I got this email from uber-blogger Joi Ito (who incidentally is an investor in the company that markets Movable Type) concerning my ongoing review of WordPress. It’s not a review of Movable Type and my preliminary comments about Movable Type was an explanation of why I choose WordPress and I should have made it more clear about hearsay decision making. I will make all this clear in the final review. I have nothing against Movable Type. After I’m more comfortable with CSS and PHP I’ll look over other products. I have no idea why the cheap shots about Indians in India, though. My feelings about offshoring have to do with Amrican interests versus overseas interests. But this does not affect anything I review in terms of determining quality of product.

Hey John,

I think your comparison with of MT vs. Wordpress was a bit screwed up.
Here’s an email from our guys.

– Joi

—
Blog http://joi.ito.com/
Wiki http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/
Blog JP: http://joi.ito.com/jp/

—— Forwarded Message
From: Anil Dash
Organization: Six Apart
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 10:09:57 -0700
To: ‘Joichi Ito’
Subject: RE: setting dvorak straight

I don’t know if Dvorak’s getting his information from blogs these days, but as an Honest-To-God Journalist, I thought he was supposed to waste time with fact checking and all that other blather, no?

I checked out John’s Wordpress review and caught a couple of glaring errors, just in the first few grafs.

First, Movable Type has a lot *fewer* commercial restrictions now. You can do whatever you want with AdSense ads, Amazon Affiliates, CafePress merch, or anything else you want. It wasn’t fun trying to explain to a lawyer that people can download our app for free and use it to make money on AdSense ads, but it happened. (I know ’cause I did it.)

There’s even licenses for hosting or anything else you’d like to do for advanced uses. And you can *buy* a license, which comes with real support from real people. John will be happy to know that those people are located in the Midwestern United States, as I know all too well of his disdain for the work of Indians. Well, at least Indians in India. I assume I’m okay since I was born here in the U.S.

We’re trying to *encourage* people to make money with blogs. Hell, that’s why we’re giving away $20,000 to developers this week, and why all of the top money-making blogs are on Movable Type. Instapundit? Gawker? Gizmodo? Fleshbot? John Kerry and George Bush? All those blogs are Movable Type-powered. Not to mention all the people outside of our company who are making a living working with Movable Type.

Going back to tech stuff, we’ve got more moderation features (you can use your own sign-in system for commenters, or one we provide, or just moderate comments on an individual basis, or any combination of these) than any other tool out there. And we even have a sign-up-and-go option for people who want a hosted service without configuring or setting up anything.

(That’s TypePad, let me know if I should set up an account for John.)

Anyway, enough ranting. If John wants to evaluate a tool first-hand and see how much easier his blogging can be, as well as how much better static pages can stand up to something like a slashdotting, let me know. I’d be glad to set him up.

Or, since I’m in California now, I can have lunch with him and harangue him appropriately. :)

Anil Dash