Six Apart News & Events: November 2008

November 21, 2008

TypePad Connect, Profiles and Comments for Everyone!

by David Recordon - Post a Comment

Today, the TypePad team is launching three exciting new features for everyone who blogs or reads blogs:

  • Profiles (a reinvention of TypeKey)
  • New commenting capabilities
  • TypePad Connect, a new beta service that is free for all bloggers and extends these features to any site.

This isn't just about providing comments and profiles for your site, but also connecting your site's community with the rest of the social web.

As we complete the migration to the next generation platform for TypePad that Ben Trott talked about earlier this year we've released many new features for TypePad bloggers (improved design screens, AutoSave, and custom URLs to mention a few). But we've also been hard at work creating TypePad powered services such as TypePad AntiSpam, Blog It and Blog Link that extend the TypePad service to any blogger across the web. Our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to connect them with a wider community of readers, other bloggers and conversations.

Let's look at the new TypePad profiles first. Ever had a profile that got out of date? TypePad profiles take advantage of things you're already doing, to keep your profile up to date and interesting. If you connect with your Twitter account we'll automatically fill in your status. Leave a comment on a TypePad enabled site and we'll pull that in too. Update your profile picture and it will automatically change on every comment you've already made across TypePad enabled sites. TypePad profiles make it easy to connect with other commenters and conversations across blogs for readers and bloggers alike. And don't worry; we didn't forget the feeds, Microformats or OpenID either.

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As a blogger, imagine the benefits to your readers if they are no longer "anonymous" but instead can choose to bring their photo and name with them from their TypePad profile. Commenters can also link back to a rich profile that contains their comment history, links to their own blogs, and even their accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or dozens of other services.

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Open For Comment

We've also launched new TypePad comments in beta that integrate seamlessly with the new profiles. The new comment service has a sleek new interface and great features like threading, easy pagination, OpenID sign in, email notifications of replies and the ability to reply via email - all with TypePad AntiSpam built in - and is a great example of the changes we will be making to the core TypePad application in the coming months.

And now, we're combining all of this into the TypePad Connect beta. These new profiles and comments are not just available for TypePad bloggers but for ANY blogger or web site -- for free. TypePad Connect makes community management easier for bloggers with the ability to track, moderate and respond to comments across multiple sites and blogs from one dashboard or via email.

TPC Dashboard.png

We've made it easy for you to integrate comments and profiles with TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, WordPress software and Tumblr or you can just embed a small piece of JavaScript yourself. And we care about design, and know that you care about design too, so we made it easy to style TypePad Connect comments to match your design with just a bit of CSS.

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TypePad Connects Everywhere

As I mentioned above, our vision is that the best way to help TypePad bloggers is to create a service that helps them connect with their readers and other bloggers, in a more open, more powerful, and more meaningful fashion and this is what TypePad Connect is all about. We've been evolving the way that TypePad works, and today TypePad is much more than the blogging service that just celebrated its fifth anniversary, it is a service for all bloggers.

This evolution and openness isn't just limited to our technology or products — our advertising program now has more than a thousand participating bloggers, and many of them use platforms other than Movable Type or TypePad. Our Blogs.com community shows "The Best of Blogs" and many of the sites featured run on platforms that aren't made by Six Apart. Even our community marketing team (which we're calling our "Genius" group right now) has a mandate to support bloggers directly, helping anyone in the community regardless of platform.

There's plenty more coming, but please try our swanky new profiles and comments today on your TypePad blog or elsewhere via TypePad Connect! Let us know what you think and what else TypePad can do to make your blog even more successful. You can learn more about TypePad Connect, comments and profiles at http://www.typepad.com/connect/ or about using these features with your TypePad blog.

November 18, 2008

TypePad and Journalism

by Anil Dash - Comments (18)
Over the weekend, I posted a simple web page on our TypePad site called the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. I wrote it up with a lighthearted, snarky tone so a few old friends who recently lost their jobs as professional bloggers/journalists would understand what we could do at Six Apart to try to help them out. It seems like the program struck a nerve with thousands more of you, though — those first few friends have passed the link along, and in less than a day, hundreds of journalists have already signed up to participate.

In short, the program as described offers up a TypePad blog, a place in our Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, and a healthy dose of our expertise and insights into helping publishers and bloggers succeed online.

Reports From The Field

The Journalist Bailout program exists because we care about the future of journalism at Six Apart. I've worked at a newspaper, our CEO was founder of a magazine, and our staff across the company and around the world have worked in reporting, publishing, designing, maintaining and supporting journalism in print, in broadcast, and of course on the web in a variety of capacities. For years, I've followed pioneers like Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen who've being loud, sometimes strident, voices articulating a vision of how journalism will evolve. I've talked to working journalists in person at events put on by groups ranging from the Online News Association to Mediabistro. And perhaps most importantly I've talked to our customers who are succeeding in online journalism, at outlets ranging from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, from small-town dailies to alt-weeklies to upstart blog networks to niche magazine publishers who are just making their first steps online.

These experiences showed me something I'd expected: A lot of people are thinking about how journalism is going to evolve online, and many people are passionate about making sure journalists make the leap.

