Last week I installed the Blogrush applet here on the website, and for the past week I have been monitoring how much traffic the applet is bringing to the website.

After a week of utilization and careful examination of log files and statistics I saw no inbound traffic being generated, which made me do some investigating.

What I found is that some of the sites with links on the applet don’t appear to be running the Blogrush applet on their own pages, yet somehow their articles are being listed in the Blogrush applet on my blog.

The way it is supposed to work is for each page load you have you get a reciprocal listing on another site and vice versa. I am questioning how people are getting links in my applet with no apparent blogrush applet running on their own site.

For example, this link on Mashable which showed up on my GNC applet has no Blogrush applet loading. I assumed they were getting credits from their home page or other Mashable page. When I went to the Mashable home page their was no BlogRush Applet on that page either.

In fact I looked all over the Mashable website and I did not see the applet any place. Maybe I am missing it somewhere but how is Mashable getting a link in the Blogrush Applet if they are not running the Blogrush applet on their website? I could have missed the applet but I looked at a lot of pages.

While this is just one example, there are a lot more sites like this that I came across. Are the Blogrush folks allowing people to pay to have their articles listed? Are sites abusing the system somehow and racking up credits?

I can accept no inbound traffic — that is part of the game — but it looks awful fishy to me when I can’t find the applet on some participating websites that are getting listings on my own blog.

On Oct 24th I ranted pretty hard on Movable Type not only on my blog, but also in my podcast. In my opinion, it was well-deserved. Bryne Reese at Six Apart listened and did some work on his own time to put together a podcasting plugin for Movable Type.

My schedule has been pretty crazy and I have not had a chance to test it yet, but I am pretty confident that the plugin will gets us started in the right direction. I have remained loyal to Movable Type because it simply does a lot more than WordPress does. The management of the multiple sites I run under a single installation of MovableType cannot be accomplished with any other blogging platform.

But like many other Moveable Type users I have been fairly critical of the pace of development, and their continued focus more on their pro-net developers versus listening to end users. I think they still have some work to do to get connected with their user community again.

I do appreciate Bryne and I am hopeful that he understands and the rest of the team understands that many of us remain passionate MT users and have invested heavily in development of our brand with MT, and hope that they really listen to our needs as time moves forward.

There is one more thing, though, that I completely disagree with, and this is SixApart’s continued heavy investment and promotion of ATOM. They have been trying without success to get vendors aka Apple iTunes and others to support enclosures in ATOM feeds. First of all, the public is already confused enough. But give me a break. ATOM has not been widely adopted and for the time being RSS will be the way Podcasts are delivered and indexed.

I don’t publicly display my Atom feed and in fact have not looked at the template in several years simply because RSS readers and syndication sites largely do not support it.

I look forward to the core podcasting changes and also look forward to updating my MT installation so it can be upgraded to MT4. MovableType.org

Hey folks looks like I will be headed out to Las Vegas next week for the BlogWorldExpo. I will be getting in to Vegas on Wednesday morning and will be leaving on Saturday.

If your are a blogger or podcaster headed out to the show. I would love to sit down with you and talk story about the blogging and podcasting space. If your part of the Geek News Central Ohana lets hook up. My cell is 808–741–4923

The event should be a lot of fun and well you know it’s Vegas. BlogWorldExpo.com

From today forward I will no longer recommend MovableType as a viable new media blogging / podcasting platform. I will recommend WordPress to any and all that ask my advice.

SixApart in my eyes is a failure in leadership and understanding of the current utilization of their platform by paying customers by both the MT4 team leaders and senior management of Six Apart.

I do not say this lightly and I had hoped that the MT4 product release would have some of the native support WordPress has for new media and podcasting.

This is a product that I believed in significantly. I took the time in early 2005 to discuss how to implement podcasting support in MovableType in my award-winning podcasting book because it was a good platform to publish from at the time.

For the past three years we have relied upon a “single plugin” from Brandon Fuller to allow MovableType users to post our podcast and have compliant RSS feeds with Enclosures:“All was well”.

To my dismay today when working on the upgrade to MT4 I found out that the development team put little or no thought into their supposed announced podcasting support from back in July.

Their mistake was relying on their pronet team to get their implementation right. The sad thing is all they had to do was look at the integrated WordPress functionality to understand why their implementation was flawed. A five minute conversation with a MT user that was a podcaster would have put them on the right track and not set them up for this huge failure. 

