Six Apart News & Events

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 Ever had a profile that got out of date?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.

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.

Reports From The Field

The Road Forward

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.

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!

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.

What Blog Link Means

What Blog Link Does

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.

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. 

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.

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.