Six Apart News & Events

Welcome Pownce team!

2008-12-01T17:00:00Z

I am pleased to announce that today we are welcoming the Pownce team and technology to Six Apart. Pownce launched in June of 2007 and opened to the public earlier this year, but, as mentioned on the Pownce blog, Pownce.com will be closing in the next few weeks. We have a lot of respect for what this team has done and believe we share a common vision about making the Internet more social.

We have been impressed not only with the vision for Pownce but the great work of Leah Culver and Mike Malone and are very happy that they will be joining us. We’re also very excited to welcome Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as advisers to Six Apart. The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging and we’re really proud to have them on board.

For Pownce users, we are very sorry the site will be closing. We welcome you to join us on Vox - Leah and Mike are there! - and we hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future. For the Pownce Pro users, we would like to offer you a free TypePad account for a year. All Pownce users will receive an email with further instructions about exporting content out of Pownce and signing up for Vox or TypePad accounts.

We’re planning on doing great things with the help and expertise of the Pownce team, and can’t wait to see all the results of their hard work.

TypePad Connect, Profiles and Comments for Everyone!

2008-11-21T05:07:43Z

Today, the TypePad team is launching three exciting new features for everyone who blogs or reads blogs:

Profiles (a reinvention of TypeKey)
New commenting capabilities
TypePad Connect, a new beta service that is free for all bloggers and extends these features to any site.

This isn't just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site's community with the rest of the social web.

As we complete the migration to the next generation platform for TypePad that Ben Trott talked about earlier this year we've released many new features for TypePad bloggers (improved design screens, AutoSave, and custom URLs to mention a few). But we've also been hard at work creating TypePad powered services such as TypePad AntiSpam, Blog It and Blog Link that extend the TypePad service to any blogger across the web. Our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to connect them with a wider community of readers, other bloggers and conversations.

Let's look at the new TypePad profiles first. Ever had a profile that got out of date? TypePad profiles take advantage of things you're already doing, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. If you connect with your Twitter account we'll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we'll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you've already made across TypePad enabled sites. TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don't worry; we didn't forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.

As a blogger, imagine the benefits to your readers if they are no longer "anonymous" but instead can choose to bring their photo and name with them from their TypePad profile. Commenters can also link back to a rich profile that contains their comment history, links to their own blogs, and even their accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or dozens of other services.

Open For Comment

We've also launched new TypePad comments in beta that integrate seamlessly with the new profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email - all with TypePad AntiSpam built in - and is a great example of the changes we will be making to the core TypePad application in the coming months.

And now, we're combining all of this into the TypePad Connect beta. These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site -- for free. TypePad Connect makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.

We've made it easy for you to integrate comments and profiles with TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress software and Tumblr or you can just embed a small piece of JavaScript yourself. And we care about design, and know that you care about design too, so we made it easy to style TypePad Connect comments to match your design with just a bit of CSS.

TypePad Connects Everywhere

As I mentioned above, our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to create a service that helps them connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion and this is what TypePad Connect is all about. We've been evolving the way that TypePad works, and today TypePad is much more than the blogging service that just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is a service for all bloggers.

This evolution and openness isn't just limited to our technology or products — our advertising program now has more than a thousand participating bloggers, and many of them use platforms other than Movable Type or TypePad. Our Blogs.com community shows "The Best of Blogs" and many of the sites featured run on platforms that aren't made by Six Apart. Even our community marketing team (which we're calling our "Genius" group right now) has a mandate to support bloggers directly, helping anyone in the community regardless of platform.

There's plenty more coming, but please try our swanky new profiles and comments today on your TypePad blog or elsewhere via TypePad Connect! Let us know what you think and what else TypePad can do to make your blog even more successful. You can learn more about TypePad Connect, comments and profiles at http://www.typepad.com/connect/ or about using these features with your TypePad blog.

TypePad and Journalism

2008-11-18T15:15:25Z

Over the weekend, I posted a simple web page on our TypePad site called the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. I wrote it up with a lighthearted, snarky tone so a few old friends who recently lost their jobs as professional bloggers/journalists would understand what we could do at Six Apart to try to help them out. It seems like the program struck a nerve with thousands more of you, though — those first few friends have passed the link along, and in less than a day, hundreds of journalists have already signed up to participate.

In short, the program as described offers up a TypePad blog, a place in our Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, and a healthy dose of our expertise and insights into helping publishers and bloggers succeed online.

Reports From The Field

The Journalist Bailout program exists because we care about the future of journalism at Six Apart. I've worked at a newspaper, our CEO was founder of a magazine, and our staff across the company and around the world have worked in reporting, publishing, designing, maintaining and supporting journalism in print, in broadcast, and of course on the web in a variety of capacities. For years, I've followed pioneers like Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen who've being loud, sometimes strident, voices articulating a vision of how journalism will evolve. I've talked to working journalists in person at events put on by groups ranging from the Online News Association to Mediabistro. And perhaps most importantly I've talked to our customers who are succeeding in online journalism, at outlets ranging from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, from small-town dailies to alt-weeklies to upstart blog networks to niche magazine publishers who are just making their first steps online.

These experiences showed me something I'd expected: A lot of people are thinking about how journalism is going to evolve online, and many people are passionate about making sure journalists make the leap.

What I hadn't fully expected was how gripping the stories from individual journalists have been. The mood of the emails we've gotten has ranged from hopeful to heartbreaking, from cynical to sincere. Overall, there's an optimism which indicates that having a starting point to do something proactive and positive will be a great first step for many journalists to take control of their careers in an industry that is going through enormous upheaval.

I know that journalists are a skeptical bunch, so I'm not trying to bullshit anyone: The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program is not a silver bullet. It's not going to singlehandedly preserve the career and income of every working journalist who has a job today. And frankly, the response has been so overwhelming that we won't be able to accept every application at first.

