Just Bru

SixApart just announced the new release of MovableType.

the BlogMob effect
Aside from the changelog, that's really interesting, and the fact that the new plugin api opens a new universe of possibilities to third party developers, there are two big news that made the blogosphere (or at least the part of it that I live in) shake today so much so that, by the time I'm writing this, 6A site's still unreachable. For what it concerns me, this is the first time an event in the blogosphere creates a "slashdot" effect. As I was saying a few minutes ago on #joiito, I was used to see this effect when a famous portal higlighted some big news, acting like a lighthouse pointing his beacon to the target host. This is different thing: the meme spread through the net as a rumor, and more and more people either went to see what was happening, or either wrote their own trackbacking comment. All this traffic (trackback is much heavier activity than simple browsing) brought the site to its knees...

...the news
First one is licensing. Much of the rumor is about the fact that MT isn't free anymore. Well, this is not quite true: there's a personal edition downloadable for free :) Still, there are licensing limits on this edition: no more than one author and no more than 3 blogs. This is also interesting: for what I've been able to test in 1 hour of playtesting, there are no license enforcements in the code. Just a matter of licensing trust. I appreciated that.
Oh, and here's an post about 6A's commitment to a free version.
Second news is the contest: if you are a MT plugin developer, there are prizes for 20k$ awaiting you. You just have to submit your work before june 18th and... be resident in one of many countries... that DO NOT INCLUDE ITALY :(
Really can't see why?!?
Looks like the upcoming version of MT-Location won't be part of the contest... what a pity, isn't it?

Edit: For anybody interested in the contest-eligible-countries thing, here's the official reply of SixApart to my request for explanation (i'm gonna quote just the part of the letter that's pertinent):

We are excited about the contest too, but unfortunately, we had to abide by international laws now that we're bigger than Ben and Mena's living room. I don't know the details, but our lawyers looked it up and there are issues that make it very difficult for us to include Italy. Very sorry...but I swear this wasn't our choice. :(

So, thank you very much 6A for your reply, and goodbye to dreams of glory ;)

As a side effect, there's been a very interesting session on IRC about blog engines, with guest stars like photomatt maker of wordpress, and rayners of MT Plugin Manager. Here's also a link to a post by Steph about requirements of a good blog tool. Must read.

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