October 30, 2008
Blog Link and LinkedIn: Investing in Yourself
Though we're proud to help create a lot of the coolest technologies around, we don't just make technology for its own sake. That's especially true with all of the concern we've heard from our community about the tumultuous economy and unsteady job market — if we're going to look at some gee-whiz new idea, it better have real value.
And that's what we think we're bringing you with our new announcement of Blog Link, powered by TypePad. At a technical level, it's a free service that lets you promote your blog and read blogs of people in your network, all through the power of LinkedIn's exciting new application platform. We think that's pretty nifty technology, but that's not why we've been creating applications like this.
Instead, you can look to conversations like the recent one our CEO Chris Alden had with Portfolio.com. There are a lot of interesting points in the interview, but one quote stood out, being mentioned by a lot of folks across the blogosphere:
[A] bad economy will probably lead to an overall uptick in blogging, Alden says. "When you don't know where else to invest," he explains, "you invest in yourself." Which is kind of a slick way of saying that when you get laid off or your company goes under, it's a good time to build your personal brand by blogging. Or, for that matter, if you suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands, you might blog to fill the empty spaces. "You look for a way to reassert control," Alden points out. "That's a reason blogging surges in down times."
We started our own company here at Six Apart during uncertain economic times, based on the firm belief that we'd be able to grow our careers, our business, and the entire industry and economy around social media just by using the strength of blogs. It's worked for us, and we believe it can work for every blogger.
What Blog Link Means
If you're an optimist, then this economic environment means your blog is a great way to reinforce your personal brand, to showcase your accomplishments, and to make new connections to potential employers, partners, coworkers and peers.
If you're more of a glass-half-empty person, then your blog can help cement your position in your job or your industry by providing evidence of what you've achieved, it can help distinguish you from your coworkers during cutbacks by vividly illustrating the strength of your ideas, and it can form a safety net to keep you connected to your partners or coworkers regardless of where you happen to be employed at any given time.
We're proud to partner with LinkedIn, which is obviously the signature social network for professionals. But we've also been happy to extend our vision of forming rich connections between blogs and social networks to a purpose as important as helping bloggers build their careers.
What Blog Link Does
The functionality of Blog Link is simple: It's an application you can add to your LinkedIn profile that shows your recent blog entries to anyone who views your profile, while also giving everyone the option to browse blog posts from the people you're connected to.
Blog Link works with any blogging platform: TypePad, Movable Type, Vox, WordPress, Blogger — any common service should just work. There's virtually no setup; You just click on the application to install it and Blog Link will automatically discover the blogs and feeds for you and your associates using the profile information you've already provided on LinkedIn.
Once that's done, you've got a chance to automatically show your writing, your creativity, and the ideas that make you uniquely talented. Anyone who visits your LinkedIn profile will be able to form an opinion of your work not simply based on basic resume information or even solely on the basis of recommendations, but by reading your own thinking in your own words, directly from your blog, automatically and continuously updated.
And while we always want to make technology with a purpose, we're pretty happy with the little technological innovations behind this new application as well. Blog Link joins TypePad AntiSpam and Blog It as TypePad-powered services that share a few traits:
- These TypePad-powered services available to all bloggers, regardless of which platform you use
- They're free for any use, and we encourage you to adopt them for whatever you need
- They're designed to help all bloggers succeed and to make the web work better.
We've even taken advantage of some of the latest technology in making Blog Link happen. Our David Recordon helped create the OpenSocial application standard that powers LinkedIn Applications functionality, and he's even provided a video demo of how Blog Link works so you can see it in action for yourself.
We've also written up brief descriptions of Blog Link for each of our platforms as well:
Blog Link is brand new, but we think it's a good first step to helping you use your blog to strengthen and grow your career. That's good investment at any time. You can check it out for free just by adding the Blog Link application to your LinkedIn profile now.
October 27, 2008
We Couldn't Call It "MTV"...
Just over a month ago, we released Virtual Movable Type, which gives you all the power of Movable Type Pro on any machine, with no installation in just a few clicks. It's a completely virtualized version of Movable Type that includes not just the application, but all of the infrastructure needed to keep a site running great, from the operating system to the web server to MT itself. We've been excited about it and proud to see it join the MT family.
Of course, part of the process of planning such a release is basic tasks like picking out a name. The allure of "Movable Type Virtual" or something like that was almost too great — just think of all the awesome "I Want My MTV!" badges we could have made!