But what we can do is give journalists the tools to take control of their own presence online. This program will let a lot of the most eager writers and reporters learn the ropes about how to be more effective and successful on the web. That hope shows through in just some of the responses we've seen already:

"Thanks for coming up with such a smart solution to the journalist's dilemma! Hope we can work something out."
"You have no idea how many questions this answers for me that I never even quite understood how to pose."
"Dear Six Apart, thanks very much for your kind offer, glad you are getting such a great response. I've been thinking about starting my own blog, and this seems like a good and fun way to do it."

The Road Forward

Our first order of business is to tend to the dozens of people who have already submitted applications. It will take a few days to get personal replies to everyone who wants to participate, and our criteria of evaluation for membership in the program will have to expand a bit to accommodate everyone who's applied.

In the future, we want to reach out to the many media organizations we already work with to find ways to make this new wave of independent journalism sites more successful and more effective. We know that a vast amount of the good journalism being done today is happening within traditional media institutions, and we think there are plenty of ways for both media companies and independent journalists to support and complement each other's work.

Finally, we'll be asking the entire community for help in defining how these sites will grow, evolve and thrive in the future. So, if you haven't done so already, read up on the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program, see if it's right for you, and if it seems like we can provide the tools to help you move your journalism career forward, then sign up to join us.

Changes at Six Apart

2008-11-11T17:00:32Z

Earlier today, I published the following message on our internal company blog. For those members of our community who wanted to know about the changes at Six Apart today, I've reposted it here publicly for reference.

Today we are making some changes at Six Apart. We are reducing the size of our full time staff by around 8% and are making some organizational changes as we prepare for 2009. This note is to provide some detail and context around these changes.

Everyone is aware of the challenging economic times we face. The uncertainty of 2009 has made planning very difficult but it is clear that next year looks very different now than it did just a couple of months ago. While it would be easy to just blame “the economy” for these changes, however, the truth is more complex.

This year was one of profound growth and change for Six Apart. In addition to welcoming almost 90 new people and growing to a company of over 200 employees, we launched Six Apart Services, Six Apart Media, Blogs.com, Movable Type Open Source and MT Pro, a suite of TypePad-powered products, including Blog It, Blog Link, the TypePad iPhone app and TypePad AntiSpam, and reached the final stage of the biggest technical project in the company’s history: the migration of TypePad onto a new platform. And, as you all know, we aren’t done yet, with several of our most significant product releases still to come this year.

From a financial point of view, the company continues to grow with Q4 2008 on track to be our biggest revenue quarter ever, and cash flows from our revenue, past financings, and sale of LiveJournal providing funds that will serve us well going into next year and beyond. Despite the challenging economic environment, we estimate that the depth and breadth of our products and services will allow us to continue growing revenue throughout this downturn.

So why are we doing this? First, as with many companies these days we are being proactive about keeping our expenses low. Second, with so many changes in 2008, and looking forward to the changing market 2009, we have to rebalance our organization accordingly.

We've been reminded lately that blogging was born out of the last recession in 2001 - 2002, and that during tough economic times creative voices look to powerful, cost-effective ways to connect and communicate with the world around them. With that backdrop, here are some of the organizational changes we are making and why we feel they are necessary:

Creating Six Apart “Genius” group. We are refocusing our marketing efforts from promoting Six Apart to helping support our bloggers and clients directly. Our marketing, community, and support groups will merge to create a single team whose mission is to help our bloggers be successful. Despite the economy, or perhaps because of it, we believe that more people will be turning to blogging to promote themselves or their business, and we want to provide them with more than just great technology but also help with getting started, design, building an audience, revenue generation, and more. We are committed to having Six Apart remain the best resource for individual and professional bloggers around the world. Bar none.
Growing Six Apart Services. Our professional services group has grown significantly as our larger clients are increasingly using Movable Type and TypePad as cornerstones of their broader online strategies. Companies have always come to us to help them compete in a modern, social Internet but now they are also looking for more cost effective ways to run their entire web sites and seeing MT in particular as a complete web content management solution. With this has come the need for more support and services. Today we will be transferring several people from around the company into Six Apart Services and have more open positions in that group.
One hosted technology team. As we all know, the TypePad migration has been a long and arduous project that organizationally split much of the engineering and ops team around various pieces of that project. As migration completes and we move forward, we are bringing the hosted engineering, analytics, infrastructure, open platforms, and operations teams under one leader, Ben Trott.
Moving forward with Six Apart Media. While we expect that online advertising will be hard hit by this economy, analysts still expect Internet advertising to grow and we expect that Six Apart Media will continue to grow in 2009. We’ve had tremendous response to our advertising program that we launched in April which now includes almost a thousand bloggers and continues to grow rapidly. We are committed to serving these bloggers and helping them make as much money on their site as possible in this environment. We will continue to grow our sales force and account management teams to meet this need.

Through these changes we have had to make tough choices about the right mix of people to meet these ambitious goals and this has resulted in some job cuts. We have cut other expense lines and the management team and I have agreed to take a 15% salary cut as part of these cost cutting measures. All employees leaving through this layoff will receive a severance package with additional payments to cover health care benefits and we will also offer placement services and do what we can to help them land on their feet. We are very sorry to see these good people go.

The management team doesn’t take these changes lightly and agonized over this decision. However, our first responsibility is to the company as a whole and we feel these changes are the right ones to keep the company competitive, secure, and positioned for future growth.

As I’ve said several times in the past, all companies face adversity from time to time, but the mark of a great company is how it responds. Today is a day when we will be tested. A day to help one another. And a day to say some goodbyes.

Tomorrow will be about redoubling our efforts to create an even stronger focus on what's made Six Apart successful: the bloggers we support.

Thank you for all you do.

Barack Obama and Blogging

2008-11-05T19:48:36Z

We'd like to extend our hearty congratulations to everyone who voted in the United States elections here yesterday, especially in the historic and endlessly surprising Presidential campaign. We've been thrilled to point to our own efforts like politics.typepad.com, which showcases TypePad bloggers who talk about political issues, and of course the politics section of Blogs.com, which has been a must-read for months.

