I take the bait

A good friend is often one's harshest critic. This came to mind while reading this post Jason Kottke writes about the "New Internet" and, more specifically, Six Apart's role in creating "a black hole for creative people". I can feel comfortable in debating his opinion because I respect Jason as a friend and a peer and, in the past, have questioned him privately on his opinion of what makes a respectable company. Because of this relationship and my respect of his opinion, I've decided to break the perceived Six Apart oath of silence (you should see the initiation ritual!) and respond to his post.

Jason writes:

A person who -- when she was unemployed 3 years ago -- could spend a couple weeks in releasing a neat web app for anyone to use because she wanted to or could say what she wanted on her blog will now be putting all her coding energies into an application that serves a few customers & needs to be cash-flow positive and won't have the time to post anything to her blog (and can't say much about what she's working on anyway unless all her readers want to sign NDAs).

As I read this, I naturally felt Jason had picked me as an example. More than likely it's a composite of a bunch of different people all in similar circumstances. Regardless, it's a profile that could very well fit me. Afterall, a little over 3 years ago I was unemployed, it only took us a couple weeks to get the first version of Movable Type out and I posted religiously to dollarshort.org and movabletype.org.

The big difference between this person and me is that the person above is working on an application that "serves a few customers." The "few" is the word that I challenge -- not because I'm fluffing our feathers about market share or need to claim a huge user base. Instead, it's Jason's seemingly discounted view on who those "few" are. I'll explain more about this in a bit.

He continues in the parenthetical:

"...what's good for companies, their shareholders, and their customers isn't necessarily what's good for environment those companies inhabit."

Jason later writes:

"[those who] were [once] pushing the edges of web design are now focused on making software that generates revenue and aren't saying a whole lot about it. That's great for them, for Six Apart, their customers, and their partners, but it kinda sucks for the community as a whole."

My question to Jason: Who is part of this environment that Six Apart inhabits? Who represents "the community as a whole?"

Remember that "few" he referenced above? Do they inhabit this community?

In growing Six Apart, we've decided we wanted to enlarge our reach and serve more than the "few" who were in the community that all of us early adopters came from. These early adopters are the tiny number of people who follow all these little debates and care about semantic markup or CSS or the big Atom versus RSS war of 2003. They remember the girl-on-a-bicycle gag and are proud of their low user numbers on various online communities. A lot of us at Six Apart still care about that stuff, because that's where we come from, but it's not all we care about.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Six Apart seems so quiet to the core audience of bloggers these days is because Six Apart wants to reach an audience outside our own inner circle of webloggers (the early adopters). For example, I spoke in front of a crowd of 500 people at the nTen conference recently, to an audience of people involved in non-profits. These aren't necessarily bloggers, but they're people that should be blogging. I didn't do a product pitch and barely even mentioned Six Apart. What I chose to talk about was how non-profits can benefit from personal voice in their weblogs and their need to harness the passion of people who are already online and weblogging.

Maybe this isn't the most exciting stuff if you've been following blogs for three or four or five years. And perhaps it isn't anything new for people who read Mena's Corner. However, for this audience, I was explaining a new world -- one which I hope resulted in the creation of more weblogs from the non-profit realm.

In a different vein, we recently launched a service in conjunction with Major League Baseball that enables fans to keep team-based weblogs. This is really our first American deal with a non-tech organization. It's a significant milestone for weblogging, for it represents an entirely new breed of webloggers entering the space. Before we had publicly announced the launch, we saw some feedback. And frankly, it's the sort of criticism that doesn't help grow the weblog medium. Yes, there are people blogging about baseball before MLBlogs. And yes, other blogs may be better or worse. But that's not the point. I want to see weblogs about mundane things like what my friend had to eat and how the game was played. I want to empower the individual to be just that -- a person.

Take LiveJournal, as another example. There are very few people who truly understand the power of this community. I won't even claim to understand just why it works so well. And to so many, it's seemingly just a journaling service with a lot of teen girls screaming OMG.

Instead of writing theoretical weblog post after theoretical weblog post on reasons why LiveJournal plays such a significant role in the online world, we decided that we wanted it to be a part of Six Apart, so that everyone in all of our communities could benefit from the lessons that community has learned.

When we acquired LiveJournal, Jason expressed that he didn't quite know what to make of the deal. I hoped my post about the acquisition would explain why we considered it such a relevant part of online communication. The importance of small group communication is massively underrepresented in conversations about weblogging. Perhaps it's not glamorous enough or perhaps people have to discover on their own that sometimes they'd rather communicate with 12 friends than 12 million. Either way, LiveJournal becoming part of Six Apart spoke louder than any features we could add to a release. And it's in those personal blogs that people are most able to have the kind of unfettered, honest conversations that sometimes the contentiousness and confrontation of the public internet turns into a painful experience.

