the LA Times, which rarely gets anything right, mostly because theyre a monopoly, whatev, published a column today about Six Apart, the company that brought you Movable Type and TypePad.
We’ll forget that the journalist chose to only interview the principles of the start up, Ben and Mena Trott, and one of their investors to tell the story, cuz you know, whatever.
And we’ll forget that the writer just tossed out the idea that Google’s Blogger software is “largely free and aimed mostly at novices,” cuz, you know, free means it doesnt matter, and novices … dont matter either?
And we’ll forget that the busblog has been happily on the Blogger tip since we began, but am i a novice? Is Raymi? Anti? Matthew Good? Flagrant, Leah, Zulieka, Bob Mould, Heather Havrilesky, or Rupaul?
call me crazy but one reason i like using Blogger is cuz it’s free. i also appreciate that Google is behind it. yes there are ups and downs to either platform, but in my opinion i would much rather have the brainiacs at Google trying to figure out whats up with Blogger the few blue moons where it’s having issues, than to have to try to debug Movable Type like i see my friends and others have to deal with all the damn time.
obviously, in the political blog world i would be in the minority, as most of them choose to have full control of their blogs – which means being fully in control when things break.
but the LA Times should know that the political blog world is just a portion of the blogosphere, and far from the majority. which is one reason why Six Apart bought LiveJournal eariler this year.
am i expecting the LA Times to know the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between LiveJournal, Blogger, Blogspot, Movable Type, Diaryland, Xanga, and the others? dude i’m happy when they spell Los Angeles right, so no, my expectations are very low.
what i did sort of expect was them to i dont know, talk to someone at Blogger/Google to get another point of view on Six Apart’s impressive success story. Or, i dont know, talk to some Los Angeles bloggers who use MT and maybe one or two who don’t.
but why would the LA Times ever want to inject a local angle into anything… ever?
plus we Blogger bloggers don’t matter, cuz, you know, we’re novices who just use free software to dick around in our pajamas. Lord knows none of us would have a rebuttal to the investor of Six Apart who was quoted in the end of the article who shockingly said, “The future of blogging is not about bloggers who want audiences of thousands. The majority will be those communicating with four others or so.”
I, for one, have never met a blogger who would prefer to have an audience of four instead of an audience of thousands. Nor have I ever seen anyone who started a blog to share with their four closest friends. When people want to write something for four friends its called an email.
Which is also free, and therefore doesn’t matter, I assume.
Fuck the LA Times who insist on letting their writers cover shit that they dont have a clue about and aren’t interested in telling a real story.