Kids win in the Blogger Challenge
During the month of October, more than a hundred bloggers around the U.S. engaged in a friendly competition to see who could raise the most money from their readers for Donors Choose, the non-profit organization where you can support a classroom project in need of funding that's been submitted by a public school teacher. The results are in, and they are impressive: The bloggers raised $420,000 for 75,000 students from low-income communities.
Sarah Bunting, author of the blog Tomato Nation, deserves a HUGE congratulations for raising $101,280 and impacting the most kids - 15,953 - during the competition. Besides having a loyal readership that wholeheartedly supported her cause, her pledge to traipse through Rockefeller Center dressed as a tomato if she won may have helped garner the donations that sent her to the head of the pack. This despite threats from TechCrunch and Kara Swisher that THEY would prevail in the race.
Six Apart is the proud sponsor of the award to bloggers who impact the most kids. We’re pleased to note that some of the leaders in their categories are a Six Apart employee and several customers. Anil Dash is employee number one and Chief Evangelist at Six Apart, and won first place in the Technology category with donations that impact 3,016 kids. Fred Wilson, the second place winner in this category, is a prominent New York City-based venture capital blogger who uses TypePad to comment on the state of the venture world. The three winners in the science category are members of the largest online community dedicated to science, Science Blogs, which uses Movable Type as its publishing platform.
The bloggers who created challenges and raised funds for the schools played a big role in the success of the program, but those who donated also deserve recognition. Our LiveJournal community was particularly active in identifying and participating in many of the requests from teachers. It was heartwarming to see the projects that members of the LJ community supported.
Six Apart will award each first place winner with a donation of $200 to projects they’ve designated in their Blogger Challenges. And we’ll send each first, second, and third place winner Six Apart greatest hits blogger paraphenalia.
Congratulations and thanks to all who participated.
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Overall Winner: TomatoNation
Reached 15,953 students
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Technology Blogs, 1st place: Anil Dash
Reached 3,016 students
Technology Blogs, 2nd place: aVC, Fred Wilson
Reached 2,549 students
Technology Blogs, 3rd place: AllThingsD, Kara Swisher
Reached 1,940 students
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General Blogs, 1st Place: TomatoNation
Reached 15,953 students
General Blogs, 2nd place: Wide Lawns
Reached 1,053 students
General Blogs, 3rd place: Rice Daddies
Reached 657 students
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Topical/Local Blogs, 1st Place: Atomic Tiki, Steve Bryant
Reached 2,510 students
Topical/Local Blogs, 2nd Place: Apartment Therapy
Reached 1,546 students
Topical/Local Blogs, 3rd Place: Young Manhattanite
Reached 1,347 students
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ScienceBlogs, 1st Place: Pharyngula
Reached 3,264 students
ScienceBlogs, 2nd Place: Adventures in Ethics and Science
Reached 1,558 students
ScienceBlogs, 3rd Place: Terra Sigillata
Reached 901 students
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LitLiberation, 1st Place: Internet Lifestyle
Reached 1,728 students
LitLiberation, 2nd Place: 4-Hour Workweek Readers
Reached 1,572 readers
LitLiberation, 3rd Place: Piranha Marketing
Reached 1,565 students
OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People
At Six Apart, we'll be supporting the new OpenSocial initiative to make an open platform for social applications on the web. But for us, it's not about Google or Facebook. It's about the web itself. As you can guess from our announcement weeks ago that we're opening up the social graph, this is the sort of thing we believe in. Honestly, we don't care much about the political battles between big tech companies: We're doing this because this is what it takes for new features, applications, and experiences to happen in the right way for the vast range of communities that we serve. This gives regular people on the web more control over the social networks and applications they use.
By the "right way", we mean the "open" part of OpenSocial. OpenSocial is simply a set of programming standards that let developers create applications that can run on a wide range of social networking platforms. But more importantly, OpenSocial has the promise of letting regular people choose which social networks they want to run those applications on. That leads us to a couple of important ideas:
- At Six Apart, we think the idea of using whatever applications you want, on whatever networks you want, is really powerful, and really cool.
