Radio Tip: This comparison should serve as a good starting point for anyone making a decision. [Radio Free Blogistan] Here are some of the differences between Movable Type and Radio UserLand:

Where the Client Lives
Where Your Data Lives
Where Your Site is Hosted
Ease of Installation/Getting Started
Design Templates
User Interface and Ease of Use
Multiple Authors
Community and "Culture"
Documentation and Help
"Blog This"-Type Bookmarklets
Full-service vs. Blog-centric CMS
Business Model
Odds and Ends
The Bottom Line
Stay Tuned
Coming Up
Some further comparisons I plan to run include:

• Blogger vs. Movable Type
• Blogger Pro vs. Movable Type
• Manila vs. Movable Type (if I can get an evaluation copy of Manila)
• Comparisons of Slash, Kuro5hin, and Nuke group weblog tools

• Modifying blog templates
• Migrating from one blog tool to another

• LiveJournal vs. Radio UserLand
  • LJ geared more towards diary, while RU is more content-neutral
  • LJ material hosted totally on their servers so if they went down, you go down
  • RU is on your PC published to RU site, so you can move it to another host
  • RU enables categories that can be published on different hosts
  • RU comes with RSS (see Understand Radio News Aggregation)
  • Sounds to Al like LJ has the RSS feed but not the News Aggregation
• More Follow-up on RU vs. LJ
  • Eric Speckman thought LJ diary more natural to update while RU better about statistics on who is linking to you
  • Scot Hacker thought easier to backup RU than LJ
  • Robb Sonic thinks Blogger is easier
  • Gregory saw RU's powerful engine supporting more flexibility of added features
• Blogger vs. Radio
• Radio vs. Blogger Pro

[dws.] UNQUOTE [RadioFAQs]

Somewhat later, [Radio Free Blogistan] wrote, QUOTE

I like the way MT's page-per-entry archiving method enables you to put the post title in the title field of the archive page, making any bookmark or web search result item infinitely more useful.

UNQUOTE [Radio Free Blogistan]

[Todd Stauffer], in his Blog On weblog (see Blog Books for context) explains why he used Moveable Type as opposed to pMachine for a particular function.  Check out the comments that get into

• dual weblog sites off of one PC
• data base setup
• suitability of particular Blog Software for a particular application

Scott Johnson has this link to someone talking about migration from MT to Drupal  http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/2002/12/07.html#a1034

[Psybertron site] is collecting links to RSS services from various different Blog Software, and commenting on what they seem to provide or not provide.

[Steve Pilgrim] points out that the News Aggregation interface for Radio Userland is far superior to that which is provided by any of the considerable competition that he has seen.

[McGee's Musings] is teaching a class, using Radio Userland for the weblogging software, that will hopefully turn reluctant MBAs into competent bloggers, in which he argues QUOTE The key design decisions include locating a webserver on the desktop, local storage of weblog data, single authorship, integrated news aggregator, and extensible design. The key goal here is to explain how and why these design decisions matter from an end user perspective.  UNQUOTE

[Jon Udell] writes about Things to Like, and Things to Look Forward to, with Radio Userland advantages over the competition.

[Bryce] appeared to report on his success migrating from Radio Userland to Moveable Type, but his later post corrected my misconception, for which I apologize.  Rather he has both reasons to be pleased and displeased with Radio Userland as opposed to the competition.  He likes the News Aggregation and Weblog Integration, but has experienced a lack of quality tech support, and has been hit by one of the monthly bugs.

[Dixie Blog] is considering the migration and listing features that each appears to have that the other does not have.  Decisions decisions, which list of features to go with.  Some of what she lists as Radio not having, I think Radio does have, so the problem is with documentation clearly showing to people what is there.

It seems to me that over time all weblogging software alternatives will be continuously improved, and occasionally one good Blog Software vendor will have some nice feature that the others not offer, because they thought of it first, but in time, the competition will offer something comparable.  Thanks to Blog On by Todd Stauffer (see Blog Books for more info) I found out about a couple features that Moveable Type apparently has, that I not yet see equivalent from Radio Userland:

• Bookmarklets ... we see a post when we surfing the Internet, and we want to comment on them, without launching Radio Application.  However, we can put something in Windows Notepad that is a Draft for later posting to our Radio Weblog.   See my Blogrolling post for further clarification of my learning about this concept.
• Trackback ... we surf to someone else weblog, we comment on that weblog, using a special option from Bookmarklet.  When we post something to our weblog commenting on the other person weblog, that other person is automatically notified with a message linking that person to the fact that we did this comment.  For more info on how this works, see http://www.moveabletype.org/trackback/
  • Radio Wish: When we use News Aggregation (see Understand Radio News Aggregation for more info) to post something about some other person weblog, I would like that person to have something that is LIKE the Referers directory (see Understand Radio Referers) that lists who all used your RSS feeds today to post something on their sites, commenting on your stuff, and when we click on the connections, we would see not just their site, but where they doing the commenting on us.

