Blogging About Blogging LXXIV

Ben and Mena Trott announced the winners of Moveable Type's Developer's Contest tonight at BlogOn, which I'm confblogging for FC Now. Here's a partial transcript of their awards presentation:

Mena Trott: Blogging has come really far, and this event is proof. If there's proof that you can make a business out of blogging, the proof is standing up here. We're incredibly excited. One of the main things we want to talk about is developers; they're the bread and butter. There are people in this room who've been Moveable Type developers since Day One. We want to make money, but we also want our developers and the community to make money. Tonight, we're going to announce an award -- six awards, really.

Anil Dash: I've moved from being the third Trott to being their first born, so I'm really lucky. There are people all around the world who don't work for Six Apart but make their living on Moveable Type and TypePad, and now legally. There are things we didn't Moveable Type could do, that blogs could do.

Mena Trott: Our developer program is just in its infancy, but we've had 1,000 people sign up for it. This is the inaugural event for that network. We have three third prize winners.

Ben Trott: The first winner has been a developer for a long time now, and he's done a number of plug ins. He did a plug in called MultiBlog. Moveable Type allows you to separate your content into different weblogs, but this plug in lets you make a page that pulls in content from a number of blogs. The winner is David Raynes. The next winner is someone whose weblog we've long admired. His plug in is a text formatting system. Not having to know any HTML, you can still express a lot of ideas and syntax structures. This award goes to John Gruber from Markdown. The next award is for a plug in that closes a pretty critical feedback loop in weblogs. It's important that your community keep up to date on your weblog, comments, and such. This plug in allows you to keep track of changes in your comment threads, and the award goes to Chad Everett for his Notifier plug in.

Mena Trott: We have two second prizes.

Ben Trott: The first winner was pretty amazing to us. It's something we never would have imagined. I'm not sure of everything that this thing can do. It's a visualization engine that lets you create visuals for your posts. It was made by Andrew Sutherland of KoalaRainbow. The next one is a replacement for the search engine in Moveable Type that allows you to use indexing and things that are more powerful. This goes to Timothy Appnel for X-Search Plus.

Mena Trott: Our final first prize is one prize.

Ben Trott: The winner is someone who, like Tim, has been around in the community for a long time. He was really great when we were having the troubles with the 3.0 licensing. He really understood what we were trying to do, and he helped get that message out. The plug in is MT-Blacklist. Jay Allen won this. He's really integrated it into the new version of Moveable Type. And he's rewritten the plug in completely to take advantage of all of the new developer features.

Mena Trott: These winners will be integrated into a plug in pack. And if you didn't win, we're sorry. All of the entries were really great.