“If you are catering to the type of blogger who wants to have ads on their site, then you’re catering to people less interested in providing content and more interested in earning a quick buck. That’s certainly an acceptable business strategy, but not one I would lower myself to.”

I know you’ve got some cheerleaders for sticking it to someone perceived as The Man, but as a constructive suggestion I’d really take a deep breath before you hit that submit button and take a look not only at your tone, but at the unfounded assumptions you may be making about huge swaths of people whose work you do not know. You don’t value the ability to host ads on a blog. Great. You could have simply made that point graciously. As it is, you sounded like a sanctimonious little twit.

First, if you’re making some kind of moral statement about ads… the same folks who provide the non-ad-friendly Wordpress.com are also behind the VERY ad-friendly self-hosted Wordpress. So much for the moral superiority of Automattic and their developer community. While they have specific reasons for forbidding ads on Wordpress.com-hosted blogs, they are just as happy to “cater to the type of blogger” at which you are pursing your lips like the Church Lady.

Let’s go over it in detail:

“If you are catering to the type of blogger who wants to have ads on their site…”

There is no such thing as “the” type of blogger who is ad-supported. There’s an infinite range from total spammers to authors advertising their own books to piano teachers putting up links to the sheet music they assign (how DARE they get 8% from Sheet Music Plus!) to ordinary bloggers with a few adsense units to defray hosting, to corporate blogs to put a face on a company and product, to widely read blogs that run “real” advertising from major companies eager to get in front of their highly qualified audience.

“Then you’re catering to people less interested in providing content and more interested in earning a quick buck.”

How so? Many bloggers are primarily passionate about a subject and want to earn a few bucks if they can. Other bloggers ARE primarily interested in earning a buck because they view blogging as a JOB. But who cares, as long as the content is good? When I go to work for some company, I am indeed more interested in earning a buck than I am in the company’s agenda. However, I have agreed to perform at a high level of professionalism in exchange for said buck. If I fail to meet expectations, I’ll be gone. If a blogger fails to provide content people want, same deal.

“That’s certainly an acceptable business strategy, but not one I would lower myself to.”

I assume you work for a living. So do many bloggers and other people who provide all sorts of content. If it’s “lowering yourself” to earn money providing content, then all your favorite writers, entertainers, journalists — and (gasp!) probably some of your favorite bloggers — are “lowering themselves” in a cynical attempt to put food on the table for their families.

Or do you think blogging is different, somehow above it all? Please explain.

This is not how to keep or gain customers. I don’t want a “fully loaded” fancy car if the damn thing can’t get me from point A to point B, and that’s how Typepad feels right now.

These types of comparisons, not matter how “objective” they appear to be can never cover all of the factors that matter to people — it always comes back to a question of what suits any given individual at any given time.

As for the “Typepad/MT sucks because it’s too hard to theme” type of comment, you could also argue that WP theming sucks because there is too much PHP mixed into the tags. Both can be said to be accurate, but both are clearly open to argument.

And for the record, I think both platforms are OK, and don’t have a problem with either and would (and have) recommended both to different people at different times and in different circumstances. It always come back to choosing the right tool for the job at hand.

Quote:

You neglect to point out the following link: http://celebritybabies.typepad.com/, and all the subsequently valid links that can be searched for on google. If you want to talk SEO, lets talk about the penalties of double-posted content.

To contrast on WordPress.com, lets take a look at People Magazine. The original stylewatch wordpress account link redirects to the correct URL, and even if you search at the stylewatch.wordpress.com site the links all 301 redirect to the correct server.

Example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=G&q=site:celebritybabies.typepad.com

‘You are using misleading statistics in the post you linked. The aggregate data provided by the Department of Homeland Security covers every version of each system and every third party plugin across the better part of a decade, without even taking into account reported vs. actual, fix turnaround, whether it’s third party or core, and the size of the reporting community.’

I’d like to imagine that a Department of Homeland Security would be concentrating powers upon clear and present danger and not on the comparative insecurities of blogging software — they should turn their collective attentions to how many CEOs can dance on the point of a needle if they have that much time on their hands.

All WordPress themes are, basically, PHP code. Customizing your site and it’s look requires theme editing, which invariably means editing that PHP code. While this is not difficult, it’s sometimes hard to convince people of that. From my experience as a moderator on the WordPress support forums, I can say that some people simply won’t do it under any circumstances. They have this notion that it’s beyond them, even when it is probably not.

But then again, these same people would have issues with a simple templating system as well. The problem is not that they think they can’t code, it’s that actual text scares them in some fundamental way. If it’s not about dragging things around in a GUI, then they can’t bring themselves to do it. This is where we get things like widgets to make this sort of thing simpler.

And in the long run, themes like Sandbox and similar are slowly making theme editing via PHP/Templates almost unnecessary. Sandbox can be wholly customized with mere CSS editing, is good with SEO, and highly semantically flexible. New versions of WordPress support “CSS Themes” like this, where the theme remains the same and only the CSS changes. More support for this sort of thing is planned in the future. So his point about editing PHP files might not be the case sooner rather than later.

Are you powering typepad.com with the openly available version of Movable Type? Because WordPress.com is powered by MU
1> No, they aren’t. Typepad is, and has been for some time now, a different application. The dog food argument is invalid given that the equivalent MT functionality didn’t even exist then.
2> Wordpress.com doesn’t run on the openly available WPMU, either. (See end.)

I’m sorry, but the raw number of plugins each platform has is absolutely irrelevant. It has been repeatedly pointed out that part of the reason for this difference is that both applications do things in the core code that the other does not. The MT templating language has been evolving for some time now to reduce the need for plugins to accomplish many tasks.
Now, if you want to focus on specific plugins as deficiencies, feel free.
As a sidenote, the MT plugin directory is not remotely comprehensive, and I have the personal library to prove it.