Consider Six Apart as an example of what I'm talking about. 6A is like a black hole for creative people. Folks who, a year or two ago, were among the leading voices in the discussion of how weblogs were changing our culture, were coding all sorts of useful plug-ins for Movable Type, or were pushing the edges of web design are now focused on making software that generates revenue and aren't saying a whole lot about it. (Sort of ironic that working for 6A kills the weblogs of their employees, isn't it?) That's great for them, for Six Apart, their customers, and their partners, but it kinda sucks for the community as a whole.

I don't buy the idea that most companies are creatively stifling their employees. While it may be true for some companies, I think it's far more likely that, as you say, people with jobs are really, really busy. Frankly, I know that when my heaviest periods of blogging came when I was unemployed or not feeling fulfilled at work.

People often misconstrue my motivations for not posting as frequently as I should. During the course of the day I'll get into a conversation about some hot topic and decide that I'll want to devote a Mena's Corner post to the matter. But, the fact is, I'll get pulled into a meeting about an upcoming business trip, will have to catch up on the email that builds up in my inbox, will need to participate in a meeting about future versions of our various products or will be called to handle the sort of situations that arise when you're an executive of a growing company and you're intent on fighting the good fight.

The fact I don't write much about the politics of weblogging or blogging conferences or the importance of weblogs as perceived by specific online demographics doesn't mean I'm not keenly aware of it all. It isn't as if I don't have an opinion about these things as well. It's just that I have to fight the right battles and spend my time in the best way that is beneficial for not only Six Apart, but our customers -- who are indeed part of the weblogging community. And a lot of people who are in the weblog community will learn their own lessons a lot better first-hand than if I just pontificate to them on my blog.

Take the "Where Are All the Women in Weblogging?" question that pops up every so often. Well, the last time Six Apart did some serious user demographic studies, we saw that there was about an even split of male to female webloggers on TypePad and a 75% female population on LiveJournal. The number of women on Movable Type is slightly lower than on TypePad, but is still above 40%. Roughly 40% of the Six Apart, Ltd. employees happen to be women – in the United States alone, 21 of 53 total staff members. Another interesting statistic: our technical support staff for Movable Type and TypePad is comprised entirely of women.

And, despite the fact that I'm a woman, I do get asked to speak at high profile conferences. I started a business with my husband, but don't feel marginalized. My best friend asked if Ben ever feels uncomfortable that I get more visibility in press about the company, and that is a reflection of her own perceived view based on the press coverage Six Apart has received.

I could write about how women are represented in our tools or in Six Apart itself. I could write a 2,000 word essay on how more and more young women are coming online via tools like LiveJournal. Or how the booming population of cooking, knitting and family weblogs have resulted in many new communities with a dominant female presence, across all three of our platforms.

If it's true that men dominate tech and political weblogs, then I'm sure it's fine to let them have their little niches.

In the meantime, I can try to work with our marketing group and try to figure out how to reach even more women or men or any other group that needs a voice.

Transparency is wonderful and we're constantly struggling about how much information we want to reveal. Today, in fact, we had a follow-up meeting about the release of Movable Type 3.16 and Shelley (one of our technical support wizards) raised the important point of finding the right balance of revealing future features to our customers and explaining to them when a certain bug will be fixed.

Like I said, it's a constant struggle. And, when you're competing with big guys like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, I think we'd err on the side of opacity if keeping our product plan for 2005 closely guarded meant giving us an edge of these giants. It still matters to us that at least one of the main companies bringing blogs to the masses is the company that's founded and run by bloggers who've loved the medium since its inception.

So then the question is: What do people want us to reveal? Is it our dark inner struggles? Is it what we're doing with AJAX? Is it my speaking schedule for 2005? Should I talk about what I want to express at the D Conference this year before the conference even occurs?

Frankly, can we ever reveal enough? Probably not.

Finally, Jason makes the comment that Six Apart is a black hole for creative people. While our lack of noise about what we're doing internally may make this seem true, the fact of the matter is, if we talked about things before we could ship them, then we'd just be called purveyors of vaporware. Yes, we're working on future versions of Movable Type and LiveJournal and TypePad. Yes, some of these developments have been in the works for the entirety of the past year. There's a lot of cool stuff and just walking around the office and talking to our staff makes me realize that the creativity at Six Apart is probably the strongest in the entire industry.

The reason we've attracted creative people to Six Apart is because they feel it's a place where they'll have the best chance of getting their best work in front of the widest audience. If it requires having a quieter period where the heavy lifting is being done, we're willing to take the time to get it right and hope that you'll trust us to open up once we've got some results to show.

In the meantime, we trust you'll all keep us honest, and please do let us know what you'd like to hear from us, and give us examples of which other companies are doing a good job with blogging. We'll be following up on all your suggestions.