Six Apart, a provider of weblog software, yesterday announced that Yahoo! Web Hosting is now offering its MovableType blogging software, bringing easy installation, speedy performance and full customization to businesses and independent professionals seeking to maintain high-traffic blogs on a scalable and reliable platform.
Under the agreement, Yahoo Web Hosting customers will be able to create blogs using Six Apart’s MovableType software.
Anyone who wants to make use of weblogs to communicate to a wider audience, without the hassle of managing them, can now take advantage of Yahoo!’s Web Hosting product and the blogging solutions of Six Apart.
SixApart offers MovableType software for blog publishing, the TypePad personal blogging service and LiveJournal, an online community organized around personal blogs. The company optimized its software specifically for Yahoo’s hosting environment, with an eye toward offering customers a professional-strength application.
The latest version of blogging software can be installed on Yahoo! Web Hosting in seconds. As with all Yahoo! Web Hosting services, this professional blogging solution includes a free domain, blog/web site hosting, and business-class email. Other features include – scalability, reliability, ease-of-use, customer support, BusinesMail, security from spam and speed.
The service is available immediately upon purchase of a Yahoo! Web Hosting package at www.sixapart.com/movabletype/yahoo, starting at $11.95 per month.
Blogging is quickly moving into the mainstream as companies grow their businesses by using blogs for marketing purposes, for internal workgroups and even for content management, said Anil Dash, Six Apart’s vice president of professional products.
With tens of millions of existing blogs and an estimated 70 thousand new blogs being created everyday, Yahoo is committed to meeting the needs of the growing blogosphere, by helping bloggers focus on their content and their audience, rather than on their infrastructure, said Rich Riley, vice president and general manager of Yahoo Small Business, in a statement.
By partnering with Yahoo! and customizing Movable Type specifically for their environment, we have created the best Movable Type experience on the web. Professionals now have an easy way to install, customize and expand their Movable Type weblogs, all hosted and managed by the recognized leader in website and blog hosting, said Dash.
Meanwhile, Yahoo announced its purchase of del.icio.us, a site where people can store and share their bookmarks. That buy and this agreement both illustrate Yahoo’s increasingly people-centric strategy, differentiating itself from search leader Google’s by-the-numbers engineering-centric offerings.
In a research note, IT analysts Delphi Group wrote, The del.icio.us acquisition is the third in a series of ‘social software’ acquisitions, and makes abundantly clear Yahoo’s commitment to leveraging the social nature of the Web as a new avenue with high potential for improving user experience and driving new eyeballs and net new ad revenue related to that improvement."
With the Moveable Type business blogging offering, Yahoo gets more "social" still.