6 January 2005 Archives

When my roommate came home tonight, I asked him if he’d heard that Six Apart might buy LiveJournal.

“Six who, buy live what?”, he asked.

“Six Apart and LiveJournal.”

“Who or what are Six Apart and LiveJournal.”

“They’re weblogging companies. Well, to be more precise, Six Apart is a weblog company, and LiveJournal is a community that happens to use weblogging technology.”

“Okay.”

“Well Six Apart, one of the larger weblog tool makers is rumored to be buying LiveJournal, one of the larger weblogging communities.”

He looked at me a moment, still wearing his rain gear from the trip home from the office.

“So?”

So.

Update

The news has been confirmed. Of course it was–did anyone expect differently after the ‘leak’?

There is an ironic twist to this, as the LiveJournalers have just been promised trackback on the very day when most sites with trackback have suffered serious spam attacks. Welcome to the big outside world, our new brothers and sisters in weblogging arms.

For all of you Movable Type users, you may want to check out the FAQ on this new merger carefully, specifically the point about MT:

Q. What does this mean for Six Apart and our existing products?

A. It means that Six Apart now offers top quality blogging software for every type of blogger on the planet. With LiveJournal, we now have a blogging service intended for individuals to interact with family and friends, bringing us a new audience that is distinct from the one for our current product line. TypePad is a hosted service used by avid webloggers who want a more flexible tool. And Movable Type, our server based solution for web professionals gives corporations and institutions an effective way to communicate both within their company and to their customers.

(emph. mine)

The questions today has been about LiveJournal. What will happen to LiveJournal? The questions really should have been about Movable Type. What will happen to MT?

PS Baby sharks comes to mind, right about now. Oopsie, where did that come from.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I just read a review of Practical RDF out at Amazon that wasn’t very complimentary. In fact, I’ve had few complimentary reviews of the book, which can happen with a book. Sometimes you hit; sometimes you miss.

I can’t do much about the typos in the book (though these really were not as extensive as people say and have been corrected as errata at the book site at O’Reilly), because there won’t be a new edition of the book to make these corrections. I also can’t correct the style issues that have upset many of the readers, for the same reason – again, no new edition. But I can do something about new releases of technology that have happened since the book was first written.

I’ve already done so with the Java sections, but I think a better approach is for me to just go through each chapter at a time, and provide updated examples, new and updated information, and corrected links. I’ll then link these in the sidebar so that they’re easily accessible, and see if I can get O’Reilly to link to these chapter updates from the main book site. My hope is to have these updates done by end of January.

It’s not much, but it’s something I guess.