More SA/ TypePad coverage
Looks like this really, really caused mass hysteria amongst the TypePad using set.
SixApart was Slashdotted, obviously for the wrong reason there PR department will be thinking.
El Reg as always is never subtle.
An interesting question: why do multi-billion dollar mainstream media companies use TypePad when they could easily afford a MT license, or maybe they are stingy bastards like me. As question we could ask The Chicago Tribune, The Bakersfield Californian and The Toronto Star.
The Dilbert blog got knocked offline as well. Will the pointy headed Mena feature in a future cartoon?
Forbes covers the outage and quotes a blogger who writes “The Adventures of A Snowball In Hell.” A snowball in hell? about as likely as multiple lightning strikes on SixApart HQ.
It saddens me that the Toronto Star would stupidly host their blogs on TypePad. I guess they figured installing MT would be too daunting a task for any technician, while failing to recognize open-source alternatives (WordPress) are not inherantly inferior. I found TypPad appealing for a few seconds, until I realized I would be given up the kind of control only a web hosting provider (with FTP access, web logs, PHP, CGI, and all that jazz) can provide.
While not comparable to the organizations you list, the reason my small company’s marketing director insisted on using blogspot, when we could perfectly well host it ourselves, was being hooked instantly into a community of fell blogspot users. (I found this particularly embarassing as we were an IT company! It made us appear to be clueless to tech saavy blog readers.)
For the larger companies, it’s often about a sales pitch going over particularly well and sometimes they’d prefer to “rent” rather than buy for tax reasons that always seem opaque to me.
Outsourcing. It’s all about outsourcing.
They probably figure it’s cheaper to use the off-the-shelf service than run it in-house with their own IT people.
Maybe it’s the old S.S. Theory.
Sheer Stupidity.
Well I can understand using wanting to be a part of the blogspot community. So many of the bloggers on that service get exposure through the “next blog” feature. But TypePad is hardly anymore of a community than DreamHost web hosting.
There’s also the issue of running multiple Weblogs from a single installation, something WordPress is not very good at, to say the least. While that is slated to improve, when the newspapers needed to get blogs online, they had to go with a technology actually viable at the time. They could upgrade later, I suppose, but they won’t.
There’s a number of reasons businesses choose TypePad, starting first with the large number of features that are unique to the system. (Built in podcasting, video blogging, TypeLists, moblogging, etc.) There’s also the built-in technical support that’s integrated with the system, the compatibility with the Movable Type blogs that many of those organizations are already running, and of course the fact that people can get up and running quickly without installing anything of having to manage anything.
That’s a pretty compelling combination, from what I know from having worked in publishing myself.
Instant results. I’m guessing most marketing departments shudder at the thought of waiting for IT to decide that WordPress is secure enough to be hosted on an intranet or to get their minions to learn MT’s tag system.