Six Apart News & Events

Ever since Ben and Mena Trott created Movable Type together so that Mena could blog and build a community, Six Apart has been about helping to get more people blogging. In order to do this we must produce optimized user experiences that take cutting edge technology and make it more accessible. We've been fortunate enough be recognized for our efforts in innovation and today we're introducing a free web application, Blog It for iPhone Powered by TypePad. Built specifically for iPhone's Safari browser, Blog It for iPhone enables you to post blog entries or status updates from wherever you are to more than a dozen different online services.

Blog It for iPhone is essentially the mobile version of our Blog It for Facebook application, which we launched in April. We've been thrilled with the response to Blog It for Facebook (see this ReadWriteWeb post for an example!), and love seeing people use it to create content and share it all over the web. And we also love making it better -- in May we added support for MarkDown so you don't need to write HTML by hand; and in June we added support for FriendFeed and Jaiku, to bring the total list of services we support to thirteen. Blog It now supports creating content on Blogger, Facebook, FriendFeed, Jaiku, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad Vox, WordPress.com, and any WordPress.org site.

Blog It: Free blogging to any platform, from any iPhone

The Blog It for iPhone web application lets you post to your blog and update your status via one easy-to-use interface. Just like the original version for Facebook, you can choose to automatically share your post with people you know on various social networks. And Blog It for iPhone supports all the same services Blog It for Facebook does. To use Blog It for iPhone simply visit blogit.typepad.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

It's so easy that you don't even need to create yet another account; we've integrated OpenID for login to Blog It for iPhone. Our designers worked hard to try to keep it simple so that even if you don't know what OpenID is you'll still be able to just login with your account from Yahoo!. This also means that once you've chosen to link your accounts together, all of your existing settings from Blog It for Facebook will automatically show up on your iPhone and any changes you make will be reflected no matter where you use Blog It.

The Blog It for iPhone web application joins our existing iPhone-optimized TypePad site which we launched last year. TypePad bloggers can visit i.typepad.com from their iPhone to manage comment activity, create and publish simple blog posts and even check on site traffic statistics. To our beloved Movable Type users, we've heard you loud and clear: Blog It is a great way to post to Movable Type from your iPhone, or if you want even more features, you can check out the iMT plugin, which lets you manage your whole Movable Type blog from the device.

To round out blogging support for the iPhone, a native iPhone application for TypePad will be available for free at the launch of the iPhone App Store. TypePad for iPhone enables bloggers to instantly post photos from their iPhone to their blogs and photo albums on TypePad. Michael Sippey, Six Apart's VP of Products, demonstrated this new app during the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Check out the video of the event; his demo starts at about the 30 minute mark.

We're certainly excited about all of the great new things we can provide to bloggers because of the iPhone's great web browser and powerfully simple SDK for native applications. Below are some screenshots of the new free Blog It for iPhone web application, and you can access it from Safari on your iPhone at blogit.typepad.com.

At Six Apart, our mission is to help people communicate on the web, and we've always done this by making the best software and services that we can. But part of our larger goal is to help do what's right for the web, and today we're launching the latest initiative in that effort: TypePad AntiSpam.

What's TypePad AntiSpam? A few short answers:

• A free, open source system powered by TypePad for blocking comment spam on any site, free no matter how many comments you get.
• A service for all bloggers, built into TypePad blogs already and implemented as a free plugin for users of platforms like Movable Type and WordPress.
• An open source engine which developers can use to create new antispam services, with customizable rules and logic.
• In beta! We're hearing great results from testers so far, but wanted to open up TypePad AntiSpam to a larger audience so we can make sure the system is getting as smart as possible.

One of the reasons that we think TypePad AntiSpam is performing so well already is that its adaptive learning engine has been trained by millions of comments already. Every time any TypePad user reports a comment as junk, the system gets a little bit smarter and is even more ready to fight future spam attacks. The same goes for TrackBacks and Pingbacks.

• TypePad AntiSpam is a free, automatic upgrade for TypePad users at any subscription level -- it's built in! You can read up on Everything TypePad to find out how this helps your TypePad blogs and be sure to check out the screencast.
• The service is included in the brand-new Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 1 and is available as a free plugin for any user of MT 3.3 or later.
• For users of other platforms, TypePad AntiSpam is a free plugin. Users of WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 can download the plugin for free, and other platforms can use our 100% Akismet API-compatible implementation to extend their existing antispam support to use this service.

So, why are we releasing TypePad AntiSpam now? It all comes back to our mission, as stated above: We want to increase the quality of conversation on the web. At the highest level, we wanted to change the economics of blog spamming by introducing variety into the ecosystem.