And here is a rebuttal from Dave Winer, a well known Radio Userland spokesperson.

[Scripting News] QUOTE: Radio Free Blogistan compares Radio UserLand and Movable Type. No mention of Radio's news aggregator. That's how multi-author weblogs work. Also no mention of shortcuts. The CMS in Radio is the same CMS as in Manila. You don't have to buy a license for Manila to run a Manila site, you can purchase Manila hosting at Weblogger.Com, and other places. And while I suppose UI is a matter of taste, we worked very hard to get all of Radio's functionality to flow through the Radio menu, where Movable Type spreads less functionality across several screens. In Radio, all the functionality is arrayed for you in one place at the top of every page. It means less hunting, and quicker navigation. One more thing, while macros are a relatively recent innovation in MT-Land, they're built in to Radio. Radio is the result of constant development in weblog software since 1996. The depth is there for you to use. :UNQUOTE [Scripting News]

Now I am beginnning to learn Radio and do not yet know how to use all the features, let alone how they compare with other Blog Software but someone who has become somewhat expert on the choices that are out there is obviously John Hiler.

It is evident to me that it can be very difficult for someone to know two competing software products well enough to do an honest and complete comparison.

Several decades ago, when we were just barely out of punched card computing, I was a programmer in COBOL and RPG almost at the same time, because businesses had software packages that needed support.  Some were written in COBOL and some in RPG, and the business needs were similar irrespective of the language being used.  I was always interested in articles that gave how to techniques for both languages, and in among them I was amused to see articles by people who said that one language was far superior to the other because of all these things it could do that the other could not, and the examples they gave were always things I was using both languages to do.

My explanation is that someone learns one computer language first then can get frustrated trying to figure out how to do something in the other language then conclude that it cannot be done.  With Blogging software there is the added complication of knowing the correct terminology for some phenomena.

Phil Wolff [A klog apart] Blue Sky Radio offers a different perspective, which I think is more meaningful to me than the list of features. QUOTE

I think Radio has a lot more features than Moveable Type. Sometimes people confuse difficulty with feature richness. MT is designed to run n Unix, which means that it can be difficult for average people, because Unix already presents a high barrier. Radio is designed for Mac and Windows users, not developers (although it has deep features when you lift the hood), so it has to be easy to set up and use to work.

I agree with David. But Radio is difficult in its own way.

When fun, cool, and powerful features are buried, awkward, or unreliable, that is a user experience design failure. When a blogger tries to explore and discover features, and can't, that is a UE design failure. When "basic" tasks are not self evident, that is a UE design failure.

Try some of these things:

• Delete a post from three months' ago.
• Set up a project klogging cluster. 
• Set up a blogroll.
• Choose which tools to install.
• Show links to an item's categories, and linkbacks, and Google citations.
• Make my template more accessible.

Now try these things without knowing html.

How is not obvious to naive newbies. In other words: newbie initial mental models don't correspond to the developer's mental models or the software's physical model.

Radio's rough edges remain a key issue, something of a barrier to uptake. Radio has been percolating for more than a year, flushing out hundreds of exciting capabilities, most delivered simply and explosively.

If it was my product (and it's not), my knee-jerk reaction: bring in a usability SWAT team to do their thing. Persona casting and profiling, task analysis, trials, measurement, design feedback, user experience patterns and an experience style guide. 

Double user success on the top 100 tasks:

1. open up new markets,
2. cut supports costs, and
3. makes the overall product more attractive to developers.

UNQUOTE [A klog apart]

Have you seen on TV cop shows where an interrogation room uses 2 way mirrors so there can be witnesses to a discussion, that the suspects don't see?  Years ago IBM used to use those kinds of rooms to observe newbies struggling to use IBM instructions.  They'd be watching the newbie from multiple directions, logging keystrokes, copying screen.  Newbie makes all kinds of klutz oops, due to misconceptions vs. the manual, so IBM rewrites the manual to avoid that error by future readers.

Can we translate that to the networked world where the SWAT team might be checking on distant newbies, or is it only practical in academic setting where bunch of newbies in a classroom testing documentation in different mixtures of OS and browser.

The mental models of newbies coming from various directions need to be spelled out, then documentation crafted to reach out to each of those models.