Yahoo added Movable Type blogging software to its Web hosting offerings,
thanks to a partnership announced on Monday.
Under the agreement, Yahoo Web Hosting customers will be able to create
blogs using Six Apart’s Movable Type software.
Six Apart offers Movable Type 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.
“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.
The service is available immediately, starting at $11.95 a month, with
the purchase of a Yahoo Web Hosting package.
Six Apart’s January purchase
of blogging community LiveJournal caught the attention of independent stock
analyst David Jackson, editor of the Internet Stock Blog.
Back then, Jackson thought the now-bulkier company would be a nice acquisition
target for Yahoo.
On Friday, Yahoo announced its purchase of del.icio.us, a site where
people can store and share their bookmarks. That buy and today’s agreement
both illustrate Yahoo’s increasingly people-centric strategy,
differentiating itself from search leader Google’s by-the-numbers,
engineering-centric offerings.
Commenting on the del.icio.us deal, Jackson wrote, “Yahoo seems to
be rolling up ‘Web 2.0’ startups. Its strategy hasn’t changed since the announcement
of Yahoo 360: create a highly ‘sticky’ bundle of communication,
publishing and productivity tools, and glue them together with integration
and social networking. In many cases, acquiring will be cheaper than
building.”
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.
