It seems that Yahoo! and Movable Type have teamed up in the blogging arena. According to Beta News, it seems that Yahoo! has taken a step in the right direction in realizing that, yes, blogs are a great marketing tool:

Yahoo and Weblog software maker Six Apart announced Monday that they are joining forces to offer blogging solutions for Yahoo’s small business customers. Six Apart has created a specialized version of Movable Type for Yahoo. Each account will offer up to 200GB of transfer per month with up to 5GB of space. Yahoo will also provide 24-hour customer support, as well as 200 e-mail addresses and spam protection.

Service options will begin at $11.95 USD per month and would be an extension to the hosting packages that Yahoo already offers. “Yahoo! has created a best-in-class hosting solution for bloggers, and by integrating it with Six Apart’s leading Movable Type software, we offer users a flexible, easy-to-use blogging product with unparalleled scalability,” Rich Riley, vice president and general manager of Yahoo Small Business, said in a statement.

What does this mean in for businesses looking to get into the blog market? It seems to me like a good proposition for businesses. They get a strong (although debatable) blogging application and customer service from one of the biggest names on the web in Yahoo!, but is this a good option? At $11.95 per month, it is expensive for hosted blogging applications considering that Wordpress offers a free hosted version, and that these companies still need to hire bloggers to market their products/services on their blog.

In the long run, though, this could be huge to professional and business blogging. To have a major player like Yahoo! get into the business blogging game could bring the attention needed to blogging in the business community. It will show that the widely know, hugely successful, and oft skipped form of marketing on the web (blogs) is for real and is the future.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Blogging, and Movable Type

Scott Goldblatt also writes daily at his personal blog The Parental Olympian