Comments on: More SA/ TypePad coverage

By: Andy Wibbels

Andy Wibbels — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:46:30 +0000

Instant results. I’m guessing most marketing departments shudder at the thought of waiting for IT to decide that WordPress is secure enough to be hosted on an intranet or to get their minions to learn MT’s tag system.

By: Anil

Anil — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:02:54 +0000

There’s a number of reasons businesses choose TypePad, starting first with the large number of features that are unique to the system. (Built in podcasting, video blogging, TypeLists, moblogging, etc.) There’s also the built-in technical support that’s integrated with the system, the compatibility with the Movable Type blogs that many of those organizations are already running, and of course the fact that people can get up and running quickly without installing anything of having to manage anything.

That’s a pretty compelling combination, from what I know from having worked in publishing myself.

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:10:08 +0000

There’s also the issue of running multiple Weblogs from a single installation, something WordPress is not very good at, to say the least. While that is slated to improve, when the newspapers needed to get blogs online, they had to go with a technology actually viable at the time. They could upgrade later, I suppose, but they won’t.

By: Haasim

Haasim — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:55:02 +0000

Well I can understand using wanting to be a part of the blogspot community. So many of the bloggers on that service get exposure through the “next blog” feature. But TypePad is hardly anymore of a community than DreamHost web hosting.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 15:58:05 +0000

Maybe it’s the old S.S. Theory.

Sheer Stupidity.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 10:27:24 +0000

Outsourcing. It’s all about outsourcing.

They probably figure it’s cheaper to use the off-the-shelf service than run it in-house with their own IT people.

By: Bitch | Lab

Bitch | Lab — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 07:20:24 +0000

While not comparable to the organizations you list, the reason my small company’s marketing director insisted on using blogspot, when we could perfectly well host it ourselves, was being hooked instantly into a community of fell blogspot users. (I found this particularly embarassing as we were an IT company! It made us appear to be clueless to tech saavy blog readers.)

For the larger companies, it’s often about a sales pitch going over particularly well and sometimes they’d prefer to “rent” rather than buy for tax reasons that always seem opaque to me.

By: Haasim

Haasim — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:53:26 +0000

It saddens me that the Toronto Star would stupidly host their blogs on TypePad. I guess they figured installing MT would be too daunting a task for any technician, while failing to recognize open-source alternatives (WordPress) are not inherantly inferior. I found TypPad appealing for a few seconds, until I realized I would be given up the kind of control only a web hosting provider (with FTP access, web logs, PHP, CGI, and all that jazz) can provide.