Yahoo! adds blogging to small business offering

By Steve Malone

Posted on 13 Dec 2005 at 10:21

Internet portal Yahoo! has upgraded its offerings to small business by integrating the Movable Type business blogging software with its web hosting operation.

Moveable Type is a fully featured blogging service. The service has its own interface and allows a customer to create any number of blogs which might be for each workgroup or for every person in the company. Users can choose between static page generation or dynamic pages to optimise blogs on a per-template basis.

It combines proprietary template tags with standard HTML which, SixApart says, can be integrated with an existing website design and create custom output formats using standard tools like Adobe GoLive CS2. It also supports standard XML formats like RSS and Atom.

The companies promise easy installation of the latest version of Movable Type into Yahoo! hosting, with automatic upgrades, with SixApart saying it has tuned the software specifically for Yahoo!'s hosting environment. Using technologies such as FastCGI the company claims that the performance of Movable Type is some 140 per cent faster than the majority of other hosting environments.

SixApart has included a number of plugins including a rich text editor, the StyleCatcher plugin for customising designs and (natch) now features for integration with Yahoo! Search.

The Yahoo! web hosting service will allow a virtually unlimited number of blogs with up to 200GB worth of data transfer per month and 5GB of disk space for posts and graphics. It also offers 200 email addresses based on the business's domain and features SpamGuard Plus and Norton Antivirus.

Many companies have introduced 'company blogs' on their web sites to provide a less formal method of business communication beyond the press release. While many of these are dismissed merely as 'flogs' - just selling the company line, a recent survey found most people regarded blogs as more trustworthy.

Further information is at the Yahoo! small business website.