This spring, when Six Apart (the name is a reference to the six-day age difference between Ben and Mena) released its newest version of MT, it announced plans to begin charging the most active users for a license to use the system (previous versions had been offered essentially for free). The news hit bloggers like a thunderclap; many accused the company of forgetting its roots and embracing soulless corporations instead of people.

Six Apart weathered the controversy and, according to its executives, emerged only stronger. Still, the company's decision to charge customers to use Movable Type is an intriguing one, as it suggests a belief that blogging is, or will soon be, more than just a bastion for hobbyists, more than a place for political punditry and the sort of entertaining stream-of-consciousness musings that Mena Trott offers on her blog. When the folks at Six Apart talk about the promise of blogs and the future of Movable Type, they don't talk about Instapundit or Talking Points Memo, two popular Movable Type blogs. Instead, they talk about law offices and media companies and software firms, and the benefits these businesses might see when their employees start blogging.

Competing, on the one side, with several deep-pocketed firms willing to give their blog software away for nothing and, on the other, with open-source developers committed to the notion that blogging should be free, Six Apart is building a blogging empire around what seems a crazy idea -- that bloggers will pay for fine tools. Blogging may be provoking a revolution in the media and politics, concedes Anil Dash, a blogger and Six Apart vice president, but the revolution needs software -- complex, powerful software that professionals can depend on. "And it just makes sense," Dash says, "to pay for professional-level tools."

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Perhaps the most difficult thing about starting a new blog is deciding to actually do it -- seriously examining whether you are witty and wise and prolific enough to make a difference to anyone else on the Web and, if you aren't, deciding that perhaps blogging isn't your thing. But you wouldn't be the first blogger to skip this step, and for many people the big early hurdle to blogging is choosing the right tool. An aspiring blogger faces a tsunami of blogging applications, many of which are quite well-regarded and easy to use. There are Dave Winer's Radio UserLand (which powers Salon Blogs), or any number of open-source systems, including WordPress, Blosxom, NewsBruiser, and Scoop, the "collaborative media" tool that powers Daily Kos. The most popular services are Blogger and LiveJournal, which are free to anyone on the Web and don't require users to download software or to set up (and pay for) domain names and Web hosting services.

Together, they account for millions of users -- though it should be noted that LiveJournal and Blogger attract very different kinds of bloggers, and folks on one system would not appreciate being compared with those on the other.

This goes to one of the key difficulties people encounter when choosing the tools to run their blogs: If the entire point of creating a blog is to talk about yourself, or to get people talking about you or the things you care about, then it matters what judgments people have formed about the particular blog tool you use. Traditionally, for instance, LiveJournal has been a place of closely connected teenagers; you could try, if you wanted, to publish your well-researched foreign policy musings on an LJ blog, but chances are not many people are going to take you seriously.

Mena Trott might have been thinking along those lines in the summer of 2001, when she and Ben decided to create their own blogging tool. At the time, there were, as now, dozens of blog-building programs available, but none included all the features that the pair thought bloggers needed to really personalize their sites, to make the Web their own. How do you get someone to pay attention to the well-researched foreign policy musings featured on your blog? Certainly, your musings must be compelling and unique, but often that's not sufficient. You've got to also have a tool that allows you to stretch your site into the kind of thing well-suited to foreign policy, both aesthetically and functionally.

"All of us feel pretty strongly that tools influence content," says Dash. "If you look at a PowerPoint presentation you know you're not going to get something particularly profound -- you're going get bullet points shouted at you for 10 minutes. In terms of how people use the Web, the tools inform what you write. This was Mena's sense of it: 'What's going to make someone be inspired?'"

Fortunately, at the time the Trotts were pondering all this, they were laid off from their day jobs at a sinking tech firm. With time on their hands and some money saved, they decided to turn the blogging tool they'd been building for themselves into something bigger, something "to release upon the weblogging masses," as they wrote in an early post on a blog they created to track the development of the new application. "Hopefully some of our features will make this seem as exciting to you as it does to us. But, really, maybe we're just excited because it's our project."

That was on Sept. 3, 2001. The following week, of course, the unthinkable happened, and for a time Mena and Ben weren't sure there was a need, anymore, for blogging, let alone another blog tool. On Dollarshort on Sept. 19, in a post titled "Speechless," Mena wrote: "I'm still here. I just don't know what to write. I don't want to write about the attack. I don't want to write about politics. But I'm not ready to write about my life. Or, the silly little things that used to jump around my mind." Then, a few days later, the pair came back. "We actually forced ourselves to take a week off in order to deal with the events of the eleventh," they wrote on the blog tracking Movable Type's release. "While we did come to the conclusion that most things -- including a weblogging content management system -- are a bit trivial, we realized that we needed to go back to the metaphorical mines in order to regain some sort of normalcy in our daily routine. But don't worry, the beta-testing is scheduled to begin today and everything is falling into place."

Everything began to fall into place quite nicely, in fact. Rather than dampen the popularity of blogging, the terrorist attacks significantly quickened the pace of online discussion, and when bloggers went looking for the best tool to handle their growing sites, many of the most prominent ones began to see the beauty of Movable Type, which the Trotts released publicly in October 2001. In a short time, MT blogs became ubiquitous: Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit runs on MT, as does Joshua Marshall's blog, and Brad DeLong's, Lawrence Lessig's, Jason Kottke's, and Boing Boing, Gawker, Wonkette, and Gizmodo, to name a few.

What was it about MT that hooked people? "The very first thing that caught my eye was that it was very elegant," says Dash, who was blogging with Blogger when MT was released. "I said, 'I want my site to look like that.' It was elegant all the way through, and the features -- really basic stuff, like I wanted comments and categories and titles on my posts. I mean that wasn't a common thing then, you couldn't put a title on your post. Really basic stuff like that, and they got all that together in one tool, in a way that worked."

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