Six Apart supports multi-author blogging and mobile blogging

Blogging – the practice of keeping and publishing a log on a Web site – has evolved from fringe through phenomenon to Internet standard.

But what can you use a blog for in business? Glad you asked: Three common business applications are as a support site, a user forum, or as a news resource. You can configure blogs to be private or public and you can allow multiple editors – it all depends on which blog product you choose.

Some months ago, I discussed Movable Type from Six Apart (see links below; Six Apart was also at last month’s Demo 2004), one of the leaders in the blog market. Since then it has released a hosted blogging service, TypePad.

TypePad blogs support multiple contributors as authors or junior authors (their posts require review before publishing) and can include photo albums (with automatically generated thumbnails), lists of anything (for example, links to news items, favorite Web sites, etc.).

The one weakness of TypePad is that editing isn’t WYSIWYG which means that naïve users will need a certain amount of hand holding if you want them to be able to link to resources like your photo albums.

TypePad is available in three versions: Basic, which cost $4.95 per month for a single blog; Plus, which adds more features and allows up to three blogs for $8.95; and Pro which supports unlimited blogs, even more features, and costs $14.95 per month.

TypePad also supports a new feature called moblogging – a portmanteau word for “mobile blogging” which means that you can not only post from your browser but you can also send posts via e-mail and post from a WAP-enabled phone.

Six Apart showed its latest moblogging features off at Demo. It now supports more than one e-mail address posting to a moblog, multiple authors to post, and when enabled, allows anyone with e-mail access to post to a public moblog (which was what the Demo moblog was).

The new moblogs will also allow audio content to be uploaded and the company will be releasing a Palm client for posting photos and text. Six Apart will provide custom moblog-specific templates, optimized for the display on mobile phones and moblogging will be available to all service levels.

TypePad blogs are easy to use and generally very good-looking and the new moblog features are very powerful. And as they are a hosted service, TypePad blogs require minimal systems management.

I’d be interested to hear if you are using blogs in a business context and your thoughts on how moblogging might be useful.