Six Apart News & Events: September 2006

This post is the fourth in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Simone Plebani, whose Magic Paper theme won in the "Hobbies and Crafts" category.

Continue reading 'Style Contest Designer: Simone Plebani'...

We’re travelling all over the U.S. to talk about the opportunity of business blogging in the most appropriate way: face to face. Now, if you’re like us, you’re probably either skeptical of events that are run by a software company (who wants to spend a few hours hearing a sales pitch?) or you’re burned out on ceaseless hype. (If you didn’t already know about business blogs, you wouldn’t be reading this.)

So, to help make it easier for you to take time out of your busy schedule to join us, we’ve created a list of the Top Ten Things You Won’t Hear At The Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar.

1. “It’s a revolution!” Ugh. Nothing’s more grating than someone repeating over and over that blogging is a revolution. For some companies, maybe it is. But mostly, it’s just another communication tool in your arsenal, and we want to show you how to make the best use of it. Hype only distracts from the good, hard part: seeing results.
2. “Let me read you these bullet points…” We’ve all suffered through seminars or tutorials where someone reads a PowerPoint presentation as the audience struggles to stay awake. There might be some slides used to illustrate points, but we’re bloggers — we believe in educating through conversations.
3. Tired crap about bloggers getting Dan Rather fired. Yeah, yeah, it was a great triumph against the doddering mainstream media. It’s also very 2004. We want to get more media companies blogging, along with everyone else. So we’re not going to be trotting out these tired old examples to illustrate our points.
4. “Markets are conversations!” Hey, we love the ideas behind the Cluetrain Manifesto as much as anybody, but if you’re responsible for helping a company communicate better, you already know this stuff in your gut. Instead, you’ll get practical details about how to enable useful conversations with a blog.
5. “Buy Movable Type and TypePad now!” Look, we’re proud that the tools we’ve created help lots of businesses get started blogging. And sure, we’ll point out examples of customers using our platforms to power their blogs. But we’re not selling used cars — we don’t need to shout about our technology.
6. “Ajax!” We love asynchronous javascript and XML, as well as the design patterns the technology enables. That’s because we’re nerds. Unless somebody wants a recommendation on something to clean a sink with, ajax isn’t going to come up.
7. “Web 2.0!” Same story as Ajax. Love the idea, but there’s already a conference for that kind of stuff. The technology changes are minor compared to the business goals that we’re focused on.
8. “RSS will kill email.” Chris Pirillo said this a few years ago, and maybe he still even believes it. We’re thinking the existing base of email users make up an audience of a billion or two that your blog should be reaching.
9. “Isn’t Mena cute?” Hey, we love our co-founders. But we’re not holding a bunch of seminars all over the country just so we can talk about our own company. We’d rather talk about yours.
10. “You can quit your day job!” Sure, there’s maybe a few hundred people in the world who’ve been able to quit their jobs and blog full-time. But we like our day jobs, and just want to use blogs to be better at doing them. We figure you’re probably the same way.

Okay, so if that’s the list of things we’re not going to be talking about, what are we covering? The things you actually need: How to get your boss or team to sign off on doing a blog in the first place. What to do if you deploy blogs and some people don’t want to post on them. How to choose a consultant to help you deploy your blogs. Strategy for coming up with content, or encouraging your team to be smart about what they post.

And lots, lots more. Of course, there’s only one way to really find out what goes on at our Business Blogging Seminars: Sign up.

Today we released a mandatory security update for Movable Type and Movable Type Enterprise to resolve a number of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. To make updating your system easier, we are providing patch distributions for Movable Type versions 3.32 and Movable Type 3.2 containing only the files which have changed.

The patches are localized, so you will need to choose the one which is appropriate to your installation. If you are running a version of Movable Type other than v3.32 or v3.2, the full distribution provided in your Movable Type account is required for update.

Updating from Movable Type 3.32

Updating from Movable Type 3.2

More details forthcoming

Although we feel it's extremely important to provide you will full details about the vulnerabilities so that you understand the severity of the issues, we are postponing release of that information for a couple of days. This will allow you sufficient time to update your system (and inform your neighbors about updating theirs) before putting it at greater risk for attack.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us directly. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you all for your continued support.

Gothamist has been included in Business Week’s Best Bloggers lineup. This list was put together with a blogging audience in mind. It was open to a general vote and many of the winners were write-in candidates — a nice open process and good for driving traffic, too.

Over the past few months, we’ve helped Gothamist with their scaling and some of their custom plugins, and we’ll write more about that soon. In the meantime, congratulations are in order.

This post is the third in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Victoria Wang, whose Summer Love theme won in the "Home and Family" category.

Continue reading 'Style Contest Designer: Victoria Wang'...

Before starting our business together, both David and I worked for many years in the non-profit sector. And in addition to our interest in social change, I'm also a bit of a map geek. So we were happy to help when Ashoka expressed interest in using our DIY map for their redesigned regional pages. Ashoka is a global association of social entrepreneurs — businesses that take sustainable social change as part of their mission.

DIY map is a configurable, interactive map in Flash that provides a basic geographic interface to your data or webpages. I started it as a skunkworks project at Human Rights Watch years ago, but have since extended it and released it publicly. It's simpler, easier to use and style than a lot of the big webmapping services. Sites have used it to map vendors, photos, podcasts, web traffic, and more.

But don't take my word for it. It's free to download and try out for yourself.