Of course, part of the process of planning such a release is basic tasks like picking out a name. The allure of "Movable Type Virtual" or something like that was almost too great — just think of all the awesome "I Want My MTV!" badges we could have made!Fortunately (or unfortunately) we are blessed with a competent lawyer, and while our corporate counsel is a really nice guy and has a great sense of humor, he pointed out that there might be some issues with a brand conflict around the name "MTV". (Maybe we can use that name when we release Movable Type 5?)
The good news is, none of this has slowed down adoption of Virtual Movable Type at all: It's a hit! We frankly worried that it might be a little bit early to release a completely virtualized web application onto the market because, while virtualization has started to see adoption in enterprise data centers, it's less common to find regular web hosts who support it as an option. We wanted to take the opportunity, though, because we have one of the best scaling and infrastructure teams in the world and a virtual platform lets us build their expertise right into the MT product itself.
And the MT community has always been full of early adopters who love new technology. We know tons of you are on Macs that run Parallels or VMWare Fusion, or on Windows servers that can run the free VMWare Player. We've also been keeping a close eye on our good friends at Amazon's web services team, because they host their blog on our TypePad platform and we'd love to return the favor by having lots of our customers host their Movable Type communities on the Amazon EC2 platform.
The result: We're regularly seeing 5% to 10% or more of all downloads of MT being for Virtual Movable Type. Considering that many estimates say that fewer than 5% of all servers are virtualized so far, we think that shows tremendous progress. (Of course, these statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt, because anybody can redistribute MT under its open source license, and people can use one download for multiple installations.)
Best of all, we've been able to support all these different virtualization platforms while offering a great experience thanks to the expertise of our friends at JumpBox, who've partnered with us on Virtual MT. ChannelWeb offered up a great video introduction to the platform, which shows in just under two minutes how easy it is to get started.
ChannelWeb also offers up a detailed written review of Virtual MT as well, and it reaches the same conclusion as the video: There's never been an easier way to get started blogging. They sum up the benefits pretty well:
For solution providers, Virtual Movable Type offers several options. Customers wanting a blog but lacking physical infrastructure will appreciate the simple and straightforward solution. Because of its low requirements, this would be a good introductory application to move to a virtual environment for customers a little nervous about the whole "virtualization thing." And for solution providers, there's the option to set up a hosting farm for Movable Type blogs using these virtual machines. And that's only to name a few.
Of course, the best way to evaluate Virtual Movable Type is to get it for yourself. Whether you're interested in MT Pro for running a robust community, or just evaluating MT to learn more about how the platform works, get Virtual Movable Type and you'll be able to see for yourself just how easy MT can be.
October 3, 2008
How We Twitter @sixapart
At Six Apart, we take our presence on Twitter (follow us at @sixapart) seriously, and we have a goal of being one of the best corporate users of the popular service. That might seem a little odd, since most of us see Twitter as a fun little lightweight service that we use mostly for personal messages, so it bears some explanation.
Part of it is just our heritage. We know the folks that make Twitter and we like them and think they share a lot in common with our attitude and community at Six Apart. But more importantly, we have a long tradition of directly interacting with our community wherever the conversations are taking place, whether that's on blogs or anywhere else on the web. And seeing so many of our customers, partners and bloggers on Twitter meant we had to be there too, in a way that was useful, sincere, and (hopefully!) fun. We wanted to make @sixapart worth following even if you aren't yet a customer or partner of Six Apart, but if you were someone who's just interested in blogging or how the web is evolving. We frankly wanted to make it good enough that you'd encourage your friends to follow the account, too.
The great news is, our community noticed the work we've put into being the best business on Twitter, and it comes as no surprise that they've blogged about it. Here's some great recent examples:
- From Slate's (Movable Type-powered!) BizBox Blog: "Props to TypePad. Note how the customer--that would be one of us--was able to get superior service without even having to seek it out. New Web 2.0 technologies and products allow such things, but only if you take full advantage of them."
- And Ogilvy's 360º Digital Influence Blog has a post in their "Why Twitter Should Matter To You" series entitled Twustomer Service Edition: "Six Apart is doing a great job listening, engaging, and acting - and their doing it in a way that produces happy, vocal customers."