But perhaps most of all, we should extend our congratulations to the campaign and innovative technological team behind BarackObama.com. Just as with the blog of outgoing President George W. Bush's 2004 campaign, key parts of Barack Obama's campaign website have been powered by Movable Type, and we're proud to have played a part in knitting together a successful strategy that's combined blogging with a compelling presence across dozens of social networking sites. It's a tradition that began at the national level with candidates like Howard Dean and John Kerry making tentative steps four years ago. But we're not satisfied merely to count the campaign blogs of two successive U.S. Presidents among the community of Movable Type users.

Now that the election is over, we're sincerely hoping that politicians across the political spectrum, and citizens of any stripe, will demand that these social publishing tools be used for a lot more than just raising funds online or getting out the vote. We firmly believe that our platforms, used intelligently and in combination with the many other services and networks on the web, can be powerful tools for better governance.

Blogging, especially when combined with a social publishing platform that bridges multiple social networks, is far too powerful a medium to be dragged onto the national stage once every four years. If, as has so often been stated, this is a "change election" here in the United States, then we hope that one change we'll see, not just at the national level but at a state and local level, is our government making better use of the web.

Given the long tradition of bloggers leading the conversation around politics, policy and government, we hope to play a part in encouraging government to make the same leap into the social web that so many of us have made in our personal and professional lives.

A Shout Out For Helping Students

2008-11-03T16:22:50Z

As we mentioned in early October, hundreds of bloggers engaged in a friendly competition during the month of October to see who could raise the most money or reach the most kids for Donors Choose, an organization that matches donors with classroom projects specified by public school teachers all over the country.

The results of the competition are in: Once again, Sarah Bunting of Tomato Nation blew every other blogger out of the classroom by raising $111,352 and helping over 19,577 students via her giving page. Sarah demonstrated the power of blogging by producing a campaign ad that asked her readers to vote with their wallets. It worked: over the course of October, 1,162 donors “voted” on her challenge.

As the sponsor of the prize for the bloggers who reach the most kids, Six Apart would like to give a shout out to Sarah and to all the winners of the Bloggers Challenge who reached the most students in each category:

(This is our San Francisco team. The New York, Paris, and Tokyo teams send their thanks too.)

Nearly twice as many bloggers attracted 50% more donors than last year, making the competition fiercer than ever. But leaders emerged in each category, and we'd like to acknowledge their fine efforts:

In the Tech Blog category, Fred Wilson’s AVC blog reached 4,545 students
In the Science Blog category, David Ng and Benjamin Cohen’s The World’s Fair blog reached 1,780 students
In the Topical/Local Blogs category, Ralph Alswang Photography reached 522 students
In the Mommy Blog and BlogHer category, Alice of Finslippy reached 1,676 students
In the Knitting Blogs category, Rose-Kim Knits reached 597 students
In the Music Blog category, music teacher Walt Ribeiro reached 910 kids
In the Black Bloggers for Education category, The Assimilated Negro reached 100 students
In the Sports Blog category, Sports Crackle Pop reached 465 kids

In addition to this literal shout out, each winner will receive some choice schwag from our team at Six Apart.

As the creator of three leading blog platforms - Movable Type, TypePad and Vox - and the provider of social media services and advertising solutions, we’re thrilled to participate in an event that raises awareness about the power and influence blogging can have while raising money for a very worthwhile cause: future bloggers of America!

Blog Link and LinkedIn: Investing in Yourself

2008-10-30T16:50:03Z

Though we're proud to help create a lot of the coolest technologies around, we don't just make technology for its own sake. That's especially true with all of the concern we've heard from our community about the tumultuous economy and unsteady job market — if we're going to look at some gee-whiz new idea, it better have real value.

And that's what we think we're bringing you with our new announcement of Blog Link, powered by TypePad. At a technical level, it's a free service that lets you promote your blog and read blogs of people in your network, all through the power of LinkedIn's exciting new application platform. We think that's pretty nifty technology, but that's not why we've been creating applications like this.

Instead, you can look to conversations like the recent one our CEO Chris Alden had with Portfolio.com. There are a lot of interesting points in the interview, but one quote stood out, being mentioned by a lot of folks across the blogosphere:

[A] bad economy will probably lead to an overall uptick in blogging, Alden says. "When you don't know where else to invest," he explains, "you invest in yourself." Which is kind of a slick way of saying that when you get laid off or your company goes under, it's a good time to build your personal brand by blogging. Or, for that matter, if you suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands, you might blog to fill the empty spaces. "You look for a way to reassert control," Alden points out. "That's a reason blogging surges in down times."

We started our own company here at Six Apart during uncertain economic times, based on the firm belief that we'd be able to grow our careers, our business, and the entire industry and economy around social media just by using the strength of blogs. It's worked for us, and we believe it can work for every blogger.

What Blog Link Means

If you're an optimist, then this economic environment means your blog is a great way to reinforce your personal brand, to showcase your accomplishments, and to make new connections to potential employers, partners, coworkers and peers.

If you're more of a glass-half-empty person, then your blog can help cement your position in your job or your industry by providing evidence of what you've achieved, it can help distinguish you from your coworkers during cutbacks by vividly illustrating the strength of your ideas, and it can form a safety net to keep you connected to your partners or coworkers regardless of where you happen to be employed at any given time.

We're proud to partner with LinkedIn, which is obviously the signature social network for professionals. But we've also been happy to extend our vision of forming rich connections between blogs and social networks to a purpose as important as helping bloggers build their careers.

What Blog Link Does

The functionality of Blog Link is simple: It's an application you can add to your LinkedIn profile that shows your recent blog entries to anyone who views your profile, while also giving everyone the option to browse blog posts from the people you're connected to.

Blog Link works with any blogging platform: TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, WordPress, Blogger — any common service should just work. There's virtually no setup; You just click on the application to install it and Blog Link will automatically discover the blogs and feeds for you and your associates using the profile information you've already provided on LinkedIn.