• “I know all about blogs, but there’s no way I’ll ever convince my boss our company should be blogging.”
• “Yeah, I read blogs sometimes, but nobody actually uses them for business, do they?”
• “We know we need to be blogging, but it’s hard to figure out where to even start.”

I’ve worked at Six Apart for a few years now, so I get to hear sentiments like these every single day. If you’re reading this, you already know about the potential of blogging. But getting a company to start blogging can be a tough job. We’ve created our new series of Business Blogging Seminars to help solve the problem.

We think it’s important to bring blogging to real businesses, the kinds full of people who just want to make their day at work easier, or who want to help their company grow. So we’re coming to see you.

We’re visiting major cities all over the United States to explain the real, practical benefits of business blogs, along with advice on how to get started. We might mention things like Ajax or RSS or podcasting, but if you’re looking to skip an afternoon of work to hang out with people talking about tech toys, don’t bother. This is real productive advice for professionals who value their time.

You’ll walk out of the seminar with some straightforward benefits:

• A solid understanding of the different ways you can use blogging.
• Real-world case studies of how other companies in your line of business save time and money using blogs.
• Simple, effective tips on how to make the case for blogging to your coworkers, team, or management.
• All the resources you need to start a trial deployment of a business blog.
• Introductions to peers and experts in the community who can help share ideas or provide assistance.

We’ll be joined by expert speakers in every city, focusing on particular industries that have the most to gain from blogging. Our agenda includes Washington D.C., Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Miami. Early registration is discounted 50%, to just $75.

So get moving: It all starts in two weeks in Washington, DC (early registration for the D.C. event ends today!) and we’ve sold out at every seminar in the past, so you’ll want to sign up as soon as possible. Just fill out the registration form to get started.

We helped get New York Magazine's Fashion Week blog up and running for this year's big event. Obviously, this was a deadline we did not want to miss!

Some of the highlights so far: "Classy Models upstage celebs", "Iman sees future in plastics", "Waistlines, going up!", "Gramercy Park Outrage over Marc Jacobs Party", "Tripping the Runway Fantastic " and "Padma Lakshmi did her own curls."

Update 9/18: Grub Street, a food blog we worked on for New York Magazine is up now too!

This post is the second in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Parker Torrence, whose Top Secret theme won in the "News, Politics, and Current Events" category.

Continue reading 'Style Contest Designer: Parker Torrence'...

I’m very happy to announce that Six Apart has acquired Rojo Networks. As many of you know, Rojo runs the popular Rojo and Nooz services.

Not only are we excited to be affiliated with Rojo and Nooz, we are thrilled about the people and technologies that join Six Apart through this acquisition. Four people will become core members of the Six Apart Team: Chris Alden, Aaron Emigh, Andrew Bunner and Jim Ramsey.

Chris, Rojo’s CEO, will become the vice president and general manager of Movable Type, and will work to expand Movable Type’s presence in the enterprise blogging market. Aaron, Rojo’s CTO, will become vice president and general manager of core technologies, working with the product groups to unify our engineering efforts and provide leadership on shared code, services and APIs. Brad Fitzpatrick will continue in his role as chief architect within the new core technologies group, expanding Six Apart’s core infrastructure code to scale for our future. Andrew Bunner, Rojo’s current director of engineering, will join the core technologies group to provide additional technical and management leadership. And Jim Ramsey will join the LiveJournal team doing front-end development. In addition, Ben Trott, in his role as CTO, will be a key advisor and contributor to the Core Technologies Group as he continues his work on Vox, our new personal blogging service.

I can’t express how excited I am that these four people with such deep knowledge and skills are joining Six Apart. I have spent a good deal of time with each of them and am convinced they will not only add momentum to our work, but be great additions to the team.

So who will run Rojo and Nooz? Good question. Rojo will initially be an independent subsidiary of Six Apart and continue to operate as usual. Chris and Aaron will continue to be involved with Rojo. Users will see no change in the quality of the services they receive. Rojo and Nooz will continue to be independent entities, and we expect to sell a majority interest in the services business within a few months. You can see more on Rojo’s blog as well.

And what does this mean for Six Apart? It means that Six Apart is continuing its aggressive strategy to remain the leader in blogging software and services through continued innovation, acquisitions and partnerships.

Six Apart: The Film? Okay, we’re not really breaking into the movie business, but we’ve got a bunch of little video clips that we’ve posted in the past few days that you’ll definitely want to check out.

TypePad Tag Team: It’s only two minutes long, but it shows you exactly how we deliver your TypePad blog posts directly to search engines like Technorati. There’s even a little bit about the new tags support in TypePad. So how does all of it work? Hint: Technorati’s office is only a few blocks from us, and the process involves a domestic quadruped.

Mena Speaks at Ted: Mena attended the Ted Conference back in February, and talked about a lot of the ideas that we think are coming for the future of personal blogs. This clip’s about fifteen minutes long, but it’s definitely worth watching. It’s always nice to see some funny and touching personal stories instead of the usual blather about blogging.

On the other end of the blogging spectrum is a clip aimed squarely at those who are new to Vox: Going Back Home. We’re trying to answer all the different types of questions that arise in the Vox community, and even something as simple as getting back to the homepage without a link that says “home” is fair game for Team Vox. For those of you who are on Vox, you can use it as a reminder that you can always upload your own videos to share with your friends, as well. Not on Vox yet? Request an invite!