TypePad is a personal publishing service that combines easy tools for creating weblogs, photo blogs, photo albums, and all the other pieces of a full-featured personal website with hosting and maintenance and updates of the software. Because the whole system is designed to work by just signing up and diving in, we’re anticipating it being extremely popular with beginners, but it will range in features all the way up to its highest tier, which includes nearly all of Movable Type’s functionality, except for the ability to customize the application’s code.

TypePad's editor isn't WYSIWYG, so a little knowledge of HTML is helpful if you want to include a photo album image in a post. You can post from your browser, send posts via e-mail, post from your WAP-enabled phone, or even use third-party stand-alone products.

The key thing that differentiates TypePad is that it’s designed to not require any setup or configuration, or any focus on anything except the ideas you’re sharing. In the case of Movable Type, TypePad is differentiated by not needing to be installed on your server. In the case of other weblog tools, TypePad is differentiated by not needing the user to manually integrate Javascript or HTML for basic features like comments, categories, TrackBack, blogrolls or statistics.

TypePad would probably only be used by very small organizations which were primarily focused on updating the news on their site. It’s likely to fit the “church newsletter” market pretty well, but it’s not designed to build a full brochureware site, even though there are some fairly nice tools for managing the static parts of your site. It’s more likely that small businesses get help with their sites from consultants, either paid or voluntary friend-of-a-friend experts working on building their sites. And to those developers, Movable Type is already the most popular choice. It does generate standards-compliant markup by default, and we plan to improve the semantics of the default templates even more in our upcoming releases.

A part of what makes TypePad compelling to a lot of writers is the idea that you can have your own site and have control of publishing in a way that’s not controlled by a large corporation, or one of the giant media conglomerates. That’s not to say that those aren’t also valid and important media outlets, but as a rule people like having a choice of both. In addition, everyone tends to prefer small companies when it comes to responsiveness and in valuing their customers.