We could tease a little bit about the phrase "Twustomer Service" evoking Elmer Fudd's voice, though there's nothing wrong with having some fun while pointing out rock-solid fundamentals of doing good business. Ginevra Whalen, a long-time Six Aparter who was behind both of the Twitter conversations highlighted in these posts, also gets interviewed for the Ogilvy post. But the ideal of connecting to anyone who wants to get the most out of blogging and the web is something backed up by all of us here at Six Apart, from our community team to our professional support folks to our services team, who all work directly with bloggers every day.
Best of all, it seems like our community agrees. Just take a look at some our favorite tweets on the @sixapart account — they cover everything we love about our community:
- If we announce a new product, our community can let us know immediately what they think, as @kimonostereo did with a recent launch: "Virtual Movable Type is simply awesome."
- Our customers can let us know when they're getting the most out of our tools, as @marcjohns did recently: "Overhauling my website using Typepad. The more I use it, the more I totally dig it. Getting rid of my ol clunker of a table-infested site."
- When we go to events, we can get instant feedback, as @dbrazeal offered to our CEO Chris Alden at the recent BlogWorld conference: "Chris Alden (Six Apart): Today's mainstream social networks are like yesterday's mainstream media. Will be fragmented #bwe08"
- And we can see how our customers inspire each other and us with their praise and encouragement, like CitizenDino: "The Six Apart people are simply inspiring. And having read about them in the Sarah Lacy book made it cooler.
There are lots more ways for this conversation to evolve, and we do know that a lot of times Twitter is just used to vent or get complaints off your chest. So we're ready to respond to that as well — we don't expect everything you say to us to be perfect, and we do expect it to be passionate.
Honestly, the tools for tracking and responding to these conversations are still relatively new, so they're not perfect at helping us catching every mention and responding as quickly as we'd like. (Customers should still always file help tickets to get support directly from us!) But despite the challenges, we want to try to get this right because we think making it easier to have a direct connection to Six Apart means its that much more likely to be listening and responding to what you need. All you have to do is follow @sixapart and we'll be following your conversations, too.
October 1, 2008
Second Annual Blogger Challenge Starts Today - Participate!
Want to make a difference in the life of a public school teacher and his or her students? Want to contribute to the education of the next generation of bloggers? Well, now you can.
For the second year in a row, Six Apart is taking part in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge. The challenge starts today, and we’d like to extend an invitation to you, as a member of the Six Apart community, to participate.
The Blogger Challenge is a friendly contest among bloggers to raise money for low-income public schools. Here’s how it works: teachers from all over the country post items they would like funding for, such as writing supplies for a journalism class, equipment for a science lab, or music instruments for a band class, and bloggers feature their favorite projects on a giving page, where their readers can go to donate. The bloggers who raise the most money or reach the most kids will win an award.
Just as we did last year, Six Apart is sponsoring the award for the bloggers who reach the most kids. We’d like to encourage all of you, our customers and your readers, to participate in the effort. Why? First, it just feels good - it’s very heartwarming and gratifying to receive the lovely thank you notes from kids in the classrooms you support. Second, it’s a very worthy cause. These future leaders of America and their teachers need our support as they learn to read, write, calculate, reason, appreciate the wonders of art and science, and become creative contributors to society. Besides, the world needs more intelligent, thoughtful bloggers like you!
Congratulations to the many Six Apart community members who raised a lot of money last year, including NYC-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson of A VC, who raised $18,000, and University of Minnesota biologist PZ Myers at science blog Pharyngula , who raised $15,000. Six Apart’s co-founder Mena Trott and VP of Evangelism Anil Dash both had their own challenges last year, and have posted their giving lists this year as well. Many more Six Apart-related bloggers are participating this year, including Finslippy, Silicon Valley Moms, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Craig Newmark the economist, and Scienceblogs.com, to name a few.
Here’s how you can participate:
* Go to the Blogger Challenge page on Donors Choose and find a blogger’s giving list you’d like to support. (You’ll see Mena’s list, named after her blogs Nested and Dollar Short, in the General Blogs category.)
* Or, set up your own challenge and let your readers know where to go to support the projects you’ve chosen to feature.
* Sign up to donate to the projects you want to support.
* Feel good about helping kids and teachers in low-income schools
* TypePad bloggers: Note that you can add a Donors Choose widget to your blog that colorfully illustrates to your readers how your challenge is faring.
Watch for an occasional update from us as the Challenge progresses. Donors Choose will announce the results in early November, and we’ll reveal the winners of the Six Apart award for bloggers who reached the most kids.
Thanks for joining in the fun, and for showing the world that bloggers can make a significant difference in the lives of teachers and kids.
