Movable Type 4 (currently in beta) is Six Apart's latest offering of the pioneering blogging platform. My reaction: Who cares?

In case you do care, Wisdump has a good writeup on MT4's features. He upgraded one site from WP to MT4 and likes the new software, but only recommends it for geeky coders and designers.

I used to be a loyal Six Apart fan, but they lost me when they started charging for MT3. It just wasn't worth it, especially with upstart WordPress doing it better (and improving much faster)!

My very first blog, right after I registered avocadoshake.net in 2003, was a MT2 powered site. Marc and I even tried to use MT at Rhythm for some personal project blogging. That didn't go far, but did lead us to examine other early blogging platforms. Anybody remember Bloxsom (site seems decommissioned) or UserLand? (Apparently, UserLand isn't dead yet.)

Bloxsom had some real geek appeal. It had a simple plain text backend (like CVS, that makes it easy to "massage" the data), was Perl based (so is MT), and had lots of neat hacks around it. What other blogging platform has its own Apache module!? But while it was fun to play with it and maybe power a personal blog, it was never a serious contender to power a full featured website.

Back to MT and Six Apart. In my estimation, Six Apart lost its way right after MT2. Instead of building on the bleeding edge features of MT2 and embracing the developers using MT for their own blogs, Six Apart tried to charge for MT3 (a BIG mistake that all the backpedaling clarification in the world couldn't fix) and started focusing on the hosted blog space (Typepad).

They lost out on two fronts:

1. Typepad never surpassed Blogger's dominance in the hosted blog space. And instead of making Typepad a better product, they release the same thing with slightly different packaging (Vox). I never understood that move.
2. Alienating all those early MT users with a barely existent plugin architecture. You know what happened to those people? They're now fanatical WP developers and themers.

I do owe Six Apart a thanks for getting me interested in the art of blogging. And I guess I owe them a thanks for driving me away from MT. That search took me to a little known CMS named Drupal that had me at "custom content fields".

Edited to add: I totally forgot about LiveJournal. That makes a total of 3 non-industry-leading hosted blog services.