As we continue through our list of what's new in Movable Type 4.0, one of the innovations that's had the community most excited is the built-in support for OpenID authentication for commenters. We've been talking about the momentum around OpenID for months -- over 100 million identities are OpenID-compatible today. And now, with MT4, any of those users can sign in to comment on your blog without having to create a new login or password: Movable Type 4 includes OpenID authentication for your commenters, built right in.

On top of general OpenID support, MT4 lets you add in service-specific plugins to provide even smoother integration between third-party OpenID-enabled services and your MT-powered site. Of course Movable Type 4 also provides its own built-in authentication service, if you choose. But some of the coolest options are the ones from other sites -- out of the box, MT4 has authentication integration for:

• Movable Type's built-in registration
  
• Generic OpenID
• LiveJournal
• TypeKey (includes all TypePad users)

But the energy that the MT4 community has shown since the platform's launch is reflected in OpenID support, as well. Community member Minh Nguy??…n has created an OpenID connector for AIM and AOL logins. That's almost 90 million potential users who don't have to create a password to sign in on your blog's comments! And our own Byrne Reese, product manager for Movable Type, has stepped to the plate with a WordPress OpenID Login plugin for MT4, which supports anyone using the wordpress.com service. Both of these are made possible through MT4's authentication plugin framework, which is accompanied by some spiffy new developer documentation.

We're always happy to see the industry embrace open standards, and as OpenID was first incubated at Six Apart, we're especially proud to have the first professional blogging system that's incorporated OpenID natively into the platform. We'll be watching carefully to see how you use OpenID on your sites, and expanding our support even further in the future.

Boing Boing is one of the biggest breakout successes in the history of blogging. From its roots as a zine cofounded by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair to its presence today as one of the most popular blogs ever, the site has exceeded all expectations. Guided by Mark, along with David Pescovitz, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing has influenced not just the blogosphere, but culture as a whole, leading the conversation on topics ranging from intellectual property to oddball gadgets to the fringes of art on the web.

And today, we’ve made them our Movable Type Featured Blog to celebrate the fact that they’ve relaunched on Movable Type 4.0. They’re using some of the most powerful features of the platform:

• MT4’s built-in user registration features let Boing Boing create its own database of registered users. Andif they want to support OpenID in the future as as sign-in option, MT4 has OpenID authentication built in.
• MT4’s ability to manage an unlimited number of blogs in one installation made it easy to launch Boing Boing Gadgets, which can share logins and management functions with Boing Boing itself. BB Gadgets is helmed by Joel Johnson, who’s no stranger to the big leagues of gadget blogs — he used MT every day as former editor of Gizmodo.
• MT4’s powerful comment management capabilities give new Boing Boing team member Teresa Nielsen Hayden the ability to oversee the site’s rambunctious and vibrant community. (You know Teresa from her venerable MT-powered blog Making Light.) And with MT’s multi-blog support, Teresa can manage comment on both Boing Boing blogs in one place.
• MT4’s flexible new templating features let our friends at Federated Media and Apperceptive take advantage of some unique features to help build the site’s new look. Cross-blog aggregation makes it easy to include content from more than one blog, and improvements to the templating language simplified the ability to choose exactly which content appears on each page.

There are, of course, many more people involved in a launch of this scale — Federated Media’s team played a pivotal role in everything from implementation to the business side of the launch, and you can read a bit about that on FM’s MT-powered blog. Jemma Hostetler created an amazing design that honors Boing Boing’s history while giving it a fresh, new look. And we’ve talked to Six Apart Professional Network members Apperceptive in a little more depth in an interview on our Professional Network site which talks a bit about the opportunities they’ve found in working with MT4 on sites like Boing Boing.

All of us on the Movable Type team at Six Apart are extremely proud to have played a small role in helping reinvent Boing Boing, and we’re thrilled that it does such a great job of showing what smart, talented bloggers can do with the power of Movable Type 4.

Ok, here’s a fun little blog mention that we’d been meaning to post after last week’s season finale episode of The Office. If you watch the NBC show, you’ll be familiar with the dark-hearted fan-favorite character Creed Bratton. In the finale, it’s revealed that Ryan had helped Creed set up a “blog”.

Of course (spoilers!) the blog itself turned out to just be an address at the top of a Word document. www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts wouldn’t have worked very well as a web address anyway.

