Six Apart announced Motion, a new tool for MT Pro that the company says supports Pownce-like microblogging, friendfeed style activityustreams and open id sign in for commentators. Engineer/product guy David Recordon says this is an open web app and a way to maintain real community.(And of course the whole presentation of the new product is elegant and clear; Anil is both through and eloquent.)

But here's my question: Were the Pownce team moonlighting on this app before their acquisition? And was their acquisition a means to accelerate delivery?  It's a well-known but little discussed way of life in the Bay area for talented founders to moonlight when they get short of cash and can't go back to the Board for more; was this was Leah Culver  and Mike Malone were up to keep Pownce, uh, going?

Side note: Whomever is making Leah keep a blog should stop, this vox thing is frighteningly inane. Kittens & turtles? Scary. On the other hand, Mike's blog hasn't been updated for two weeks (Guess: which is more authentic?)

Just found a post on this blog from 2006 entitled Paradigm Shift: What Google didn't buy,  It reads:
" started the day reading about how TechCrunch's Mike Arrington felt attacked by the journalists at the Online News Association conference, and ended it hearing that Google had indeed bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in do no evil stock.

That news got me thinking about what Google mighta coulda bought with their money and didn't, and I got to asking myself where the paradigm shift was in that.

For instance, with that kind of dough, Google could have bought the New York Times Company. I remember talking with Timesman Martin Nisenholtz about how the NYTimes was one of the biggest consumers/placements for Google AdWords, right behind the big portals as they were still called then, Yahoo and AOL (this must have been late 2004.) Nisenholz felt that the Times had to find a way to roll up in size, and not soon after, they bought About.com.
Presumably, if Google was looking for a property that they could own to place their own AdWords on, they could have considered buying The New York Times. But no--they didn't, did they--and the decision to spend all this money on YouTube shows that the coffin nails of mainstream media are already strewn across the open grave (Yes, I am feeling poetic tonight, that kind of day).

Here we are in 2009l almost, and DealScape is wondering if Google will now buy the Times. I think it would be a really smart acquisition--but they might end up scrapping most of the print editions (!!!).