Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Christine staged a Blog Debate, during which Ciscley commented about guys being reluctant to move to Moveable Type because it’s popular. She wrote:
I think (I *know* in my personal blogging circle and I’m generalizing from there) that most of the people that are uncomfortable with the popularity of MT are guys. It’s like it’s a dirty blog word to every guy I know. They use phpWeblog (though I still have to design their layouts for them cause the interface only goes so far). They use geeklog. They’ve thought about pMachine. They’re willing to try anything and everything but MT.
Is it because so many women use and love MT? Is it because MT, if you don’t actually use it and know what a huge part of it Ben does, appears to be the creation of a woman? Is it taking something away from the all male tech industry to consider that a product inspired by or significantly designed by a woman is the best option out there?
Jonathon picked up on it, writing:
There are so many things to like about Movable Type—reliability, elegant interface, customizability, MySQL support, vibrant user community—but what could be more intriguing than Ciscley’s hypothesis of gendered MT use? Has Mena’s contribution influenced the software to the extent that it attracts a disproportionately high proportion of female users?
Christine picked up on both Ciscley’s and Jonathon’s comments, so it will be interesting to see if there is any form of debate on this.
A gender bias with Movable Type just isn’t something I’ve seen. I would imagine that there is a strong gender bias with the other weblogging tools that Ciscley has mentioned, but not with MT.
Any initial reluctance to adopt MT is based on the installation, which can be a hassle for non-techies. However, this seems to effect both men and women equally, and is really dependent on how comfortable the person is with Perl and CGI. Once installed and used, though, MT users can be fanatical in support, regardless of gender. I know — I’m a fanatical MT user.
(“Hello, my name is Burningbird, and I’m addicted to Moveable Type.”)
Why do I like MT? Because it’s a lovely, lovely piece of software. Powerful enough for all my needs, hooks that allow one to tweak if we wish, and now it has the MySql backend, which for a data person such as myself, is pure heaven, with little chocolate sprinkles on top.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, if Movable Type is an example of software resulting from a paired man/woman collaboration team, then I think it’s time for the software industry to look at its development practices.
(Notice how I didn’t once use “—ism”? I’m getting better. And Christine, I have Trackback enabled. Do I get a cookie? Sorry for the double ping, but MT went crazy — it pinged you three times, blo.gs, weblogs.com, and my mother. It also scritched my kitty underneath her neck, and washed the dishes in passing.)