Free Software Linux

Last week mixi, the largest social network in Japan, become an OpenID Provider for all of their fifteen-million plus users; one in five Japanese web users are on mixi. While they are another large OpenID Provider — which some argue is a bad thing — they are the first large OpenID Provider to also support exchanging profile information.

MovableType: "We're releasing the latest update to Movable Type, version 4.2, and along with it we're announcing the launch of Movable Type Pro, a profoundly powerful new set of capabilities that shows the web where blogging is going next." Complete Story Advertisement: read more

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories from around the blogosphere, in scan-friendly format. This Week: * Twitter Cuts SMS Access * Movable Type Goes Social * AOL to Acquire Socialthing * ReplyFeed.com : Social Media Conversation Management * Google's Failed Acquisitions in Social Media * Facebook Launches New Social Ad Unit, and Gets Sued... Again

Six Apart released a brand new version of Movable Type (MT) that “signals a new era in blogging,” thanks to the newly added social networking capabilities. Six Apart’s icing on the cake is the debut of MT Pro - a product combining Movable Type’s blogging tools and WCM features with social networking capabilities.

Identi.ca is a new micro-blogging service which runs the open source Laconica platform. Ultimately, this will likely be the distributed, open microblogging platform twitter fans have been waiting for (though the community itself seems mostly to be sticking with Twitter, fail whale and all). For now, it’s just fun to play around with. I just releases an Identi.ca action stream plugin - get version 1.0 on my Movable Type Action Streams Plugins page. Here’s what the output looks like:

I use BrightKite to update my location via SMS, and it feeds FireEagle, which in turn posts to my lifestream via Movable Type and the Action Streams Plugin. If any of that made sense, keep reading. The problem is that when I send brightkite a message like: @bos It sometimes knows that is Logan Airport in Boston, and sometimes just knows that as BOS, United States, which results in updates like this: Anyone know why this is happening? Brightkite’s fault? Fire Eagle’s fault? Neither?

(Via the TripIt blog) TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private: The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history. The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc. It’s got a nice, RESTful public url - mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman

Linux.com: "As the popularity of blogs continues to rise, blogging software platforms continue to evolve. With the recent release of version 4.1, the popular Movable Type application offers improvements that allow bloggers to expand their control over the publishing process." Complete Story

Originally scheduled for release Monday May 19, the newest release of Movable Type v4.15 is now planned for Wednesday May 28, 2008. Why the delay? They say all will become clear on release day. Until then, here are the enhancements in store for all you Movable Type users.

San Francisco-based Six Apart -- makers of Movable Type, sellers of Live Journal -- have just unwrapped a lovely new piece of technology. Some call it blog fire-hosing, but we'll go with rather heavier metaphors and say their new Blog It FaceBook app is double barrel publishing fun. It's buckshot blogging. It's strafing the blogosphere. It's like going hunting with Cheney -- you know, pull the trigger once and you get two birds and all your friends, right in the face.

The Social: Six Apart, the software company behind blogging platforms TypePad, Movable Type, and Vox, has launched a new Facebook application called "Blog It." Facebook members who install the application can post to multiple blogging services at one time, update their Facebook status in sync with micro-blogging services like Twitter, and have updates from the app appear in their Facebook Mini-Feeds. Complete Story

"Here’s a fact: intranets don’t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together with Front Page that no one looks at." Complete Story Advertisement:

"Six Apart has recently decided that the best way to win back customers fleeing their platforms is to target WordPress, which is a new strategy they call competing. (What have they been doing the past 7 years?) A good example is this exchange between a commenter on Valleywag and Byrne Reese, the lead developer of Movable Type: Sundown: “@anildash: what part of Wordpress is not open source?” byrnereese: “@Sunnduwn - I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.” Okay, here’s some accounting: WordPress is 100% open source, GPL..." Complete Story Advertisement:

The gang at Six Apart has just announced a new extension for their Movable Type 4.1 Commercial and Open Source publishing platforms. It's called the the Action Streams Plugin and by tying together data from all manner of social networking providers it moves you one step closer to the open social web dream.

It's official, Moveable Type Open Source (MTOS) 4.1 Stable has been released to the market. We've been keeping you up to date about MTOS since we heard about it in August. In December we gave you an overview of the new open source version. It was just last week that MT4.1 RC1 was released. So the guys and gals over at Six Apart are moving fast.