and then there are “public companies”. It has been two weeks since Six Apart asked how people use Movable Type, and on Friday it will be two weeks since Mena Trott posted a short “it’s quiet, we’re working” blog entry in Mena’s Corner. It’s amazing that they persist in communicating so little with their customers.

This has had two effects. First, by not communicating effectively about their product, they force a kind of Kremlinology-lite among interested customers. Second, Six Apart has noticed this (not hard) but they see scared to death of it while resenting it at the same time. (See, there’s some Kremlinology right there!) I give them all the slack in the world on this whole issue, and this post is intended to be nothing but constructive. But almost two weeks of no public communication in the midst of a product launch? When their customers have very clearly let them know that they need more? It boggles the mind!

Marketing is not an add-on. A PR strategy is not a nice-to-have. Communication is not optional, it is not a second thought. This stuff is MORE important than development on the eve of (or during) a major product launch. There should be a steady flow of information – official, unofficial, anecdotal, simple reactions (“oh we never knew THAT, how fun!”), developing thoughts, etc. I really hope they get this together.

Movable Type and their new pricing structure, but it was too long for the front page of the blog so I’ve moved it over to my “Words” section (which has been horribly underused in the past while): Charging for Movable Type.

now, I’m giving up on Kinja and I’m going to exclude Kinja from my site in the future. It’s not that I’m outraged or anything, it’s just that to me, the site never lived up to anything close to what it promised. None of the shortcomings are even killers – it’s more a “death by a thousand cuts” kind of thing. The honking big CNet ad didn’t help, but it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, not the whole load. Other problems with Kinja? It seems very fickle about what it picks up and when, it often suffers from post-dumps from particular sites, it doesn’t deal with accents very well, posts are frequently out of sequence, and, even more, it doesn’t give me anything new, anything I can’t get better in a dozen other places. It’s too bad – judging by the look of the thing and the reputation of the folks who worked on it, I expected a lot more.

Caterina right now on the CBC’s Sounds like Canada.

One thing that people have noticed about the new Blogger is that there are lots of redirected links in Blogger sites. According to Blogger, one of the reasons for this is to ensure that Blogger’s relationship and proximity to Google doesn’t influence things like Pagerank. More info from Blogger Help : Why do links on blogger.com (and in comments) redirect through google.com and blogger.com?