Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

This week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara is clearly the place to be. Maybe I'll make it next year. Anyway, the big news from the West Coast confab is that Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, the content management system which powers this blog and thousands of others, made the headlines, and big. Wow!

Ben and Mina Trott (Six Apart) have secured funding from Neoteny, a Japanese venture capital firm, and this cash sets them up to launch a new product: TypePad. Coming as it does only a few weeks after Google bought Blogger, this means not only radical change in the blogging business but a sign that internet investment may be picking up again. Another pleasing aspect to this deal is that Neoteny's investment allows the great New York weblogger Anil Dash to join Six Apart as its business development guru.

So what's TypePad? From what I've read, it's a big step up for blogging tools. Unlike MovableType, TypePad is a hosted service where the software and the user's blog, are hosted on the TypePad server for a monthly fee. By way of contrast, I host Rainy Day on a commercial server, which I have to pay for and manage myself. All this, and more, will be now available via TypePad to anyone, regardless of computer skills. Prepare for an avalanche of bloggers!

And TypePad's features sound impressive. There's a powerful template builder, a built-in photo album, server stats so that you can see who is visiting your blog and lists for blogrolling, music and books as well.

Some of the TypePad ideas will be included in the upcoming professional version of MovableType, which will also contain power features needed by micro-publishers such as Nick Denton of Gizmodo and Gawker fame.

The blogging business is picking up speed. Keep your ear to the ground for more big stories.

Diarist of the day: John Evelyn, 25 April 1661

"I went to the [Royal] Society where were divers experiments in Mr. Boyls Pneumatique Engine. We put in a Snake but could not kill it, by exhausting the aire, onely made it extremly sick, but the chick died of Convulsions out right, in a short space."