Dale is concerned about the difficulty of moving between one blog platform and another. He has been setting up a Movable Type blog and has been working on transferring his old blog entries from his Radio Userland blog. (Hmmm... I'm having trouble accessing his site. Maybe he's updating something. I'll double check these links later.)

The basic problem here is that there is not yet an agreed-upon standard for what a blog is. Different systems have been established which allow for these journal-style content management web sites, but there is obviously no standard in place as there is with HTML. These types of conflicts between different, competing software systems are not new. This has happened almost every time software of almost any description gets enhanced. When browsers first started supporting JavaScript, the new browsers could use these new tricks, but the older browsers couldn't. Thus the "Browser Wars" that led to new browsers from both Micro$oft and Netscape about every six months until MS drove NS out of business. At that point, browsers stabalized as MS no longer had an incentive to enhance their browser any further (except for tying it tightly to Windows so that competing browsers would have a harder time breaking into the market again).

Hopefully, that monopolistic resolution will not be the result of the current blog incompatibilities. Besides the items he has mentioned, there are other problems which arise from switching blog software. Clearly, all of my older links to his articles will break if he removes his Radio site all together. I might decide to update my old articles to reflect their new locations, but for sites more active than mine, such an undertaking would be very time consuming, assuming that they even noticed that the links were broken and took the time to figure out what had happened. Furthermore, the comments from his Radio site have not been transferred into MT (at least, not yet).

Some of the difficulties Dale has encountered are simply a matter of differences in how the different creators have envisioned what a blog should be. Apparently Radio allows quick linking to internal articles by simply quoting the title of the article in the header. MT doesn't have any such feature. On the other hand, Radio doesn't seem to have the TrackBack feature that MT has introduced to their package to allow blogs to track when references are made in related articles from other blogs.

Until some kind of agreement can be made on what is expected in a blog I am sure this confusion will continue. In the meantime, I like the approach MT is taking with their code being openly available and standards for features (like TrackBack) being published so that other blog software creators can make compatible features if they want to. This is where open source software has it all over proprietary packages. Radio might come up with the best feature imaginable, but if they try to keep how it works a secret in an attempt to lure users with their unique feature, they may find that others just ignore it and move on to other features which are supported by multiple creators.