What I hadn't fully expected was how gripping the stories from individual journalists have been. The mood of the emails we've gotten has ranged from hopeful to heartbreaking, from cynical to sincere. Overall, there's an optimism which indicates that having a starting point to do something proactive and positive will be a great first step for many journalists to take control of their careers in an industry that is going through enormous upheaval.

I know that journalists are a skeptical bunch, so I'm not trying to bullshit anyone: The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program is not a silver bullet. It's not going to singlehandedly preserve the career and income of every working journalist who has a job today. And frankly, the response has been so overwhelming that we won't be able to accept every application at first.

But what we can do is give journalists the tools to take control of their own presence online. This program will let a lot of the most eager writers and reporters learn the ropes about how to be more effective and successful on the web. That hope shows through in just some of the responses we've seen already:

  • "Thanks for coming up with such a smart solution to the journalist's dilemma! Hope we can work something out."
  • "You have no idea how many questions this answers for me that I never even quite understood how to pose."
  • "Dear Six Apart, thanks very much for your kind offer, glad you are getting such a great response. I've been thinking about starting my own blog, and this seems like a good and fun way to do it."

The Road Forward

Our first order of business is to tend to the dozens of people who have already submitted applications. It will take a few days to get personal replies to everyone who wants to participate, and our criteria of evaluation for membership in the program will have to expand a bit to accommodate everyone who's applied.

In the future, we want to reach out to the many media organizations we already work with to find ways to make this new wave of independent journalism sites more successful and more effective. We know that a vast amount of the good journalism being done today is happening within traditional media institutions, and we think there are plenty of ways for both media companies and independent journalists to support and complement each other's work.

Finally, we'll be asking the entire community for help in defining how these sites will grow, evolve and thrive in the future. So, if you haven't done so already, read up on the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program, see if it's right for you, and if it seems like we can provide the tools to help you move your journalism career forward, then sign up to join us.
November 11, 2008

Changes at Six Apart

by Chris Alden

Earlier today, I published the following message on our internal company blog. For those members of our community who wanted to know about the changes at Six Apart today, I've reposted it here publicly for reference.


Today we are making some changes at Six Apart. We are reducing the size of our full time staff by around 8% and are making some organizational changes as we prepare for 2009. This note is to provide some detail and context around these changes.

Everyone is aware of the challenging economic times we face. The uncertainty of 2009 has made planning very difficult but it is clear that next year looks very different now than it did just a couple of months ago. While it would be easy to just blame “the economy” for these changes, however, the truth is more complex.

This year was one of profound growth and change for Six Apart. In addition to welcoming almost 90 new people and growing to a company of over 200 employees, we launched Six Apart Services, Six Apart Media, Blogs.com, Movable Type Open Source and MT Pro, a suite of TypePad-powered products, including Blog It, Blog Link, the TypePad iPhone app and TypePad AntiSpam, and reached the final stage of the biggest technical project in the company’s history: the migration of TypePad onto a new platform. And, as you all know, we aren’t done yet, with several of our most significant product releases still to come this year.

From a financial point of view, the company continues to grow with Q4 2008 on track to be our biggest revenue quarter ever, and cash flows from our revenue, past financings, and sale of LiveJournal providing funds that will serve us well going into next year and beyond. Despite the challenging economic environment, we estimate that the depth and breadth of our products and services will allow us to continue growing revenue throughout this downturn.

So why are we doing this? First, as with many companies these days we are being proactive about keeping our expenses low. Second, with so many changes in 2008, and looking forward to the changing market 2009, we have to rebalance our organization accordingly.

We've been reminded lately that blogging was born out of the last recession in 2001 - 2002, and that during tough economic times creative voices look to powerful, cost-effective ways to connect and communicate with the world around them. With that backdrop, here are some of the organizational changes we are making and why we feel they are necessary:

  • Creating Six Apart “Genius” group. We are refocusing our marketing efforts from promoting Six Apart to helping support our bloggers and clients directly. Our marketing, community, and support groups will merge to create a single team whose mission is to help our bloggers be successful. Despite the economy, or perhaps because of it, we believe that more people will be turning to blogging to promote themselves or their business, and we want to provide them with more than just great technology but also help with getting started, design, building an audience, revenue generation, and more. We are committed to having Six Apart remain the best resource for individual and professional bloggers around the world. Bar none.
  • Growing Six Apart Services. Our professional services group has grown significantly as our larger clients are increasingly using Movable Type and TypePad as cornerstones of their broader online strategies. Companies have always come to us to help them compete in a modern, social Internet but now they are also looking for more cost effective ways to run their entire web sites and seeing MT in particular as a complete web content management solution. With this has come the need for more support and services. Today we will be transferring several people from around the company into Six Apart Services and have more open positions in that group.
  • One hosted technology team. As we all know, the TypePad migration has been a long and arduous project that organizationally split much of the engineering and ops team around various pieces of that project. As migration completes and we move forward, we are bringing the hosted engineering, analytics, infrastructure, open platforms, and operations teams under one leader, Ben Trott.
  • Moving forward with Six Apart Media. While we expect that online advertising will be hard hit by this economy, analysts still expect Internet advertising to grow and we expect that Six Apart Media will continue to grow in 2009. We’ve had tremendous response to our advertising program that we launched in April which now includes almost a thousand bloggers and continues to grow rapidly. We are committed to serving these bloggers and helping them make as much money on their site as possible in this environment. We will continue to grow our sales force and account management teams to meet this need.
Through these changes we have had to make tough choices about the right mix of people to meet these ambitious goals and this has resulted in some job cuts. We have cut other expense lines and the management team and I have agreed to take a 15% salary cut as part of these cost cutting measures. All employees leaving through this layoff will receive a severance package with additional payments to cover health care benefits and we will also offer placement services and do what we can to help them land on their feet. We are very sorry to see these good people go.

