Mossberg blows it on blogs

Walter Mossberg writes the Personal Technology column for the Wall Street Journal. In general, it's good stuff; he champions the 'regular guy' user, and he regularly brings Fortune 500 companies to heel when they have dumb problems with their products. Wired calls him The Kingmaker.

This week, he wrote a review of Microsoft's new blogging system, MSN Spaces, and did a rundown of several other hosted blogging systems. ('Hosted' means you do it on their server; as opposed to having to install software on your server.)

Interestingly enough, he explicitly mentioned all the leading services, except one: Typepad.com.

Strangely, he even mentions Typepad's owner - Six Apart - but only in the context of their recent acquisition of LiveJournal (whose product is interminably bad, and yet used by millions of high school students.)

I've playtested them all and Typepad is far and away the best and easiest. The blogs that Typepad creates are visitor-friendly and easy to manage. On the back-end, they're easy to set up and easy to customize.

At $5/mo for the low-end, and $15/mo at the fully-customizable super-high-end, they're damn cheap too. We recommend Typepad to many of our clients, and have helped quite a few set up blogs. (You're looking at a Typepad blog right now!)

Typepad can also handle some serious traffic - one of our blogs, BlueOregon.com, is currently picking up 20,000 page views a week.

Sure, I've got my quibbles about the interface - and a long list of features that I wish they'd implement sooner rather than later. But, having swum in everyone else's pool, this one is the warmest and cleanest.