- There isn't going to be One Big Winner, either in social networking or in social applications -- people will be using lots of networks and apps.
- All of us have to have open standards for these technologies in order to reach the audiences that current social networks aren't serving well. This includes international audiences, business users, and other diverse communities.
- It's important that all users have control over which applications and networks we use, and can move freely between them with our data and connections, in a system that honors privacy.
- As a platform, OpenSocial combines the best lessons from the popularity of widgets, the social capabilities of networks like Facebook, and the application power of successful platforms like Salesforce.com's
- The important story about OpenSocial is what it enables for people, not the politics between big companies.
(For a more technical look at how OpenSocial works, and a definition of the important concepts of "containers" and "apps", take a look at Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen's excellent overview of OpenSocial on his TypePad blog. Paired with his screencast and screenshots, it'll give you all the technical background you need.)
A Thousand Killer Apps
OpenSocial is a platform for applications, so it's worth explaining how it might work. One of the most important ideas for platforms is that of the killer application, a program or utility so compelling that people will adopt a platform just to use it. In social networking, we won't see a single killer app is because there will be thousands. Everybody will find something that clicks for them, and for their circle of friends or family or coworkers. A lot of popular apps will be trivial, letting you do fun little things like put an icon on a profile page. But as Wired mentioned, some of the killer apps for these new social platforms might look a lot like they did on past platforms.
Take a spreadsheet, for example: Imagine if a simple spreadsheet could be shared on one of the services you use, but limited so only your friends could see it, for a fantasy sports league; or only your family could see it, for a Christmas wishlist; or only your coworkers could see it, for sensitive business information. You've probably already set up groups or buddy lists for those people on the various social networking sites that you use, but there hasn't been an easy way yet for a developer to let you access those networks right from within an application. Now, there will be. And if your work network is on LinkedIn, but your friends are on MySpace, and your family's on Vox, it can all Just Work.
In the same way, if you don't want to use a particular social network, or your friends are all on another service, but you really like the applications you're using, you could take them with you to another social network. It's also the best insurance for your privacy: If you have control over your data, you can make sure it's being used in the way you expect, and if it isn't, you can leave for a service that you trust.
You Are In Control
The principle of choice is something we've been supporting in our platform for years; In LiveJournal, you can bring in pictures from Photobucket, just like you can bring in Flickr photos in Vox or YouTube videos in Movable Type or use hundreds of widgets in TypePad. But those were just first steps -- there's a whole world of more ambitious ways of connecting various services together. And if these standards are open, we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time someone wants to work with us, or with any of the other companies that are supporting Open Social. Ultimately, open standards win on the web -- one of the quotes that people seemed to like from a recent post I wrote about open standards summarized this idea:
Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.
Finally, we have to bring it back to our mission at Six Apart. We want to bring the power of connecting through blogs to as many people as possible. With more than 40 million people visiting Six Apart-hosted sites every month, a number that perhaps doubles if you include all the Movable Type and TypePad-powered sites that are hosted on their own domains, we're reaching audiences that a lot of the Web 2.0 world doesn't always pay attention to. We're an extremely international company, with dedicated teams promoting and developing our platforms from San Francisco to Paris to Tokyo and beyond. We've spent a ton of time teaching businesses how to use social media, because we think one of the most important audiences for developers to reach with social software is businesses and enterprises. And those audiences are complemented the core community of people connecting to their friends and family every day through their blogs.
We're looking forward to working with the incredible lineup of companies that are supporting OpenSocial in the personal social networking space: MySpace, Google/Orkut, Hi5, Bebo, Friendster, Ning, Plaxo, and more. We're also excited about the companies that we'll work with to bring these technologies to businesses, including LinkedIn, Oracle, and Salesforce.com. But most of all, we're eagerly anticipating the ways it will make it easier for you to share and connect in new ways with the people you care about.
Additional Reading:
- We're opening the social graph: Two months ago, we made a public commitment to making sure that the potential of applications built on social networking applications would be available in an open manner that users control.
- A River of Relationships: Last week, we demonstrated a technology that we've launched that lets you share social network relationship information between different services, and made it freely available to developers.
