It's striking to hear you say that Georgia, as your family is among the gentlest people I know. And for what it's worth, I think in the days after the attacks I was *also* ready to fight. But I think very quickly, I realized that everyone directly responsible for the attacks was already dead, and it may be as few as a dozen others who'd really made the attacks happen. I was certain we'd be able to track them down within weeks.

Foolish optimism aside, I do think the stories of kindness and generosity go without the acclaim that they deserve. We rightfully repeat the stories of heroism that day, but there were literally millions of people across New York who gave their friends (or even strangers!) a place to stay for the night, or a change of clothes for a suit shredded and dusty after the attacks, or the guy who said "keep it" when he loaned a working cell phone to someone who couldn't call home.

I appreciate your perspective, because it makes it clearer to me that even a phrase as simple as "Never Forget" is perhaps powerful because its meaning is so ambiguous. I think, frankly, your interpretation of it as a call for revenge is the more common one, and I was just too idealistic or wishful to realize that until much later. Part of it is that we all live within the isolation of our context of friends and family, and so many of the people I am close to were in the city as well, or at least knew what I remembered most about the day.

I try not to spend much time thinking about it anymore; The whole topic has become so fraught and sad. But I'm glad I took a little bit of time to write again this year -- I learned a lot from what all the commenters here wrote.

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True story. No Como.

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I made a mixtape in 1992 or so where every song was using the "Paid in Full" beat. And I think it was an SA-X 90, not an SA-X 60, so we're talking a full hour and a half of just that beat.

n.b. Fully half of the songs may have been P.M. Dawn and Milli Vanilli remixes. OTOH, Lloyd would be in good company.

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Moni, I love a lot of those artists (and Paul, Jamie Lidell is definitely soul!), but I think the aspiration I was trying to articulate is something broader. A friend of mine years ago talked about D'Angelo being the "Great Black Hope", someone along the lines of Michael or Prince who could transcend the boundaries of the genre and be a true phenomenon.

As much as I like a lot of the artists you guys have named, they weren't headed on that trajectory. Apparently, none of these folks were.

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MJ post is still coming up. :) But thanks! I am having a good day!

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I dunno, I thought about this more, and I think the issue is how you define *blogs*. I mean if you just read the personal sites of the people who are your friends (i.e. not the professional sites they’re paid to update), have things gotten any worse? This thread is as good as any we had going in 2000, for example, and it wasn’t that hard to get it started and get all the old-timers out of the woodwork. Of *course* that doesn’t happen on Lifehacker, but if Gina had comments on her personal blog, I bet it would.

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[this is good] anil has marked this as a best answer.

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rrcatto, if the only people who are able to publish on the web, or able to connect with communities online, are those who “Read the CODE”, then those of us who truly love the web will have failed. Our mission at Six Apart is based on the idea that, no, you *don’t* need to be a programmer if you have something worthwhile to say, and that any time more people are sharing their ideas online, we’re winning.

And that’s the truth. When we started, a lot of people still thought blogging itself was a fad, or that we bloggers would never have the impact that we’ve had on media, on politics, on culture, on community, on society itself. But now that impact is undeniable. Frankly, we’re thrilled any time anybody starts publishing on the web, regardless of which platform. If you prefer WordPress, great! Our Media team can help you with advertising on your site. Our Blogs.com team at Six Apart can help promote your site. Six Apart makes Blog It to make it easier to update that site from within Facebook or on your iPhone, and we make TypePad AntiSpam so you don’t have to pay for Akismet just to get great comment spam protection.

In short, when people are expressing themselves online, and using the power of blogs to power communities, then we’re winning. I don’t know what war you’re fighting, or who you want to go to battle with, but if you think there’s victory in battling those that want to help more voices get online, then I’m not sure why you’d participate in a community like the one here at Mashable.

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