Once that's done, you've got a chance to automatically show your writing, your creativity, and the ideas that make you uniquely talented. Anyone who visits your LinkedIn profile will be able to form an opinion of your work not simply based on basic resume information or even solely on the basis of recommendations, but by reading your own thinking in your own words, directly from your blog, automatically and continuously updated.

And while we always want to make technology with a purpose, we're pretty happy with the little technological innovations behind this new application as well. Blog Link joins TypePad AntiSpam and Blog It as TypePad-powered services that share a few traits:

These TypePad-powered services available to all bloggers, regardless of which platform you use
They're free for any use, and we encourage you to adopt them for whatever you need
They're designed to help all bloggers succeed and to make the web work better.

We've even taken advantage of some of the latest technology in making Blog Link happen. Our David Recordon helped create the OpenSocial application standard that powers LinkedIn Applications functionality, and he's even provided a video demo of how Blog Link works so you can see it in action for yourself.

We've also written up brief descriptions of Blog Link for each of our platforms as well:

Blog Link is brand new, but we think it's a good first step to helping you use your blog to strengthen and grow your career. That's good investment at any time. You can check it out for free just by adding the Blog Link application to your LinkedIn profile now.

We Couldn't Call It "MTV"...

2008-10-27T23:11:43Z

Just over a month ago, we released Virtual Movable Type, which gives you all the power of Movable Type Pro on any machine, with no installation in just a few clicks. It's a completely virtualized version of Movable Type that includes not just the application, but all of the infrastructure needed to keep a site running great, from the operating system to the web server to MT itself. We've been excited about it and proud to see it join the MT family.

Of course, part of the process of planning such a release is basic tasks like picking out a name. The allure of "Movable Type Virtual" or something like that was almost too great — just think of all the awesome "I Want My MTV!" badges we could have made!

Fortunately (or unfortunately) we are blessed with a competent lawyer, and while our corporate counsel is a really nice guy and has a great sense of humor, he pointed out that there might be some issues with a brand conflict around the name "MTV". (Maybe we can use that name when we release Movable Type 5?)

The good news is, none of this has slowed down adoption of Virtual Movable Type at all: It's a hit! We frankly worried that it might be a little bit early to release a completely virtualized web application onto the market because, while virtualization has started to see adoption in enterprise data centers, it's less common to find regular web hosts who support it as an option. We wanted to take the opportunity, though, because we have one of the best scaling and infrastructure teams in the world and a virtual platform lets us build their expertise right into the MT product itself.

And the MT community has always been full of early adopters who love new technology. We know tons of you are on Macs that run Parallels or VMWare Fusion, or on Windows servers that can run the free VMWare Player. We've also been keeping a close eye on our good friends at Amazon's web services team, because they host their blog on our TypePad platform and we'd love to return the favor by having lots of our customers host their Movable Type communities on the Amazon EC2 platform.

The result: We're regularly seeing 5% to 10% or more of all downloads of MT being for Virtual Movable Type. Considering that many estimates say that fewer than 5% of all servers are virtualized so far, we think that shows tremendous progress. (Of course, these statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt, because anybody can redistribute MT under its open source license, and people can use one download for multiple installations.)

Best of all, we've been able to support all these different virtualization platforms while offering a great experience thanks to the expertise of our friends at JumpBox, who've partnered with us on Virtual MT. ChannelWeb offered up a great video introduction to the platform, which shows in just under two minutes how easy it is to get started.

ChannelWeb also offers up a detailed written review of Virtual MT as well, and it reaches the same conclusion as the video: There's never been an easier way to get started blogging. They sum up the benefits pretty well:

For solution providers, Virtual Movable Type offers several options. Customers wanting a blog but lacking physical infrastructure will appreciate the simple and straightforward solution. Because of its low requirements, this would be a good introductory application to move to a virtual environment for customers a little nervous about the whole "virtualization thing." And for solution providers, there's the option to set up a hosting farm for Movable Type blogs using these virtual machines. And that's only to name a few.

Of course, the best way to evaluate Virtual Movable Type is to get it for yourself. Whether you're interested in MT Pro for running a robust community, or just evaluating MT to learn more about how the platform works, get Virtual Movable Type and you'll be able to see for yourself just how easy MT can be.

How We Twitter @sixapart

2008-10-03T21:51:58Z

At Six Apart, we take our presence on Twitter (follow us at @sixapart) seriously, and we have a goal of being one of the best corporate users of the popular service. That might seem a little odd, since most of us see Twitter as a fun little lightweight service that we use mostly for personal messages, so it bears some explanation.

follow sixapart at http://twitter.com

Part of it is just our heritage. We know the folks that make Twitter and we like them and think they share a lot in common with our attitude and community at Six Apart. But more importantly, we have a long tradition of directly interacting with our community wherever the conversations are taking place, whether that's on blogs or anywhere else on the web. And seeing so many of our customers, partners and bloggers on Twitter meant we had to be there too, in a way that was useful, sincere, and (hopefully!) fun. We wanted to make @sixapart worth following even if you aren't yet a customer or partner of Six Apart, but if you were someone who's just interested in blogging or how the web is evolving. We frankly wanted to make it good enough that you'd encourage your friends to follow the account, too.

The great news is, our community noticed the work we've put into being the best business on Twitter, and it comes as no surprise that they've blogged about it. Here's some great recent examples:

From Slate's (Movable Type-powered!) BizBox Blog: "Props to TypePad. Note how the customer--that would be one of us--was able to get superior service without even having to seek it out. New Web 2.0 technologies and products allow such things, but only if you take full advantage of them."
And Ogilvy's 360º Digital Influence Blog has a post in their "Why Twitter Should Matter To You" series entitled Twustomer Service Edition: "Six Apart is doing a great job listening, engaging, and acting - and their doing it in a way that produces happy, vocal customers."