But good news! Because NBC has a number of Movable Type Enterprise blogs for all their shows, they made quick work of setting up a real blog for Creed Thoughts. The show’s on hiatus for the summer now, of course, but there have already been some updates since the finale, sowe’re hoping the real Creed Bratton will keep blogging again once the show’s back in the fall. The idea has our inner Kelly Kapoor so excited!

(And don’t worry, Schrute fans, Dwight’s got a blog, too. Only he doesn’t like the word “blog”.)

A few years ago, Spider-Man came out and did a brilliant job of showing off the classic character, making it okay to really enjoy a “comic book movie” again. This summer’s sequel, Spider-Man 3 opens tomorrow and seems to be a lock for the first blockbuster film of the season. So naturally, we’re thrilled to make the Spider-Man 3 Official Movie Blog our Movable Type Featured Blog.

The Spider-Man 3 blog is full of the kind of content you’d expect — links to trailers, feeds for fans to subscribe to, and behind-the-scenes videos that show off the making of the film. But innovation abounds all over Sony’s efforts on the blog. There’s smart use of Movable Type’s categories feature to highlight content that includes rich media. You can find extensive use of embedded video to include clips right within the blog. And the team has reached out to the entire blogosphere by providing beautifully designed templates for use on your blog, including Movable Type templates, exclusive designs for LiveJournal users, and the first independent designs we’ve seen any major film create for the Vox community.

But most importantly, the Spider-Man 3 blog really embraces community. Nearly all of the entries tell stories of how fans are excited about the film, what they’ve done to enter or win contests, or what their experiences have been as the film gets ready to launch. Congratulations to the fans and filmmakers who’ve done some heroic web-slinging to help create and launch the Spider-Man 3 Official Movie Blog.

Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com, but though he has a high-profile position, he complements his official statements with his own personal thoughts on his blog All Things Distributed. Because of the intelligent way that Werner’s All Things Distributed acts as a personal complement to his professional work, it’s a great choice as today’s Movable Type Featured Blog.

What do we mean? Well, a few Six Apart folks were at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference earlier this week, and we saw a great keynote presentation on Amazon’s web services platform. Now, we’re big believers in this kind of technology — that’s why we get so excited about things like Amazon’s TypePad widgets. But in addition to making great web services, we all have a human side to the things we write about on our blogs, even ones where the tagline claims to be a “weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems.”

And that’s where the fantastic disclaimer at the bottom of Werner’s blog comes in. It reads, in part:

This is a personal weblog. That means that the opinions voiced here are purely personal and they do not in any way represent the opinions, experiences or directions of my employer Amazon.com. If you take any of the statements on this weblog and use it as an official statement by Amazon.com you are knowingly misleading your audience. For official statements by Amazon.com visit the Amazon.com Virtual Media Room.

If I do write something worth referencing, and you feel strongly about the need to reference my affiliation, you should also mention in your reference that this is my personal weblog: “Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, mentions on his personal weblog that the Seahawks have a good shot at the Superbowl this year”.

If you can not play by these simple rules, please do not reference this weblog at all.

The truth of the matter is, we should be able to have personal blogs where we can speak freely without having to worry about them being a “gotcha” for the press or others to attribute our every thought as Official Corporate Policy. And while nobody can enforce a disclaimer like this one legally, it can be useful just to make the desire explicit. Best of all, getting the fine print out of the way means that we can all enjoy a chance to look inside the mind of one of the people who helps create the technology of one of the largest-scale sites on the web.

Have you found another example of someone creatively solving a problem with their blog? Submit the site and we’ll consider it as a Movable Type Featured Blog.

Climate change has been a… hot topic in the news, and even at the Oscars, for some time. But a lot of people who are concerned about the issue just want to know some steps they can take to help as individuals. TerraPass is an organization that lets you calculate your “carbon footprint”, or the total of the carbon dioxide emissions we create with daily activities such as driving, electricity use, or flying. And TerraPass provides the opportunity to help offset that old technology by investing in new technology that helps better the environment.

But communicating about complex issues around climate change such as renewable resources, investment in industrial efficiency and alternative energy sources is a tough task. So TerraPass uses their Movable Type-powered TerraBlog to explain the heart of their business: It’s not just a one-way channel for the company to talk about these issues, but a forum that supports a community of people who are asking the tough questions. And the company delivers their blog to their readers by leveraging Movable Type to notify their 20,000 email subscribers about new entries, and talk about relevant news of the day.

