What's the News?

We've had a bunch of recent press stories about the different projects we're working on at Six Apart, so it makes sense to highlight a few of the ones that are particularly interesting.

BusinessWeek takes a look at new networks like Vox, which focus on helping make more meaningful connections online.

Vox users can make some content available to the general public. Other posts and photos can only be seen by users designated as true friends, family members, or people in the user's extended neighborhood (which includes friends of friends). ... Its success indicates a trend among newer social networking sites, which are gaining traction not by focusing on the mass-popularity model that made News Corp.'s MySpace famous, but by helping users connect with smaller, more specific, groups.

And Inc has a similar take on Vox's mission:

Mindful of the countless tech firms that have enjoyed rapid growth only to flame out, Six Apart is letting Vox grow slowly. "We've seen so many products open then disappear," says Mena. "We are trying to build a community." One of the most enthusiastic members of that community, as it happens, is her mother. Recently, Mena was traveling in Europe and missing her daily call with mom. Says Mena: "She knew I wasn't dead because she reads my blog."

A little more lighthearted is Wired's take on the Vox launch party -- but there's one part we hope rings true. "Instead of vaporware-driven hype, the prevailing sentiment is confident pragmatism: The Web is back, and we have made it over as it should always have been".

At the other extreme, talking about the most serious and substantial impacts of blogging, there's this Nation report on blogging in Russia. (It's also been reprinted in the IHT.) In Russia, Zhivoi Zhurnal, or ZheZhe, is synonymous with blogging, and it's had significant impact on political discussion in the country.

LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick first visited Moscow last October when his company, Six Apart, announced a partnership with the Russian media company SUP-Fabrik, which would service the enormous Cyrillic sector. What struck him was the social magnitude of ZheZhe and the serious content of its journal entries. In America, "LiveJournal is lots of people writing to ten people [each, and] reading each other," he told me. In ZheZhe this is magnified into thousands of readers. What for Americans is an electronic diary accessible to a few chosen acquaintances became, for Russians, a platform for forging thousands of interconnected virtual "friends." And Fitzpatrick believes it has potential as a tool for activism. "I really appreciate what it is as a political platform."

Brad also shows up in USA Today, which gives some love to OpenID as the number of OpenID-enabled addresses rapidly approaches the 100 million milestone less than two years after Brad kicked off the effort.

An emerging technology standard could be the answer to a major headache: It lets consumers use the same user name and password for hundreds of websites that require a sign-in.

OpenID's approach has quickly earned it the support of Microsoft, AOL and thousands of users online.

Rounding up the stories is Internet News taking a look at enterprise adoption of modern web tools like blogs.

Christoper Alden, executive vice president of blog tools provider Six Apart, said the next few years will be less about inventing or advancing Web 2.0-type technology, and more about companies figuring out better ways of how to use what we have. "Human engineering, not technical, is what will be important the next few years as companies figure out how to unlock knowledge in these enterprises," said Alden.

And one last bit of coverage is an interview with our own Ben Trott over on Serious Eats. It's about food, and mentions almost nothing about blogging, but whenever we get a chance to embarrass Ben by pointing the spotlight at him, we'll take it. For more info about what's going on across the company, you can check out each of our product teams' blogs: Everything TypePad, Blogs @ Work: Movable Type News, LiveJournal News, and Team Vox.