We could tease a little bit about the phrase "Twustomer Service" evoking Elmer Fudd's voice, though there's nothing wrong with having some fun while pointing out rock-solid fundamentals of doing good business. Ginevra Whalen, a long-time Six Aparter who was behind both of the Twitter conversations highlighted in these posts, also gets interviewed for the Ogilvy post. But the ideal of connecting to anyone who wants to get the most out of blogging and the web is something backed up by all of us here at Six Apart, from our community team to our professional support folks to our services team, who all work directly with bloggers every day.

Best of all, it seems like our community agrees. Just take a look at some our favorite tweets on the @sixapart account — they cover everything we love about our community:

If we announce a new product, our community can let us know immediately what they think, as @kimonostereo did with a recent launch: "Virtual Movable Type is simply awesome."
Our customers can let us know when they're getting the most out of our tools, as @marcjohns did recently: "Overhauling my website using Typepad. The more I use it, the more I totally dig it. Getting rid of my ol clunker of a table-infested site."
When we go to events, we can get instant feedback, as @dbrazeal offered to our CEO Chris Alden at the recent BlogWorld conference: "Chris Alden (Six Apart): Today's mainstream social networks are like yesterday's mainstream media. Will be fragmented #bwe08"
And we can see how our customers inspire each other and us with their praise and encouragement, like CitizenDino: "The Six Apart people are simply inspiring. And having read about them in the Sarah Lacy book made it cooler.

There are lots more ways for this conversation to evolve, and we do know that a lot of times Twitter is just used to vent or get complaints off your chest. So we're ready to respond to that as well — we don't expect everything you say to us to be perfect, and we do expect it to be passionate.

Honestly, the tools for tracking and responding to these conversations are still relatively new, so they're not perfect at helping us catching every mention and responding as quickly as we'd like. (Customers should still always file help tickets to get support directly from us!) But despite the challenges, we want to try to get this right because we think making it easier to have a direct connection to Six Apart means its that much more likely to be listening and responding to what you need. All you have to do is follow @sixapart and we'll be following your conversations, too.

Second Annual Blogger Challenge Starts Today - Participate!

2008-10-01T05:41:18Z

Want to make a difference in the life of a public school teacher and his or her students? Want to contribute to the education of the next generation of bloggers? Well, now you can.

For the second year in a row, Six Apart is taking part in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge. The challenge starts today, and we’d like to extend an invitation to you, as a member of the Six Apart community, to participate.

The Blogger Challenge is a friendly contest among bloggers to raise money for low-income public schools. Here’s how it works: teachers from all over the country post items they would like funding for, such as writing supplies for a journalism class, equipment for a science lab, or music instruments for a band class, and bloggers feature their favorite projects on a giving page, where their readers can go to donate. The bloggers who raise the most money or reach the most kids will win an award.

Just as we did last year, Six Apart is sponsoring the award for the bloggers who reach the most kids. We’d like to encourage all of you, our customers and your readers, to participate in the effort. Why? First, it just feels good - it’s very heartwarming and gratifying to receive the lovely thank you notes from kids in the classrooms you support. Second, it’s a very worthy cause. These future leaders of America and their teachers need our support as they learn to read, write, calculate, reason, appreciate the wonders of art and science, and become creative contributors to society. Besides, the world needs more intelligent, thoughtful bloggers like you!

Congratulations to the many Six Apart community members who raised a lot of money last year, including NYC-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson of A VC, who raised $18,000, and University of Minnesota biologist PZ Myers at science blog Pharyngula , who raised $15,000. Six Apart’s co-founder Mena Trott and VP of Evangelism Anil Dash both had their own challenges last year, and have posted their giving lists this year as well. Many more Six Apart-related bloggers are participating this year, including Finslippy, Silicon Valley Moms, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Craig Newmark the economist, and Scienceblogs.com, to name a few.

Here’s how you can participate:

* Go to the Blogger Challenge page on Donors Choose and find a blogger’s giving list you’d like to support. (You’ll see Mena’s list, named after her blogs Nested and Dollar Short, in the General Blogs category.)
* Or, set up your own challenge and let your readers know where to go to support the projects you’ve chosen to feature.
* Sign up to donate to the projects you want to support.
* Feel good about helping kids and teachers in low-income schools
* TypePad bloggers: Note that you can add a Donors Choose widget to your blog that colorfully illustrates to your readers how your challenge is faring.

Watch for an occasional update from us as the Challenge progresses. Donors Choose will announce the results in early November, and we’ll reveal the winners of the Six Apart award for bloggers who reached the most kids.

Thanks for joining in the fun, and for showing the world that bloggers can make a significant difference in the lives of teachers and kids.

Movable Type Pro: Now With Comments!

2008-08-20T19:00:51Z

We've always tried to keep a sense of humor about ourselves at Six Apart, and not take our work or ourselves too seriously. Last week, when we released the widely-acclaimed Movable Type Pro, we included a short video that explained some of the exciting ideas behind MT Pro. We weren't exactly trying to show the full list of the new features in the video, but we definitely set ourselves up on this one — these things always tend to focus more on telling a story than on getting into technical details.

We focus on the story for a simple reason: It's not about features, it's about the future. Honestly, we assume that that everyone else on the web will respond by copying great ideas, as they usually do. Hell, we want them to, so that more people can benefit from open communities on the web.

Movable Type's had really great social networking features for more than a year, and MT Pro puts them in everyone's hands. So we're glad to see our friends at Automattic follow our lead by planning to provide some of these abilities for WordPress in a collection of plugins that you should be able to assemble around Christmastime or so. Until then, they've created a parody of our video.

We think that's a pretty funny way to respond, too! So we thought we'd share their parody of our video:

Of course, the joke in the video is that MT Pro's big feature is comments. LOL! So true, so true, we totally have comments! And lots more. You can view our original video, but one great thing the parody does is promote an MT Pro feature that we'd omitted — you can definitely get full social networking features on your own site, without having your site look like another Facebook or MySpace clone. (We'll even help you design it.)

