Blogs.com: The Best in Blogs

If you've been following Six Apart for any time at all, you can tell that this is a company founded by bloggers, for bloggers. From inventing a lot of the core technologies of blogging to helping reinvent the medium with cool new announcements, we've always built a lot of great tools and tech.

But if you've been paying attention this year,you've seen the vision for our company and our community going far beyond just the technology platforms and into some important new initiatives like services and media.

Whether it's advertising services or antispam technology, all of this work is based on a few simple ideas:

• We help all bloggers, regardless of which technology platforms you use.
• We're trying to help you succeed, no matter how you define that -- by growing your audience, your influence or just your bottom line.
• We strive to be open in all that we do, to help tell the rest of the world why blogs are a powerful new medium that matters.

With those principles in mind, that brings us to one of our most exciting new announcements of what's already been a milestone year: Blogs.com, the place to find the best in blogs.

Blogs.com combines a few simple, fundamental ideas in a new way that we think harkens back to some of the best parts of the early days of the web. For example, though they get beat up a lot these days, Yahoo was really exciting back when the web was young. There was just something exciting about a human-edited guide to the web, organized by topic. In a similar way, our expert Blogs.com editorial team is assembling Top Ten lists of blogs by category, to help you discover the best sites that you never knew existed. And we're taking your submissions -- so if you are tired of the same old sites getting attention, we especially want to hear from you.

It's like Celebrity Playlists for Blogs

A more recent example of a great way to discover cool new stuff is the Celebrity Playlists on the iTunes music store.

Though sometimes we all read them just to see how inane a celebrity's picks are, or to see if an artist we like shares our tastes, it's impossible to deny that they're often a fascinating way to find new songs. On Blogs.com, celebrity Top Ten lists let some of the best-known bloggers on the web guide us through the sites that influence them, helping dig up some undiscovered gems you might have missed.

Helping you discover the best of blogs also helps fulfill the mission that the team at Rojo had for their popular feed reader back when it launched. Since we acquired Rojo back in 2006, that team has become an integral part of Six Apart,and we've incorporated a lot of what they learned into Blogs.com. As a result,this new site is also going to be the official successor to Rojo.

So, what does it mean to you?

All of this fits into our mission at Six Apart of helping people communicate online, by helping bloggers reach a broader audience. We'll be rapidly expanding Blogs.com over time. The site is built on the powerful new Movable Type Pro platform, of course, so we can rapidly add new social and community features based on your feedback. And our team's hard at work rapidly expanding upon the already-extensive directory of blogs on the site.

Which brings us to the question you must be asking: How do I get my site featured on Blogs.com? It's easy! Just add your site on the simple submission form on the site and we'll add your blog to the list of sites we're considering. And we want to work hard to get the word out about the blogs we feature. There is, of course, a Twitter account for the new site, and you'll want to sign up for the Blogs.com newsletter, and pass the link along to your friends or family who may still be skeptical about blogging. It's a good old-fashioned email newsletter offering highlights from Blogs.com, and great way to find highlights from the entire blogosphere, delivered fresh to your inbox every week.

In all, the launch of Blogs.com marks just another milestone in our mission to introduce the world to the power of blogging. Though we've been best known for making the tools to create blogs, we're just as committed at Six Apart to creating the services that help bloggers succeed. Today, we've built the best way on the web to discover what the blogosphere has to offer. We're already excited about the pleasant surprises that keep popping up on Blogs.com -- and we think you will be, too.