The more different implementations of spam-fighting technology that exist, the more complex and challenging (and expensive!) it becomes for spammers to keep attacking our communities. At the same time, we want to make sure our economic incentives at Six Apart as a business are aligned with the best interests of bloggers, so that we feel the pain and cost of spam just as you do. And we want to get these weapons in the fight against spammers into as many hands as possible. One of the earliest sites to deploy the new platform has been popular tech blog TechCrunch, which just offered up a review of TypePad AntiSpam from the site's founder, Michael Arrington:

[L]ast week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I'm pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.

TypePad AntiSpam has learned from the platforms that came before: Automattic's team has created a dead-simple API for Akismet, and we're 100% compatible with their API. (As Dave Winer once said, "Invention here is hardly the issue. What matters is adoption and forward motion.") The smart work at Defensio has made it clear that bloggers want more competition in the antispam market. And years of work on SpamAssassin has shown the success of making an open source antispam engine that anyone can extend and customize to their own needs.

But most important, we made TypePad AntiSpam so that you don't have to think about spam. So grab the plugin (or TypePad users, just keep on blogging) and join the fight against blog spam.

Connecting your blog to everything you do around the web

• Action Streams: This system, first available as a completely free and open source Movable Type plugin, lets you aggregate your activity from over 50 social sites across the web. And it's easy to add new services, so when community members wanted to import TripIt journeys or Fire Eagle locations or Amazon wishlists, they just get plugged into the system.
• Blog It: Blog It is a free Facebook application that posts to your blog or microblogging service, keeping all your networks in sync. And when we say "your blog", we don't just mean our platforms -- Blog It, while powered by TypePad, works with Blogger and WordPress and Twitter and Pownce, in addition to Movable Type and TypePad and Vox. But a picture's worth a thousand words: Check out the Blog It introduction video to see for yourself.
• Opening the Social Graph: One key aspect of controlling your social networking behavior on your own site is that you have to be able to declare and manage your relationships on your own site. We've worked with the entire community to enable this kind of data sharing while preventing any ugly surprises that can happen when you inadvertently reveal relationship information you didn't intend to share. That's been a consistent theme ever since we were the only partner to provide a completely opt-in implementation of Facebook's "Beacon".
• Profiles Elsewhere: Every one of our platforms, from Movable Type to TypePad to Vox, has the simple but essential ability to publish links to a list of your profiles on other services. It's easy to take these little bits of connection for granted, but expressing those relationships in a format that web software can understand sets the groundwork for future innovations. And it takes a big step towards your personal site being the place that people go first to find you online, instead of a social networking site you don't control.
• OpenID: We invented OpenID at Six Apart with the fundamental concept is that your web address is part of your identity, just like an email address. It's a point that's obvious to any of us who use our personal web sites on our business cards (or Moo cards!) to tell people who we are, but OpenID takes that concept and bakes it into the technological underpinnings of the web. And every one of our platforms has OpenID built-in, with more and better support to come in the future.
• OAuth: This is sort of the software-focused counterpart to OpenID, based on the idea that smart services should automatically integrate into your blogging platform. Vox has done this since it was created -- you can insert Flickr photos or YouTube videos as easily as if they were built directly into Vox itself. And all of this is done with the idea that you shouldn't have to share your password just to share your ideas.

Of course, there's a lot more to come. All of these technologies are available today and are generally free and open source. Most importantly, all of this work speaks to our belief that our innovations should support independent personal web sites, and should honor the tradition of creative individuals being able to fully participate in the web while still retaining complete control and ownership over their ideas and information.

But there's a lot more to do: New networks are popping up every day, and we need to invent ways for us to have even more control over the neverending competition for our attention. There are a whole set of new challenges that we couldn't have imagined in the days when personal sites seemed like the simple and obvious way to have a presence online. The chanegs since then, though, highlight an important new opportunity: Personal websites aren't vanishing, they're evolving. We simply won't let something so important and essential to the web disappear.

Six Apart Services: Building the Best Blogs

The core of the Six Apart Services team comes to us from Apperceptive, the renowned New York City experts who've helped build amazing blog-powered communities for sites including The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, Major League Baseball, iVillage, Gothamist, Serious Eats and many more. You can see just some of their clients listed on their site. Just as exciting, the Apperceptive acquisition marks the opening of our New York location, which adds the latest to the list of great cities of the world which have Six Apart offices, including San Francisco, Paris and Tokyo. (Did we mention we're hiring?)

