Project Comet, previewed at DEMO Fall, aims to bring weblogging into the mainstream with advanced ease of use, rich features and fine-grained privacy

San Francisco, CA— September 22, 2005 — A new platform for weblogging, intended to simplify weblog creation and broaden its acceptance, was previewed at DEMO Fall by weblog software and services leader Six Apart. The new technology platform, called Project Comet, is intended to eclipse today’s services and expand online communication using text, photos, video, music and voice -- combined into a single weblog in an easy, fun and intuitive way, making blogs accessible to millions of new users worldwide.

"Just as email revolutionized social communications in the 1990s, weblogging is now redefining how people share their thoughts, experiences and lives online," said Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart’s chief executive officer. "Yet if weblogging is to really reach its potential, it needs to be more intuitive and personalized, for both the blogger and the reader. Project Comet is creating technologies that will advance weblogging as we know it today, giving millions of people worldwide the ability to easily stake out, build and share their own distinctive place online."

Combining the weblog publishing power of Six Apart’s popular TypePad service, the community aspects of its LiveJournal offering, and the years of insight garnered from Movable Type, Project Comet will enable aggregation of content from different blogs and unparalleled ease of use. The new platform builds on Six Apart’s vision of offering an open platform for users to create add-ons and very simply hook into any application.

"When we began development work on Project Comet, we thought long and hard about the kind of platform needed to bring anyone -- including people like my mother –- into the mainstream of weblogging," said Six Apart president and co-founder Mena Trott. “What would motivate people to blog? What tools would make it easy? How can we make it fun? We’re answering those questions with Project Comet, and I can’t wait for people to try it."

Project Comet will be the first platform to give users the advantages of a community network with the high quality communications style of a TypePad or Movable Type blog along with a place to store all the media that records your life. This allows users to create a highly personalized weblog that can be customized to fit their lifestyles, making each blog a communications tool -- filled with shared content, exciting media and vibrant interaction among people, all in one place. Some of the features previewed today include:

Community Aggregation: Users will be able to create individual blogs and share sections of them with other users in an elegant and customizable way that has never been done before. You can easily view everything happening on your family members’ blogs. On one automatically created page, you can see a composite blog listing what mom, dad, your husband and far-flung grandparents have posted to their blogs, enabling each family member to have a shared experience that can transcend location and time. They can share the latest news on pets, grandchildren and travel, all in one place by simply clicking on the topic of shared interests they might have.

Multiple Streams: A blog is “your place on the web,�? a place to keep everything that is important to you, creating a record of your life. This new feature allows bloggers to incorporate streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single place by simply dragging and dropping items to create a customized blog with an identity of its own. Project Comet does all the heavy lifting to customize the blog pages and sections.

Privacy: Not everything on a blog should necessarily be viewed by everyone. In addition to existing password protections for entire blogs, Project Comet will let bloggers decide who gets to see what parts of a blog. A blogger may not want her grandparents to see the picture of her in an unflattering swimsuit on the beach. She can mark that picture as private and be comfortable knowing that she has control over what her family sees.

Project Comet is expected to hit the market in early 2006. Current Six Apart customers will get the new benefits of Comet at no additional cost.

About Six Apart
Six Apart Ltd., based in San Francisco, Calif., is the company behind the Movable Type publishing platform, the TypePad personal weblogging service and LiveJournal, an online community organized around personal journals. Six Apart was founded by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott in 2002, and joined by LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick early this year. The company is funded by Neoteny Co., Ltd. and August Capital. Six Apart’s sole focus is to create tools that enable millions of individuals, organizations and corporations to participate in the Web’s full potential by publishing their ideas on the Internet with simple, yet powerful software and services. For more information about Six Apart, TypePad, Movable Type and LiveJournal, visit the Six Apart corporate weblog at http://www.sixapart.com/.

Six Apart is a trademark of Six Apart Ltd. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Media contact:

Six Apart
Jane Anderson
jane@sixapart.com
650.854.3883

Krause Taylor Associates for Six Apart
Alison Williams
Alison@krause-taylor.com
408.918.9091