LAist reviews a Maui-Wowie/Trainwreck strain today. They said it was "very stoney" and had a bit of a "creeper effect".

That's right. LAist just reviewed pot like they were auditioning for High Times.

I enjoy a bowl here and there, and I'm definitely no anti-drug crusader, but even I'm shocked the LAist would publish this. If it was a commentary on marijuana legislation that's one thing. But to review pot like they're catering to an audience of potheads? Seems like a bad editorial decision... or maybe not.

Years ago I read an Esquire magazine piece about the demand for gourmet weed among Hollywood power brokers. (Sorry no link. It doesn't appear to be online.) I was amazed then, but now I believe LA has a pretty large stoner base. And not just among the powerful. I'll bet every Angeleno is no more than 1 or 2 degrees away from kush. The good stuff too, not that Mexican crap.

BTW, one of my favorite blogs is poker playing, weed smoking, ex-Hollywood D-girl change100's Pot Committed.

A few months ago, Los Angeles magazine discussed the medical marijuana industry in LA. (Again no link! My search-fu is weak today.) We're apparently the second most pot-friendly town in the world after Amsterdam and ahead of Vancouver. That was a shocker. There are some 400+ dispensaries in the county, though a moratorium is likely to be passed soon. The feds have noticed. There have been at least 2 major DEA raids just in the past 6 months. LA is becoming the front lines for the war on drugs.

Back to the LAist. When I first discovered the blog late last year, I really enjoyed reading it. Great pictures with smart, funny writing. They had good coverage of LA news and events. Awesome coverage of the rock music scene. They were expanding into better sports coverage too. It looked like they were making good progress towards dominating the LA blogosphere. And then... disarray.

I've been pretty disappointed with the posts over the last few months. First was sex columnist/blogger April Smear. Not about sex in LA. Just... sex. Umm, okay. That's not really about LA, but I guess people have sex in LA. Then this weed review. Not about weed in LA. Just... weed. What's going on here?!

On the other hand, this weed review might be a genius move. LA has good pot and knowledgeable potheads. When you consider the fact that LA is also home to Venice Beach hippies, Snoop Dogg of the LBC and the Valley (porn capital of the world), why would anyone be surprised at the LAist post?

Well, yeah. When you put it that way.

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.

Sam Krehnbrink on the evolution of community blogging:

The problem with the traditional user driven content model is that content submission by users has no regulations. There are no requirements that must be met to become a user, nor are there any incentives or penalties for content submission. This results in a sort of quasi anonymous role for the users. Thus, users are not as motivated to make a conscious effort to submit quality content, instead, content is submitted without much discretion.

The solution to this problem is to limit user membership based on credentials. In addition, create more incentives for quality content submission, and penalties for poor content. This establishes users in a more prominent role and causes them to become more passionate for their contributions to the community.

He then includes Wise Bread in a list of what he calls "Blogging 2.0" sites. Content quality was definitely a consideration for us when we drafted the community blogging model for WB.

I was an avid reader of the old Performancing when Nick Wilson, Chris Garrett and Andy Hagans were the primary contributors. Their posts were extremely useful when I was just getting started on web work. I was intrigued by their new community blogging idea and hoped to find equally satisfying information beyond the front page. Alas, 99% of the posts by bloggers that weren't named Nick, Chris or Andy were total crap.

We were fortunate to learn that lesson before launching WB. By limiting contributions to elite bloggers, we create much more value for readers. That makes for happy readers, which makes everyone else happy.

Setting a high recruiting standard was one of the better decisions we made. It's nice that people notice.