The weblog has now reached the point in the cultural life cycle where the word is on everybody's lips, even if most people aren't sure what it is.
Perhaps the best way to illuminate the phenomenon is by introducing Ben and Mena Trott, both 27, respectively the chief technical officer and president of the San Francisco company Six Apart.
Mena, a web designer, is the voluble and irrepressible one whose bright office is filled with stuffed animals and gaily colored posters. Ben, the taciturn one, is an engineer who prefers an office cubicle where the only light comes from a computer screen.
They've been together since high school. They don't exactly finish each other's sentences like some married couples; rather, Mena mostly does the talking until she runs into a wall and prods Ben for help, at which point he composes an appropriate one- or two-word coda.
Together they developed a software tool for designing and organizing weblogs called Movable Type. Market statistics are rare in the informal blogosphere, which is estimated to include 8 million blogs. But considering that it's hard to find many weblogs, save for the most rudimentary, that don't run on Movable Type, it's not a stretch to say the product is probably the world's leading blogging tool.
It allows bloggers to generate pages, archive their postings by subject or category and distribute content in other Web-friendly formats. Six Apart says that Movable Type and TypePad, its paid Web hosting service, have at least 1 million registered users between them (though it doesn't break down the numbers further). Google Inc.'s Blogger weblog publishing program and BlogSpot hosting service are competitors, but they are largely free and aimed mostly at novices.
Movable Type was born in the high-tech bust. The Trotts spent the first two years of their working lives at Silicon Valley start-ups destined for the boneyard. After one Web design firm employing both of them went under, Mena found herself spending more time working on her own weblog, dollarshort.org.
The weblog then was a format used mostly by Web designers and software engineers, who viewed it as a kind of private tech-support networking tool. As users' personalities crept into their postings, the format evolved into something indefinably broader.
Frustrated by the plain-vanilla character of the earliest blogging tools, meanwhile, Mena had been submitting wish lists of features to Ben, who spent his own spare time implementing them in programming language. "I was her personal engineer."
