Six Apart, the company behind the popular MovableType weblog publishing platform and TypePad blog hosting has just released MovableType version 3.2 after months of development.

Here are highlights of new Movable Type 3.2 features:

• Vastly improved installation and upgrade
• Unlimited blogs for all
• Special $30 discount for Personal Edition
• All your blogs in one place
• The best community management
• Find what you need
• Smart new styles
• A new generation of plugins
• The best support in the business
• Professional backing

I am not a fan of the latest and newest version of anything and prefer to upgrade only when necessary, but MT 3.2 has a lot of additional features since 3.1x. If you have been planning to move your old weblog, this may be worth to take a look at.

Links:

• Announcing Movable Type 3.2
• Movable Type 3 Publishing Platform

Google asks for the community help to give feedback about Blogger users’ blog content. A visitor can flag a blog and note questionable content, which in turn helps them take action when needed.

Flagging a blog as objectoinable will delist it from being promoted on the Recently Updated list at Blogger.com. Blogger’s help page about the Flag Button explains:

For more serious cases, such as spam blogs or sites engaging in illegal activity, we will continue to enforce our existing policies (removing content and deleting accounts when necessary).

Blogger will track the number of times a blog has been flagged as objectionable and use this information to determine what action is needed.

Blogger Buzz failed to mention this other than to say that objectionable blogs will be delisted, which has brought a lot of concerns among bloggers recently. Getting listed on Blogger’s recently updated section used to be a way to get you indexed by Google.

One reason again why Blogger users should move their blogs to their own domain. You should not worry much about this new feature if your blog is not a splog. But in no way Google reveal how many flags can potentially raise warning and get your account deleted. Not to mention the additional benefits you can get from owning your own domain.

Link: Blogger - What is the Flag button?

Molly has an interesting blog post about her experience spending time over at Technorati. Adam Hertz, the Vice President of Engineering told her about a well-known issue at Technorati — slow server performance.

Adam drew an upward facing triangle on a whiteboard and told me it’s known as the Devil’s Triangle around the office. The bottom left angle is marked as query rate, the top is marked data set and the bottom right angle is update rate.

While data set and query rate are involved in other types of search engines, the update rate is a feature that is challenging Technorati. Unlike a traditional search engine, which doesn’t look at update frequency, Technorati is constantly logging updates to blogs as well as managing data sets and queries, and this is the area where the most problem solving needs to be done.

Technorati has been transparent about the problem and their efforts to address the issue, which is an awesome thing other company can learn from.

The post also describes the significance of tagging as a social tool and a new way to categorize blog post, especially on occasions when search engine isn’t able to distinguish what the post is really about.

Source: Tag You’re It: Talking to Technorati.

I just found a new blog ping service. I’ve not used it but think I need to blog it first. Pingoat notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them.

Pingoat works exactly the same way as Pingomatic, but notify more services than Pingomatic, including non english services and special services. To use the service, go to Pingoat, type in your blog name and URL (not feed URL), select the services you want to ping and click Go Pingoat!

You can ping Pingoat using XML-RPC too, means you can have your weblog application do it automatically for each post.

I recommend that if you are using weblog software such as Movable Type or WordPress or ExpressionEngine, add http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2 to the list of service to ping for every post and disable Pingomatic (or even all others) to prevent redundancy.

Monitor Technorati, FeedBurner and other services closely to see if it works. I am going to report back if I find problems.

Visit Pingoat.

Nivi posts an interesting view about blogosphere in 2015. Blog could be as important as you online identity by then. If you don’t have that, you can’t participate in many online services like playing games in virtual reality, etc.

Because your blog will be your avatar in virtual reality. And you can’t play in virtual reality without an avatar. So you’re gonna need a blog, baby.

When you blog today, you are participating in a Massively Multiplayer Online Conversation (MMOC). Today’s text blogs are like the text-based MUD games of yesteryear. These MUDs eventually grew up to become today’s 3-d MMOGs. And inna future, blogs will grow up from text to audio to video. And blogs will come to resemble the avatars in today’s MMOGs.

MMOC sounds like a very interesting and cool word.

Source: Nivi.