Continuing on the Moveable Type theme, one of the major limitations of the platform up until now has been the lack of support for sub-categories of postings. But one of MT’s great strengths is its plugins – small modules of code written by third-parties that extend the basic functionality of the products – and now there’s a new version of the Subcategories plugin from David Raynes that goes a long way to plugging that gap.
Archive for 16 June 2004
A few weeks ago I posted about reactions to the pricing structure of the latest version of Moveable Type, one of the most widely-used weblogging tools. The changes were announced on Six Apart’s blog – the post itself was an upbeat explanation of the new licensing terms, while the trackback links below were overwhelmingly (and vigorously) negative. A great example of instant feedback from customers.
To their credit, Six Apart didn’t react by immediately pulling down the criticism from their site, as you might expect a commercial organisation to do – after all, you can’t imagine McDonalds or Texaco allowing their sites to play host to opinions even slightly contrary to the party line, can you? Not only did they ride out the criticism, they also listened – the revised pricing structure has just been announced (on the blog, naturally), and it addresses many of the criticisms that were levelled at the initial version.
So a great example of the power of corporate weblogs on several levels. Not only did Six Apart get instantaneous – and very powerfully expressed – feedback on their decisions, they also took that feedback into account. Responses to the new model are fairly positive at the moment. From heros to zeros to heros again…
Weblogs have – how do you put this politely? – something of an image problem in the business environment. There are three responses we hear a lot when talking to businesses about how they could exploit weblogs in a corporate environment;
- they’ve never heard of the word, let alone know what it means
- they know what weblogs are, but see them as the preserve of the sandal-wearing geek
- they can see the use of weblogs as a tool for both internal and external purposes.
Needless to say, we hear a lot more of 1 and 2 than 3.
Some interesting statistics from Blogads that came our way via e-consultancy.com suggest that opinion 2 is actually incorrect. Rather than weblogs being only for Unix geeks and angst-ridden teens, the typical blog reader is in fact older and wealthier than you might suppose. 60% are over 30, and 40% have an income in excess of GBP 50,000 (USD 90,000), while the average female blog reader is older still. Women are in a minority, however, as 80% of blog readers are male.
…the survey describes blog readers as “information junkies”
The research was skewed towards understanding the impact of weblogs on advertising, so it isn’t necessarily clear how these statistics translate into the impact on corporate weblogs, but the numbers suggest that a typical blog reader is more likely to be from the demographic groups that managers and influence makers fall into. And interestingly, the survey describes blog readers as “information junkies” – who are suffering most from information and email overload.