According to the staff of Terrapass “Movable Type is the core of how we do business.” It’s a ringing endorsement of the value a blog can add to your company’s relationships. If you’re using Movable Type to tell your community about your story, submit your site as a Movable Type Featured Blog and we’ll be glad to help you get the word out.

Adobe’s Apollo project is an ambitious undertaking: A rich application platform that combines the ubiquity and power of Adobe’s Flash and PDF formats with the user experience standards set by modern Ajax applications. With the release of today’s alpha test version of the platform, the team has reached an important milestone. But for the product to succeed, it’s going to take a lot of conversations with the developers, businesses, and eventually the actual users of Apollo for the platform.

With the success of such a huge project relying on a strong dialogue between Adobe and its community, we had to mark the release of the Apollo alpha by making Mike Downey’s blog our Movable Type Featured Blog. Mike is the Senior Product Manager for Apollo at Adobe, and he’s been blogging on Movable Type as part of the Adobe Blogs community for years, including back in the Macromedia days before the companies merged. And the same is true for other Apollo team members — folks like Mike Chambers are must-subscribe bloggers for any fan of Adobe technology.

So if you want to see what’s coming down the road from Adobe, be sure to take a look at blogs like Mike’s, and then head over to the Adobe Labs site to grab the code and start hacking. But don’t be shy about feedback — the Adobe team has distinguished themselves from day one by really listening to the comments and blog posts that people write about their products.

Today’s Movable Type Featured Blog is a special one: It’s Ze Frank’s The Show, one of the most popular video blogs in the world, which is signing off tomorrow in the end of an amazing one-year run that’s culminated with Ze being widely recognized as one of the key innovators in the young medium.

Now, Ze’s How To Dance Properly was already knocking around as one of the then-young blogosphere’s favorite links half a decade ago when Movable Type was first created. And I had the chance to see Ze’s first public presentation at the Gel Conference a few years ago, where his skills as a performer were already strongly in evidence. So Ze Frank’s bonafides as someone who really gets the web were already well-established long before The Show ever launched; In fact, Ze’s been posting updates in Movable Type and embedding videos on his site for years. But what’s impressive is how well he’s understood the unique artistic requirements of the nascent video blogging medium, and used experience from one era of blogging to help kick-start a new one.

So as Ze gets ready to retire The Show, it seems there is a parallel to a comedic talent who helped define an earlier video medium’s first forays: Lucille Ball. Because, though there are lots of video bloggers doing great work today, only one year ago there had been very few breakout stars. And many of those who were creating video blogs had simply tried to bring their text blogs into the video world.

The same was true of television in the early days — radio stars were often reading off the same scripts they’d used on the air, only now they were doing it in front of cameras. But I Love Lucy helped define a vocabulary that was native to the new medium. The sitcom genre that the show invented was uniquely of, and uniquely for video on television. And Ze’s Show shares many of the same traits as that show: It’s full of a strongly physical sense of humor, a canny understanding of how to frame and feature an extremely expressive face, and it has a pacing and timing that makes all the work that comes before it seem downright languid.

So, while it’s bittersweet to be featuring a blog that’s nearing its end, it’s also wonderful to recognize someone who’s already become a huge influence on a whole new generation of video bloggers. And it’s good to acknowledge one more similarity between a pioneering television show and a pioneering video blog — they both know how to exit gracefully while at the top of their game. Congratulations to Ze, and we can’t wait to see what he shows us next.

Learning Movable Type isn’t just today’s Movable Type Featured blog, it’s a cornerstone of our community and one of the best resources that exists for, well, learning Movable Type.

Elise Bauer has been maintaining the site for years as an indispensable reference for all of us who spend our days working and playing with the platform. Along with her collaborators Jesse Gardner and Arvind Satyanarayan (whom you might remember from our post a couple of weeks ago), Elise has been posting tutorials and how-tos that explain even the most technical concepts in perfectly understandable plain English.

But what’s really exciting is what the team’s done now: They haven’t just redesigned the site, they’ve reimagined it, as a truly community-driven effort. Everyone in the community who has something to share is welcome to publish their articles on the site and become a contributor. Most fittingly, Learning Movable Type shows off what Movable Type itself can really do: check out the smart organization of the site, grouped by topic (categories) or by subject (tags) or by contributor (authors). And new technology features like a community search make it easy to find the best Movable Type resources, regardless of where they are on the web.