Because maybe it's a little idealistic, but we think communities on the web can be freed from having to live within the constraints of someone else's social network where they have no control. It's just like how blogging freed people from having to use complicated publishing systems that they couldn't control. Or freed all of us from only consuming media that was produced by giant corporations, instead of by the friends, family or peers we know and respect. Blogs are good at breaking down barriers.

We think it's time for blogging to evolve and assume that successful communities will consist of dozens or even thousands of blogs, forums, and individuals, all connecting together in an open way. And we don't just talk about it: We invent what needs to be created, release it to as many people as possible, and try to do the best job we can of telling people the story of how the web is going to look in the future.

MT is great at all kinds of other unique abilities, of course, like managing an unlimited number of blogs and aggregating content across them. Or managing forums. Letting your members and commenters create their own profiles and follow each other. Rating and recommending content. Providing free and open source TypePad AntiSpam for blocking junk comments, instead of a proprietary centralized service from Automattic. Support for cutting-edge tech like OpenID 2.0 and OAuth. Exclusive new themes like Mid-Century. Our long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, "Digg-proof" pages. And comments! Don't forget comments.

[Note: To be fair, it is possible to remedy some of the missing features in WordPress if you have enough free time to find the appropriate plugins. However, prominent independent security researchers do warn, "[T]he abysmal security practices of WordPress plugin developers places the entire Internet at risk". That's on top of WordPress being one of top ten least secure applications around, and the Department of Homeland Security's data showing WordPress having twelve times as many reported security vulnerabilities as Movable Type. Quick, time for more parody videos!]

But all of the features in Movable Type Pro are in service of something bigger. The great technology rests on top of world-class support, an incredibly talented professional services group, and a media services team that will help your site and your community succeed. Our vision at Six Apart is really about finding ways to help you achieve your goals while making the whole web better. The great part is, our community is innovative enough that they can take our ideas and use them as inspiration to build many of the most amazing and innovative sites on the web.

So thanks again to the team at Automattic for the laugh, and most of all for spending your time on making videos. In all seriousness, we think it is a fantastic way to compare your work to Movable Type Pro and to what we're trying to accomplish at Six Apart.

Blogs.com: The Best in Blogs

2008-08-18T21:04:29Z

If you've been following Six Apart for any time at all, you can tell that this is a company founded by bloggers, for bloggers. From inventing a lot of the core technologies of blogging to helping reinvent the medium with cool new announcements, we've always built a lot of great tools and tech.

But if you've been paying attention this year,you've seen the vision for our company and our community going far beyond just the technology platforms and into some important new initiatives like services and media.

Whether it's advertising services or antispam technology, all of this work is based on a few simple ideas:

We help all bloggers, regardless of which technology platforms you use.
We're trying to help you succeed, no matter how you define that -- by growing your audience, your influence or just your bottom line.
We strive to be open in all that we do, to help tell the rest of the world why blogs are a powerful new medium that matters.

With those principles in mind, that brings us to one of our most exciting new announcements of what's already been a milestone year: Blogs.com, the place to find the best in blogs.

Blogs.com combines a few simple, fundamental ideas in a new way that we think harkens back to some of the best parts of the early days of the web. For example, though they get beat up a lot these days, Yahoo was really exciting back when the web was young. There was just something exciting about a human-edited guide to the web, organized by topic. In a similar way, our expert Blogs.com editorial team is assembling Top Ten lists of blogs by category, to help you discover the best sites that you never knew existed. And we're taking your submissions -- so if you are tired of the same old sites getting attention, we especially want to hear from you.

It's like Celebrity Playlists for Blogs

A more recent example of a great way to discover cool new stuff is the Celebrity Playlists on the iTunes music store.

Some Recent Top Tens

Though sometimes we all read them just to see how inane a celebrity's picks are, or to see if an artist we like shares our tastes, it's impossible to deny that they're often a fascinating way to find new songs. On Blogs.com, celebrity Top Ten lists let some of the best-known bloggers on the web guide us through the sites that influence them, helping dig up some undiscovered gems you might have missed.

Helping you discover the best of blogs also helps fulfill the mission that the team at Rojo had for their popular feed reader back when it launched. Since we acquired Rojo back in 2006, that team has become an integral part of Six Apart,and we've incorporated a lot of what they learned into Blogs.com. As a result,this new site is also going to be the official successor to Rojo.

So, what does it mean to you?

All of this fits into our mission at Six Apart of helping people communicate online, by helping bloggers reach a broader audience. We'll be rapidly expanding Blogs.com over time. The site is built on the powerful new Movable Type Pro platform, of course, so we can rapidly add new social and community features based on your feedback. And our team's hard at work rapidly expanding upon the already-extensive directory of blogs on the site.

Which brings us to the question you must be asking: How do I get my site featured on Blogs.com? It's easy! Just add your site on the simple submission form on the site and we'll add your blog to the list of sites we're considering. And we want to work hard to get the word out about the blogs we feature. There is, of course, a Twitter account for the new site, and you'll want to sign up for the Blogs.com newsletter, and pass the link along to your friends or family who may still be skeptical about blogging. It's a good old-fashioned email newsletter offering highlights from Blogs.com, and great way to find highlights from the entire blogosphere, delivered fresh to your inbox every week.

In all, the launch of Blogs.com marks just another milestone in our mission to introduce the world to the power of blogging. Though we've been best known for making the tools to create blogs, we're just as committed at Six Apart to creating the services that help bloggers succeed. Today, we've built the best way on the web to discover what the blogosphere has to offer. We're already excited about the pleasant surprises that keep popping up on Blogs.com -- and we think you will be, too.

Movable Type Pro: "It raises the bar"

2008-08-15T04:00:17Z

As anyone who saw last week's opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics knows, a community of motivated energetic people can create a pretty powerful, even beautiful, demonstration of the power of movable type. Since the milestone release of Movable Type Pro as part of the Movable Type 4.2 launch this week, we've seen a similar outpouring that, while a little less dramatic, has been extremely exciting for the whole Movable Type community.