The management team doesn’t take these changes lightly and agonized over this decision. However, our first responsibility is to the company as a whole and we feel these changes are the right ones to keep the company competitive, secure, and positioned for future growth.

As I’ve said several times in the past, all companies face adversity from time to time, but the mark of a great company is how it responds. Today is a day when we will be tested. A day to help one another. And a day to say some goodbyes.

Tomorrow will be about redoubling our efforts to create an even stronger focus on what's made Six Apart successful: the bloggers we support.

Thank you for all you do.

November 5, 2008

Barack Obama and Blogging

by Anil Dash - Comments (17)
We'd like to extend our hearty congratulations to everyone who voted in the United States elections here yesterday, especially in the historic and endlessly surprising Presidential campaign. We've been thrilled to point to our own efforts like politics.typepad.com, which showcases TypePad bloggers who talk about political issues, and of course the politics section of Blogs.com, which has been a must-read for months.

But perhaps most of all, we should extend our congratulations to the campaign and innovative technological team behind BarackObama.com. Just as with the blog of outgoing President George W. Bush's 2004 campaign, key parts of Barack Obama's campaign website have been powered by Movable Type, and we're proud to have played a part in knitting together a successful strategy that's combined blogging with a compelling presence across dozens of social networking sites. It's a tradition that began at the national level with candidates like Howard Dean and John Kerry making tentative steps four years ago. But we're not satisfied merely to count the campaign blogs of two successive U.S. Presidents among the community of Movable Type users.

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Now that the election is over, we're sincerely hoping that politicians across the political spectrum, and citizens of any stripe, will demand that these social publishing tools be used for a lot more than just raising funds online or getting out the vote. We firmly believe that our platforms, used intelligently and in combination with the many other services and networks on the web, can be powerful tools for better governance.

Blogging, especially when combined with a social publishing platform that bridges multiple social networks, is far too powerful a medium to be dragged onto the national stage once every four years. If, as has so often been stated, this is a "change election" here in the United States, then we hope that one change we'll see, not just at the national level but at a state and local level, is our government making better use of the web.

Given the long tradition of bloggers leading the conversation around politics, policy and government, we hope to play a part in encouraging government to make the same leap into the social web that so many of us have made in our personal and professional lives.
November 3, 2008

A Shout Out For Helping Students

by Ginger Tulley - Comments (9)
As we mentioned in early October, hundreds of bloggers engaged in a friendly competition during the month of October to see who could raise the most money or reach the most kids for Donors Choose, an organization that matches donors with classroom projects specified by public school teachers all over the country.

The results of the competition are in: Once again, Sarah Bunting of Tomato Nation blew every other blogger out of the classroom by raising $111,352 and helping over 19,577 students via her giving page. Sarah demonstrated the power of blogging by producing a campaign ad that asked her readers to vote with their wallets. It worked: over the course of October, 1,162 donors “voted” on her challenge.

As the sponsor of the prize for the bloggers who reach the most kids, Six Apart would like to give a shout out to Sarah and to all the winners of the Bloggers Challenge who reached the most students in each category:

(This is our San Francisco team. The New York, Paris, and Tokyo teams send their thanks too.)

Nearly twice as many bloggers attracted 50% more donors than last year, making the competition fiercer than ever. But leaders emerged in each category, and we'd like to acknowledge their fine efforts:

  • In the Tech Blog category, Fred Wilson’s AVC blog reached 4,545 students
  • In the Science Blog category, David Ng and Benjamin Cohen’s The World’s Fair blog reached 1,780 students 
  • In the Topical/Local Blogs category, Ralph Alswang Photography reached 522 students 
  • In the Mommy Blog and BlogHer category, Alice of Finslippy reached 1,676 students 
  • In the Knitting Blogs category, Rose-Kim Knits reached 597 students 
  • In the Music Blog category, music teacher Walt Ribeiro reached 910 kids 
  • In the Black Bloggers for Education category, The Assimilated Negro reached 100 students 
  • In the Sports Blog category, Sports Crackle Pop reached 465 kids 
In addition to this literal shout out, each winner will receive some choice schwag from our team at Six Apart.

As the creator of three leading blog platforms - Movable Type, TypePad and Vox - and the provider of social media services and advertising solutions, we’re thrilled to participate in an event that raises awareness about the power and influence blogging can have while raising money for a very worthwhile cause: future bloggers of America!