We’re really excited to see the renewed level of energy around the Movable Type community these days, so it’s most appropriate that one of the flagship resources for the community has been reborn. But don’t take our word for it — go check out the all-new Learning Movable Type, maybe even contribute an article of your own, and see exactly what makes the site so special.

Back in January, we praised Time for really embracing blogs as a key part of their redesigned website. The new collection of blogs are all hosted on TypePad Business Class or powered by Movable Type, and there’s also a great new blog that covers all the areas that are in Time’s domain, called The Ag.

Great sites like this don’t just happen — they come into being with the help of members of Six Apart’s Professional Network. In this case, Time turned to the expertise of a longtime Movable Type stalwart, Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting.

Now that the blog’s been up and running successfully for a while, we thought we’d ask Chad some questions about how the site came into being.

6A: How did you first find out that Time was looking to redo their blogs?

EC: I’ve been working with Time since November of 2005 on a variety of projects. That came from a referral via Six Apart, to work on the redesign of Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” blog when he moved over to TypePad Business Class (and to Time). I don’t think that he’s part of Time any longer, however - it looks like he left earlier in February to move to The Atlantic - but he still uses the design that I implemented, for the most part :).

6A: And which blogs specifically did you work on for the Time team?

EC: In a variety of capacities, I’ve worked on: Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, The Global Health Blog, The Allen Report, Real Clear Politics and of course The Ag. Though not strictly blogs, I’ve done some other work for Time, including their White House Photo of the Day site and an implementation of a new design for their various search results pages.

6A: Which platforms were they using for their blogs? Did your skills transfer between the hosted TypePad blogs and the Movable Type-powered blogs they hosted themselves?

EC: What is perhaps most interesting is that when we started, all of their blogs - of which I am aware - were on the TypePad platform. While the hosted platform offered some nice features, it didn’t allow others, so before too long, we ended up implementing Movable Type as well. Now, the pendulum has shifted, with only the “Global Health” blog still existing on TypePad (Andrew Sullivan is as well, but he is with someone else now). It’s a big change. Plus, even more blogs are on the Movable Type platform. The skills transferred easily between Movable Type and TypePad, because the templates are nearly identical - there are only a few tags that don’t transfer between the two platforms, which made moving a breeze, and Time seemed to appreciate how quickly things went. The hardest thing was getting the right web host for the new platform. Once that was in place, getting things rolled out took no time at all. In fact, we were able to mostly copy the existing templates for two blogs that we were getting ready to roll out on TypePad, and they were up and running quickly.

6A: What were the biggest surprises of working on the project?

EC: The biggest surprise was that, even though this was probably the largest project - at least in terms of marketing/impact - it was very likely the smallest in terms of how long it took us to scope it and get it out the door. All of the knowledge that we had gained to this point allowed us to get The Ag up and running very quickly. While the first project we did isn’t exactly the same, because it was more of a one-off project, it took much longer to put together. But The Ag was a much faster turnaround, and we were really able to leverage the knowledge that we had been building. So in turn it was a huge return on the knowledge we had built.

6A: Was it nice working on a site where everybody knows the company you’re working for?

EC: Though working for Time is nice, I don’t know that it ultimately matters much. I’m more like the Wizard of Oz, the guy behind the curtain, so it doesn’t really matter that much which project I’m working on at the time. The interface looks the same to me whether it’s a large multinational or a mom-and-pop, so it ultimately isn’t all that important in the end.

6A: How has being in the Six Apart Professional Network helped you with your work, if at all?

EC: Being in ProNet helps on two fronts. One is that referrals like this can make a difference. Here is a job that originally came in well over a year ago, and there is still income being generated from it, because the lead was a solid one. The other is that it provides a group of generally like-minded individuals where you can share success stories and help to foster a community of support for one another.

The great news is, Everitz Consulting isn’t just for newsmagazines that are a household name — they work with regular bloggers to help them get their sites running perfectly, too. Thanks to Chad for taking the time to talk to us, and for being part of the community for so long, including contributing many popular plugins that Movable Type bloggers use every day. Be sure to check out the Everitz Consulting to find out more about their work.