Six Apart Media: Making Your Blog a Success

That brings up an important point about our advertising program: We have a unique understanding of how blogging works, and that makes us a better partner for advertisers, too. You can read exactly why we're better for advertisers, but the bottom line is that we've got years of expertise as leaders in the blogging industry, and that lets us combine blogs with social media, social networking and advertising in a way that only native bloggers can.

First, we brought all your social networks to your blog with Action Streams. Today, we start to complete the circle.

Ever stopped to think about how many places on the web you post about your life? For many of us, we're posting on multiple blogs, as well as Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. That's a lot of time spent just to make sure all of our friends and family across the web are caught up on our lives. And while it's incredibly important to stay connected to everyone, at Six Apart, we don't think it should have to be quite so complicated to do so. That is why tonight we've taken another step in our ongoing effort to create better tools for bloggers, no matter what publishing platforms you use. We want to make blogging better for everyone.

We are excited to launch the first cross-platform blogging application for Facebook -- Blog It Powered by TypePad. We think Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy to blog from within Facebook and tell people you know all around the web that you're doing so. It doesn't matter if you blog using our products or not; we support bloggers on Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter, Vox, WordPress.com and WordPress.org!

Plus, after you've posted using Blog It, you can choose to automatically share your post via Twitter and Pownce, in addition to the Facebook Newsfeed. While a lot of other Facebook applications rely solely on the Newsfeed to share your activity, we think that Blog It is unique in that it helps you tell everyone you know across the web about what you're creating, not just your Facebook friends. Bloggers, such as our own Alex Deve, have seen a significant increase in traffic when they tell their friends on Twitter about their new posts.

Ready to try it out? Just add the Blog It application on Facebook and take a minute to setup your blogs. From there you can create new blog posts and share them with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce all just by checking a few extra boxes. Or if you're not convinced yet then sit back, break out the pop corn and watch this short movie...

You can learn more about Blog It at http://www.typepad.com/features/blogit.html or read the press release we'll be putting out in the morning.

From our recent launch of the Design Assistant for Movable Type and TypePad to the announcement of tons of new themes for TypePad users, we’ve been extremely focused on design for bloggers this year. Today, we’re thrilled to present the next step in our effort to improve the state of design in the blogosphere: What do you have to say? contest.

We’re calling out to the design community online to create new banners and themes for use on TypePad, Vox and LiveJournal blogs, and enter in the running for HP gift certificates of up to $1000 in value.

At Six Apart, our platforms power every kind of blog, from individuals blogging for friends and family to small businesses or enthusiasts writing about their areas of expertise to some of the biggest media companies in the world. And one thing we think every kind of blogger deserves is the best design on the web. So we’re excited to have HP as a contest sponsor as the next step to encouraging the creation of beautiful new designs for your blog

You can start submitting your design entries in the contest today, with a final deadline of April 4. After that, we’ll move to the voting and judging phases of the competition with a goal of determining a final winner on April 22.

So get started — show the world your design chops, and get in the running for some amazing prizes from HP.

I've been interested in geo-location stuff for a long time now. Even back in 2003, when we launched TypePad, we built in support for parsing photo EXIF data to look for latitude and longitude embedded by a camera or mobile phone. Of course, at the time, only a couple of phone models in Japan, as well as (apparently) high-end digital cameras, could record GPS data on photos taken by the device.

A couple of years later, I bought a GPS device, connected it over Bluetooth to my mobile phone, and wrote some server software to track my location; I also wrote Python client software for my phone (hooray for Python for s60!) to take a photo, collect my current location, and send the whole mess up to my TypePad moblog.

There were a number of problems with every setup I've ever tried, though, ranging from the setup being too clunky (I quickly tired of carrying around a GPS device) to not wanting to share my location in detail with the entire world. Most importantly, though, was that there just wasn't much I could do with the data, once I had it: I could map it, but it wasn't hooked in to my online identity in any useful way.

So I was really excited last week to see the launch of Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle service, which is simple, privacy-aware, and most importantly, is now hooked in to Movable Type, using the new Fire Eagle plugin for MT. This makes my MT profile location-aware: I can add a map of my current location; changes to my location are added to my Action Stream; and other MT plugins can build off of the location to provide additional location-sensitive features. You can see it in action -- combined with the Action Stream plugin -- on David's site.

Another interesting aspect of the Fire Eagle API is that it uses the new OAuth standard for all API requests. We've written about OAuth in the past and are really excited to see Yahoo! supporting it. To help do our part in the adoption of this open standard, we'll be shipping the Perl OAuth library with the next release of Movable Type so that no plugin developer needs to worry if they'll be able to develop atop OAuth with MT.

If you need a Fire Eagle invite, leave a comment and we'll email you one.