TypePad Business Class and Movable Type Enterprise is aimed at the growing corporate market for blogging.Six Apart announced two new business-oriented blogging products on March 7, which the company said are meant to capitalize on the growing blogging trend among small and midsize businesses and large corporations.
TypePad Business Class is a hosted service aimed primarily at companies with high-traffic Web sites using blogs to communicate to their audiences.
Movable Type Enterprise, a server-based blogging tool meant for large-scale internal deployments, was released in Japan and is currently in beta tests with several U.S. companies. There was no immediate date scheduled for a U.S. release candidate version.
"Yes absolutely we're seeing an increase in businesses blogging," said Six Apart vice president Anil Dash. "We're also seeing customers needing to deploy blogs quickly, without taking up the IT department's time and resources."
Why corporate blogs are boring (and how to fix them). Click here to read more.
According to Six Apart, TypePad Business Class offers advanced customization for layout control, advanced comment and spam controls, unlimited blogger accounts, additional bandwidth allowances and premium technical support.
TypePad Business Class is available immediately, starting at $89.95 per blog per month, for 4GB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth per month.
Movable Type Enterprise extends database support to the Oracle 10g database, integrates with enterprise authentication tools such as LDAP, and offers unlimited blogs.
With these releases, Six Apart is betting that 2006 will be an expansive year for blogging. According to blog search and tracking service Technorati, the number of blogs is doubling every five months, is sixty times bigger than it was five years ago, and currently comprises about 28 million blogs.
Blogging has been on the business radar since at least 2004, when blogs contributed significantly to the election season.
According to research done by Wired executive editor Chris Anderson and author/blogger Doc Searls, almost 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies are now blogging.
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