I’d like to point out that you just went on record to say that there’s no difference between the Free Download and the “Movable Type Professional Pack” advertised at $100, which… lets see…”is an add-on for Movable Type 4.1 available exclusively to paid customers”
[...]
As soon as you want to make money off of it (as you pointed out above) or “support some kind of commercial endeavor”, it’ll cost you. [from your comment on prior post]

Actually, no, you’re putting words in his mouth based upon your own lack of understanding of the licensing. The core MT application, under the MTOS license is free for any use. This is where your comparison ends, as WP has no equivalent of a commercial add-on like the ProPack, or official support(as far as I’m aware). The ProPack does switch over to a personal/commercial usage split, but that is not a requirement of the core software.
I’ve given up on trying to understand why the licensing is confusing to people; I have no problem with it, but many others clearly do so something does appear to be wrong but I have on idea what.

(Note that I’m probably even more aware[and more accurately] of the problems MT has than you are and am not denying them. But I’m also not in a position to defend WP, seeing as I don’t use it.)

(except maybe how painful it is to install MT for the first time, when it’s just piece of cake for a newbie to install WP)

>“You seem to know more than enough about SEO to know what that implies.”
I still don’t see this as a compliment. I think the expected response was probably “uh… hmm.. what does it imply? Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about….”. And “seem” is never good.

>Let’s talk about what normal people who aren’t PHP coders can do.
“normal people”? So anyone who can hack together some dead-simple code is therefore not normal? If you’re catering to the non-technical, then say so. But PHP doesn’t have an insurmountable level of entry, I think anyone who wanted to make modifications could probably figure out how (not to mention, the WP developer community is outstanding and you could probably just ask for anything you needed done, and someone would pull it together for you). If you really want a closed system, of course selecting a less-well-known language is ok, but don’t cite it as an advantage!

I don’t want to get into too involved a response here, out of respect for this being your blog, but I do have to take strong issue with this:

Let the numbers decide who’s better.

If we do that, worldwide, then it’s easy. MSN/Windows Live Spaces is the best blogging platform, followed by MySpace blogs, with Blogger in a distant third. Do you really think popularity is a fair measure of the quality of something?

Then to go to your list of features… from what you’ve listed, Banned words, Moderation queues, Spam folders, a WYSIWYG text editor, Custom headers and BlogRolls were *all* in the initial release of TypePad, which went to beta a full five years ago this month. That’s literally years before WordPress.com launched, and if you look at the Internet Archive record of the TypePad site then, I think it’ll back up the assertion. The rest of the features, some of them definitely came to WordPress.com first, and some came to TypePad first, and you’re absolutely right that competition has been good for both services.

“Congratulations, you’re standing in the shadow of Steve Jobs. So is every last iPhone addon, Mac Peripheral and iPod knockoff. Trying to bolster your company through secondary affiliations like that indicate that you can’t stand on your own.”

I’m extraordinarily proud of what we’ve done as an independent company — from being the first to really commit to building a business model to support blogging, to inventing TrackBack and OpenID and other technologies, to inventing new things. But I’m just as proud of the fact that we play well with others. Even though he’s a TypePad user, I would never say that anybody who makes something for the web platform is standing in Marc Andreessen’s shadow, and it’s just as shortsighted to say that creating for the iPhone platform is merely standing in Jobs’ shadow. It also highlights the fact that, yes, we do focus on aesthetics and usability and a great experience, and we repsect others who do the same.

From TechCrunch: “[L]ast week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I’m pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.” And if you want to forward the email you got, I’d be happy to disabuse anyone of the notion that TypePad AntiSpam is based on Akismet — it couldn’t be, since Akismet isn’t open source and TypePad AntiSpam is.

Our goal is to cater to whatever bloggers want — and some want ads. We don’t think it’s “lowering” ourselves to do what people ask of us, and we certainly don’t judge bloggers for having different goals. I think we can agree to disagree there, though.

We also do send old-fashioned pings and the like, but when you say “this notification system of yours seems to be a public ATOM feed, which only works when and if a search engine decides to consume it.” you’re absolutely right. Fortunately, the search engines that have decided to consume it include all of the major search engines. So, faster than pinging, and not prone to being spammed.

And of course, when it comes to the impressive list of users, we have an equally impressive list, including many of the same media organizations you list. However, I’ve been led to understand that trying to bolster your company through secondary affiliations like that indicate that you can’t stand on your own.

At any rate, my point isn’t to get into a pissing match with you over minutia. You pointed out a lot of things that matter to you, but I haven’t heard a clear statement of why a friend who was inclined to use TypePad shouldn’t make that choice. If your friend had a hard requirement of something the platform couldn’t do, that would make sense, but what I hear instead is that different platforms do things differently, and that TypePad does have some unique strengths that no other platform does. That fundamental truth isn’t contradicted by the points you’ve made above.

I am by no means saying you should choose something different for yourself. But if you’re making a recommendation to a friend, the fact that we have things like a help ticket support system where you get answers directly from our team can go a long way to making people happy with their blogging. I believe the friend you were responding, frankly, is more likely to want to click on a button and add a Twitter badge than to dive into PHP coding. More likely to want to post a photo from his iPhone than to want to run his own blogging service. And given those constraints, I think TypePad’s a great choice.

All of that being said, thanks for pointing out the areas where we can do better, especially the ones where it turns out we have a great answer but just haven’t been getting the word out about what platforms like Movable Type and TypePad can do. If you want to continue the conversation more, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line, and again sorry if my tone was unintentionally confrontational earlier.