They bragged to the world on the development blog how MT4 would have podcasting support. Well it’s late November and I have figured out that in simple fact they do not have really have podcasting support for the way the vast majority of us have to publish our shows.

Here is their Fundamental Flaw: They thought (incorrectly) that most podcasters would host their media in the same place as their blog, similar to how you would host an image file on your own site.

Little did they realize that many podcasters are getting multiple thousands of downloads each day, and hosting media on the same server as the blog is not possible.

Today I submitted a trouble ticket asking how to get MT4 to recognize external media in the creation of the RSS feed.  This is the reply that confirmed what I figured out at 9am this morning.

Unfortunately, Movable Type 4 does not currently provide a
means to recognize externally linked files as assets and include them as an enclosure in an Atom or RSS feed.  You may wish to examine the Feed Manager plugin and see if it is able to meet your needs:

The MT-Enclosures plugin is currently not compatible with Movable Type 4, so you would not be able to use this plugin in a Movable Type 4 installation.  

First of all why is he even talking about ATOM? Who uses Atom and since when is podcasting supported through ATOM? You’re not going to get automated delivery through that protocol on any of the major sites.

Second you have got to be KIDDING me. WordPress has been able to do this for THREE years! So not only can I no longer upgrade to MT4 but I waited three years to go in the opposite direction, unless I can find a dedicated server that can handle the media deliveries and also serve the webpages.

Third, the FeedManager plugin does not do what needs to be done. My only hope is that Brandon Fuller can update his enclosure plugin so at least I don’t have to throw away thousands of dollars of design work.

This shows you the sheer lack of understanding of the MovableType development team and the  management of Six Apart.

HELLO, Six Apart this is 2007 and to not have native support for enclosures in 2007 shows that you are no longer in touch with what is happening in the real world.

While they will comment about how great the platform is, and how it handles media delivered internally to a single install in their walled garden,  they have no clue as to how the rest of the new media community really works. For a release that is supposed to be about new media maybe they need to make sure they cover the basics that the WordPress team has had in place for three years!

I am sure this comment will be discounted by all the SEO pundits out there, but I really think that some of these sites got slammed on their Google page rank over the past couple of days because a large percentage of them have a high percentage of links on their sites that intra-link and rarely link outwards. Granted while a few were playing the paid text link ad game not all were.

Additionally, a large number of the sites to come public largely link to other properties within their own networks, which indicates that Google is looking to make sure each of those properties can stand on their own without being propped up by a sister site.

While I hate to see anyone’s Page Rank penalized, I am sure that the SEO will figure out pretty quick what Google has done, and make changes to websites.

Or how about this as a thought? Maybe Google has figured out some of the new SEO games that are being pulled that I alluded to on Saturday, and is putting the hammer down!

Several months ago my site went from a PR7 to PR6 and I have never been able to figure out what happened. It really does not matter as the traffic to the website has stayed the same but it was disappointing.

A lot of these sites that got hammered also use the in-text advertising that is so annoying, which makes it nearly impossible to find a legitimate link on the site. Maybe Google put some usability rules into place.

I did do some review on this site’s templates today and found some links that needed a no follow added, so just in case that is what is causing sites to get hammered I want to make sure we have been proactive as possible.

So what’s your take? Why do you think Google has put the hammer down on so many supposedly popular websites?

I am in the process of upgrading this MovableType edition to version 4.0 and while I am pounding my head against the ground in that they once again made a lot of changes that is going to cause me to have to hire a developer to update the templates.

I probably could do it but I do not need the aggravation. But lets talk about podcast and new media support in MT4. First of all lack of documentation. For a paid product SixApart documentation is still terrible and you have to go through 20 pages of stuff to find a single thing. I would just prefer a PDF with all of the documentation. It would make life easier.

Second unlike WordPress they do not support podcast publishing in a way that is native. You have to guess how they support it and I really quite honestly hate it.

First you have to upload a file which the high majority of us do not do. Most of us push our media to a third party site and then drop in a link. The way MT 3.35 worked was beyond simple because a plugin took care of detecting any enclosures that was embedded in the text. In MT4 the enclosure plugin seems to not work anymore. But if you want to get MT4 to detect a media file you have to upload it and go through about a dozen steps to figure it out.

My Advice to SixApart, look at what the wordpress folks are doing, copy how they did it and implement that in MT4 and make it simple. I can honestly say this version runs slower than MT 3.35 and while the menus are pretty they are less functional then the old design and it takes forever for pages to load.

I am not sure who SixApart built this platform for but for me at least I am not so sure I want to upgrade now.