You can see the results across the blogosphere and all over Twitter (Hello to all the new followers of the Six Apart account on Twitter!), but we've seen some great reviews and reactions from the press as well. Here's just a sampling:

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger sums it up in Movable Type launch Version 4.2 and Movable Type Pro: "Today's Movable Type Pro launch marks another important step in the evolution of MT as a platform ... More and more bloggers are looking to find ways to integrate social networking within their communities and to this point most are having to settle for marrying two platforms together (one blogging platform and one social networking platform). Movable Type now offer a solution for an all in one package - something that will be very tempting for some bloggers."
Peter Hagopian of InformationWeek covers the story in Movable Type 4.2 Delivers Speed, Security, And Social Networking: "Movable Type 4.2 was released today with a pile of new features and enhancements that make the payoff well worth the anticipation. ... Building on the solid foundation of its blogging and content management functionality, MT 4.2 adds a substantial new set of functionality in support of social networking. ... Probably the most trumpeted accomplishment of Movable Type 4.2 is the improvement in speed across the board. Page publication speed has been greatly improved, as has end-user-facing search. Movable Type's user community has been clamoring for these improvements for quite some time, and 4.2 really delivers."
Scott Gilbertson over on Wired's Webmonkey leads with New Movable Type Pro Wants to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Network: "Movable Type Pro allows you turn your blog into a full social network platform, with features like user registration, profiles, ratings, forums, "following" tools, and more. ... The update is packed with features -- see the Six Apart blog post for more -- and the pro version especially looks like a very nice option for sites that want a full community-in-a-box setup."
Irina Guseva at CMSWire says Six Apart Gets a Little Social with WCM: "It's been almost seven years since Six Apart embarked on its quest to make publishing available to everyone - and it is still going strong. In the new era, however, it is now all about the ability go beyond blogging and into the social publishing. MT 4.2 is here to offer a new level of interaction between bloggers and audience, integration with social networks and a lot more. ... That is certainly a very interesting development in the world of blogging, and we'll continue reporting on it."
Kenneth Corbin at InternetNews offers Movable Type Moves Toward the Social: "Blogging pioneer Six Apart is souping up its Movable Type publishing platform, with plans to release a new version ... that will include a slate of social networking features such as profiles and discussion forums. ... Six Apart's evolution of its popular publishing platform is very much in keeping with the spirit of adding social features to content sites across the Web"
Brian Heater's covering the beat at PC World's (Movable Type-powered!) AppScout, which has a brief item entitled Six Apart Intros Movable Type Pro.
Kristen Nicole at Mashable says Six Apart Provides Social Networking Capabilities with Movable Type Pro: "Now that companies have begun to find more productive ways of interacting with their customers online, Six Apart is capitalizing on this growing necessity with additional social networking tools that can be integrated with the Movable Type blogging platform."
David Chartier of ars technica offers up Movable Type Pro to meld blogging and social networking: "Six Apart summed today's release with a simple question: 'what are the other things we can do with blogging?' ... Six Apart is certainly gaining a leg on its competition by jumping on the social bandwagon with what sounds to be a very polished and integrated package. ... Movable Type Pro is an appealing all-in-one package for bloggers and businesses looking to ride the social wave."
Rafe Needleman of CNET's Webware says that Movable Type is becoming a social platorm: "The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro. ... Just as blogging is changing publishing, social networking is going to change blogging."
Eric Eldon of VentureBeat has a post titled Six Apart to launch social networking features for blogs: "[F]or some publications, this is a great way to increase the time people spend on the site -- if you feel a part of a community, you often want to spend more time with that community. ... Now, Six Apart's goal is to create mini social networks for blogs. "
Andy Merrett on the Blog Herald offers up Movable Type gets social with Pro version, built on MT 4.2: "Blogging and social networking have been happy partners for some time, so it's not surprising that at least one blogging platform is making the most of that alliance in their latest 'pro' version. ... It sounds like a great 'out of the box' solution for those already using, or keen to use, Movable Type, who want to integrate more social tools."
Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb gets it at least halfway right (kidding!) with The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type: "Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks. With Six Apart's recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more."
Heather Havenstein at Computerworld gets right to the heart of it with Six Apart adds social networking, content management tools to Movable Type.
RSS Applied chimes in with MovableType adds social to the blog: "Considering blogs were the first link in the social networking chain, it seems only right that it would come back full circle. Most bloggers use social networks extensively to extend the reach of their blog, and it has become the common secondary effort of most bloggers. ... So this move by SixApart is a savvy one that accepts the direction the web has gone, and I'm definitely downloading and installing MovableType Pro on one of my personal blogs to see what it's all about."
And James Lewin of Podcasting News wraps it all up Movable Type Wants To Help You Build The Next Digg: "Six Apart today announced an update to Movable Type and the launch of Movable Type Pro, a new version that's designed to let you build your own social networking sites. ... The announcement is good news for all bloggers, because it raises the bar for blogging platforms. If you've got a popular podcast, blog or Internet video, you'll soon be able to turn your site into a social network."

Of course, we can continue with the examples forever -- there are already dozens of excited conversations about MT 4.2 and MT Pro all across the web. But perhaps most gratifying is that we're hearing the same level of excitement from the diehard community of Movable Type users as well. That is, after all, why these tools exist.

It's reminiscent of one of the most striking images in those opening ceremonies, the sprouting of the peach blossoms, a symbol of openness. That blossoming was followed by the revelation that all of the intricate, technical movements of the beautiful choreography were pulled off by individual people manipulating a nearly countless number of enormous blocks. While our own small efforts pale in comparison to the grandeur and scale of the opening of the Olympic games, there are still some lessons we can learn from the example. Our work is designed to increase openness, to bring people together, to make something that's designed to be beautiful. And most of all, it's designed to broadcast these things to the world, using the powerful combination of talented individuals and Movable Type.

