A long, long time ago (near the beginning of blog time) Movable Type was born.

Unlike many previous rivals (i.e.  Blogger and LiveJournal), Movable Type allowed bloggers to host the software upon their own servers, eliminating the need to rely on corporate hosting without breaking the bank.

In order to feed their families, the Movable Type monks charged businesses a fee to use their software while allowing individuals to use Movable Type for free.

But that was before the dark times, before the rise of the WordPress empire. Fast forward to today and Movable Type has (more or less) fallen out of the lime light.

While Blogger and WordPress have become house hold names (at least among my less than tech savvy non-geek friends), Movable Type has diminished in popularity as evidenced by the rise of Tumblr.

But all is not lost my Movable Type lovin’ friends, as their is still hope for Six Apart’s favorite child to regain its former glory by adapting to times (aka make Movable Type relevant for the new millennium). read more

Ever since its launch in 1998, the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, has continued to grow and always expanded more and more. Today when thinking of Google it isn’t just a search engine anymore but also one of the biggest advertising platform world wide (the biggest?), a software distributor and a mobile phone manufacturer. Google is rumoured to venture even further and recently announced Google TV, an operating system for television sets. Only yesterday the company announced that it is positioning itself better in the VOIP and telephony space as well. Nobody knows when the company will stop to acquire and expand its services.

The Blog Herald team had a look at the history and timeline of Google and all this info was compiled in an infographic.

Thanks to the team of Infographiclabs who created this infographic for us.

Search Engine Optimisation is by many considered necessary, others say that it’s all about the content and other will even go as far as to call SEO a way to trick out Google. The truth is that it’s a mi9x of all these elements and then some: great content is required to receive links and go viral on social media networks, ‘SEO tricks’ will improve how your site ranks. The team of BloggingPro sat down and created the ultimate basic guide to SEO, in the form of an infographic.

View the complete graphic over at BloggingPro

This is a guest entry by Jean-Baptiste Jung from Cats Who Blog.

Feedburner, the popular RSS tool, is used by many bloggers to serve feeds to their readers, but also in order to know how many people are currently subscribing to their blog using RSS. Despite the fact it can be easily hijacked, RSS subscriber count is one of the ways used to measure the popularity of a blog.

Back in 2008, Feedburner was bought by Google. It sounded interesting at first, but no significant improvements were made to the service, and shortly after Google took ownership, a major problem occurred, and millions of blogs saw their count dive from 5000 to 500.

Since last month, I have seen my subscriber count going up and down every day and show unrealistic numbers.
Look at the screenshort below:

On June 12, CatsWhoBlog had 1,730 RSS readers. Three days later, it had 1,110. And on June 21, according to Feedburner, only 437 were still reading my blog. read more

This is a guest post is by Ann Smarty, founder of a community of guest bloggers: My Blog Guest and first contribution as part of a new My Blog Guest – Splashpress Media partnership.

I used to be highly advocative of guest blogging as an effective link building strategy. I used to tell people that this way they could get a quality link back from a high-authority website for free. I used to say, these links (coming from high-quality content) are well-deserved and thus can’t be frowned upon by Google.

But now I wish I hadn’t said that.

Like many other things done online to promote yourself, the concept of guest blogging as the way to build links is being so much abused that it makes me shudder.

People go around spreading poor-quality content (even paying sometimes to get it posted on the blog) and call that "guest posting". They send spam guest posting pitches and tell you they would "guest post for you for free" (never trust a spammer offering you anything for free. Spammers have nothing of value to offer!).

Now I am telling you: Don’t build links using guest posts. Forget about links. read more

SeededBuzz is a site that promises to help bloggers promote themselves.

Blog posts are promoted using what are called Seeds, which are summaries of a blog post that has been written on a topic that you think other bloggers may want to also write about. The idea is other bloggers read these Seeds, get inspired and write about the same topic, and link to the Seed owners post in doing so.

The blogger that has then written about the Seed can then submit their post on the same page as the Seed that inspired them, under what is called Buzz. The idea is both Seeds and Buzz attract visitors and link.

As a way of discovering new topics to write about this looks like a great idea. Seeds that have attracted Buzz and valuable backlinks should also find that their search engine rankings get a welcome boost. Quality links are never easy to come by.

Other community features I like include the ability to receive and offer Guest Posts, and the tagging of Seeds that inspired you for a later date. read more

The link request can be a very effective tool for link building but it seems to be underused by bloggers. Many of them are hesitant to ask for links. They think it is too intrusive and spammy. Or they are not confident in their content.

Others have tried sending a couple requests but they didn’t have success so they stopped.

If you haven’t had success, here’s a principle that can help. Also, this principle can build your confidence and help you realize that link requests don’t have to be spammy. read more

Happy Monday, folks! This week we’ve got a handful of new plugins for you. I have not had a chance to try these personally, so if anybody has, please let us know what you think in the comments.

AutoSmileys — Sebastian Böthin has written a plugin that replaces text-based emoticons with images. The plugin comes with a default list of emoticons to replace, but you can customize that list as much as you want. And AutoSmileys can be used just about anywhere — entries, comments, pages, and more.

Garmin Connect Action Stream — Garmin Connect is a social training log that lets you track and share your training activities using Garmin GPS devices. This plugin from Scott Hill adds those activities to your Action Stream. read more

Rand Fishkin has an interesting prediction in his recent post, 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010. He believes that Twitter will become a part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

His argument is that Google has a history of innovating their algorithm to take account the most relevant link sources. And now it seems that Twitter has become the top place to share links instead of blogs and social news sites.

read more

Happy Monday, folks! Things seem to be a bit slow in the Movable Type community right now. I think it’s a combination of the holidays and impending release of MT5. Still, we’ve got a few news items to tell you about.

Mike from Code Monkey Ramblings has forked Byrne Reese’s jQuery Comment plugin. This doesn’t seem to be a radical departure from the original. Instead, Mike has concentrated on small tweaks that improve the plugin and extend its compatibility with existing themes. read more