Michael Hiltzik's "Golden State" column in today's Times tells the story behind Movable Type, the popular blogging software developed by Six Apart, a San Francisco company started by married couple Ben and Mena Trott. In the piece, the company's chief executive says, "The future of blogging is not about bloggers who want audiences of thousands. The majority will be those communicating with four others or so." Hmm. Perhaps that explains why my satisfaction with MT has always been muted, even though L.A. Observed is still small (260,243 pages and 1.4 million hits last month) by big-blog standards. I have no plans to change software, but I'd love to see it become easier to use. I'm more concerned these days about my hosting service, Total Choice Hosting. The connection has seemed very buggy the past few days. If your clicks on L.A. Observed links have been refused or the pages haven't been loading correctly, please drop me a line.