We can't wait to see what you and your communities do next.

hCard Hacking in Perl

2008-08-11T23:23:50Z

This morning one of our interns finished up one of his hackathon projects (every Wednesday is hack day -- our coders spend all day working on projects that they think are interesting, valuable, or just plain cool. And yes, we are hiring) which is a Perl library to create new hCards and parse existing ones from around the web. The Microformat hCard describes how to represent people, companies, organizations, and places by using a 1:1 representation of vCard properties and values in HTML. When developing this library, we focused on making sure that it worked with hCards in the wild -- including those that might not fully follow the specification -- and making sure that you didn't need to already know how hCard worked to make use of the library.

Some more information from the library's README:

This module handles three existing specifications from Microformats.org:

hCard -- http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

adr -- http://microformats.org/wiki/adr

geo -- http://microformats.org/wiki/geo

Each of them can be used on their own (hCard uses adr and geo to parse addresses and geolocations, but adr and geo have no dependencies on any others, and hCard doesn't need either unless the corresponding elements appear in an hCard), though the primary appearance of adr and geo "in the wild" is as subparts of hCards.

This module exists both to parse existing hCards from web pages, and to create new hCards so that they can be put onto the Internet.

To use it to parse an existing hCard (or hCards), simply give it the content of the page containing them (there is no need to first eliminate extraneous content, as the module will handle that itself):

my $card = Data::Microformat::hCard->parse($content);

If you would like to get all the hCards on the webpage, simply ask using an array:

my @cards = Data::Microformat::hCard->parse($content);

The module respects nested hCards using the parsing rules defined in the spec, so if one hCard contains another, it will return one hCard with the other held in the relevant subpart, rather than two top-level hCards.

To create a new hCard, first create the new object:

my $card = Data::Microformat::hCard->new;

Then use the helper methods to add any data you would like. When you're ready to output the hCard, simply write:

my $output = $card->to_hcard;

And $output will be filled with an hCard representation, using tags exclusively with the relevant class names.

If you would like to have the parser determine the representative hCard for a page, simply pass the page's URL as an additional parameter to the parse or from_tree methods, and the appropriate property will be found if it can be determined.

Check it out on CPAN and let us know what you think.

Facebook Connects with Movable Type

2008-07-23T22:00:56Z

Blogging is evolving, to encompass the world of social networking and connect to the rest of the web, merging publishing with community. Movable Type users know this better than anyone, since they get first and best access to the coolest social publishing features.

Today marks another milestone, as our own David Recordon joined Mark Zuckerberg onstage at Facebook's F8 conference to demonstrate a live, working implementation of Facebook Connect for Movable Type. Facebook Connect is a powerful new initiative from Facebook that lets you bring your Facebook profile and social graph to other applications and websites while still giving you full control over privacy. We've shown off (and will soon release for download) a free, open source plugin for Movable Type that enables Facebook Connect on any MT-powered site.

Simply put, this is another huge leap forward in the effort to make the personal web more open.

Facebook users who visit Movable Type-powered sites using these new features will see a number of significant benefits:

You can sign in with your existing Facebook account, without the compelexity of creating a new account on a site.
If you choose, your Facebook profile name and picture can automatically be shared with the Movable Type site you're visiting.
All of these capabilties take place without you having to share your password with any other sites.
Facebook Connect for Movable Type honors your privacy, so that no one else will see your information from Facebook unless you've given then permission from within Facebook.
Facebook Connect makes it possible to tell your friends on Facebook where you're participating on the web, by updating your News Feed.
As Facebook brings new capabilities onilne with Facebook Connect, Movable Type sites will be able to provide them to you seamlessly.

Of course, this doesn't just benefit the members of a site's community, there are some huge benefits for those of you who manage and publish Movable Type-powered sites, too.

It's easier than ever to get new visitors to your site to register and participate, increasing engagement and encouraging repeat visits.
Community members can advertise their participation on your site using the Facebook News Feed, driving traffic and new visitors to your site.
You can require sign-in via Facebook Connect or OpenID or other systems, knowing that most active users on the web have an account with one of these systems already.
Site visitors are more likely to participate if they see familiar avatars and names from their friends on your site.
You can manage community members who sign in through Facebook Connect using the same familiar tools you use today -- even on your iPhone.

This kind of open connection between social networks and blogs benefits everyone. Publishers get more visitors and engagement on their sites, Facebook members get to discover more dynamic conversations going on across the web, and everyone gets a better user experience that honors their privacy.

For years now, we've invested in connecting Movable Type sites to the rest of the web. Millions of people visit a Movable Type-powered site or community every day, and they benefit from our work to make the web better. There are initiatives like OpenID, which has grown from its genesis at Six Apart to being part of the fabric of the web, with over half a billion accounts now being able to sign in to your Movable Type-powered community without having to create a new login. (We hope to see Facebook Connect support OpenID soon, too -- that would mean even less work for sites which already accept OpenID.)

We committed to bringing social networking capabilities to any site that wants them with the enormous success of our Community Solution for Movable Type, which turns any MT-powered site into a complete social platform. This was amplified by efforts like Action Streams, which from its launch at the beginning of this year has exploded with support for sharing activity from dozens of social networks, offering aggregation of social networking activity from more sources than any other platform. And the web has seen immediate benefits from projects like TypePad AntiSpam, designed to be a free way to combat blog spam anywhere on the web, on any platform.

Today, this tradition is demonstrated again by bringing Facebook Connect to Movable Type. Like Movable Type itself, it's available for free and will be released under an open source license. And like all of these efforts to make blogging more social, Facebook Connect is available first and exclusively for Movable Type.

As we get closer to the availability of Facebook Connect, we'll explain the technical details of implementation, as well as offering an overview of the experience that community members and site owners can expect. In the meantime, you'll want to grab the latest release candidate of Movable Type 4.2, due to be released shortly, and featuring massive performance improvements and far simpler templating in addition to support for the Facebook Connect plugin.