National Geographic Partners with Six Apart
In order to create interest and engagement around this controversial subject, Six Apart Media spent this week asking relevant questions on Vox, LiveJournal and Blogs.com. Bloggers have been weighing in on everything from which food they'd miss most if they were sent to prison to whether or not the prisoners in the War on Terror should be protected by the Geneva Conventions.
It's not too late for you to weigh in on these topics. Join the conversation at Blogs.com.
And be sure to tune in to "Inside Guantanamo" on the National Geographic Channel this Sunday at 9 p.m. to learn more about what life on the inside is really like.
Skittles: The biggest social network is the web itself
- The biggest online social network is the internet itself. Skittles obviously gets this — instead of targeting one social network for their efforts, they've tried to connect to a broad set of networks.
- Reveal the community you already have. Again, Skittles understands that they shouldn't try to make their own community from scratch. Instead of competing with the big social networks, they tried to connect to their community wherever those people are already active.
- Your social network belongs under your control. This is the one where Skittles.com comes up short. Letting your community share in ownership or control of your brand does not require completely abdicating control over your company homepage.
- Instead of merely saying "our brand has to have a Facebook page!" or "Why isn't our company on Twitter?" smart marketers are realizing the only way to be successful online is to combine all of the different networks together.
- Empowering your customers and community to feel like they own your brand does not mean that you have to completely give up control over what people see when they come to your website.
- A smart way to look at what people are saying about your brand online is as a starting point for a conversation that can continue on your own site, not as the end of the story.
Six Apart Media: Solutions for Bloggers and Advertisers
Last April, we launched Six Apart Media, our innovative advertising program that helps make bloggers and advertisers successful.
Today’s bloggers are savvy, outspoken and influential, inspiring a record number of people to join conversations throughout the social web. We’re happy to report that to date, Six Apart Media reaches over 2.4 million of these influential bloggers with more than 85.5 million engaged readers. Since our launch, we’ve had some incredibly talented bloggers join our advertising program, including:
Most recently, we’ve been hard at work on a campaign for Nature Made, who asked us to help inspire people to share their stories of greatness. Since we know how much bloggers love sharing and because we believe that each of us has a personal story of greatness to tell, this was a campaign we couldn’t wait to kick off.
You can share your story of greatness by answering today’s QotD on Vox, LiveJournal and within your TypePad profile. If you don’t have an account with any of those services, don’t worry, anyone can answer the Question of the Day on Blogs.com! Once you’ve answered, be sure to submit your story on the Nature Made website. You could win $1,000 and appear in the Nature Made “Fuel Your Greatness” documentary.
With so many great bloggers and advertisers on board, we are very excited for what the future holds. Are you ready to join the conversation? Whether you're a blogger who wants to generate income from your blog, or an advertiser looking for creative ways to reach your target audience, we have a solution for you.
Visit Six Apart Advertising to learn more.
Six Apart Announces Support for Parallel’s APS Format, Providing Wider Availability of Movable Type through Global Hosting Providers
San Francisco, CA - February 4, 2009 - Six Apart, the world's leading blogging software and services company, today announced the availability of Movable Type through hosting providers who support the Parallels’ Application Packaging Standard (APS) format. Now any size organization can purchase Movable Type via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, making it easier than ever to get a social website up and running on Movable Type. Datagram, the Internet Network Services Company, is the first hosting provider to sign a formal agreement to use the APS format of Movable Type.
Six Apart made the announcement at the 2009 Parallels Summit, the premier hosting conference currently taking place in Las Vegas, where it is an exhibitor and two of its executives are speaking. Ed Anuff, EVP and GM of Movable Type and Six Apart Services, and Michael Sippey, VP of Product Strategy, are participating on panels during the three-day conference.
“We are committed to making it easier than ever to build a rich, interactive website on the Movable Type platform, and this is one more step in that direction. By supporting the APS format, we can provide end users and hosting providers with the best social media platform available,” said Ed Anuff. “Now partners like Datagram can generate additional revenue by bundling Movable Type with other services while end users can use Movable Type on an on-demand basis with confidence that they will have the most up-to-date version of Movable Type in a high quality environment.”
The APS format, which was designed by Parallels, enables hosting providers to efficiently provision and install Movable Type on their existing infrastructure using a standard “socket” for APS applications. As an APS-compliant application, Movable Type is compatible with Parallels’ Plesk control panel and Virtuozzo containers.
In an increasingly competitive market, hosting providers can differentiate their service offerings with Movable Type to retain existing customers, attract new clients, and generate additional revenue per user. Movable Type’s blogging and content management capabilities, built-in social and community features, powerful administration and analytics tools, and proven security track record make Movable Type a premium addition to any hosting service package.
“Movable Type will be a valuable addition to our wide range of dedicated hosting options,” said Alex Reppen, CEO of Datagram. “We understand the vital role blogs play on the web and with Movable Type available in APS format and our experience in hosting, a partnership to provide a hosted Movable Type solution made a lot of sense.”
Hosting providers interested in learning more about Movable Type partnership opportunities can contact Six Apart by visiting movabletype.com/services/partners/signup.
About Datagram
Datagram is the Internet Solutions Company that enables clients to efficiently leverage the Internet to achieve their objectives by providing highly reliable network and datacenter-based services, such as Dedicated Hosting, Internet Access, Colocation and Disaster Recovery. With over fifteen years experience in designing networks and server environments, Datagram operates state-of-the-art network and datacenter facilities in the New York metropolitan area, with additional points of service in Connecticut and California. Datagram is committed to optimal customer support and first-in-class technology so customers can focus on growing their business while Datagram takes care of the rest. Datagram: Internet Solutions Made Simple. To simplify your company’s Internet solutions, please visit www.datagram.com.
About Movable Type
Movable Type is Six Apart's flagship blog software product, launched in 2001. Today, this robust social publishing platform powers many of the websites and blogs of the world's largest media companies and Fortune 100 businesses, small and medium sized businesses, and power bloggers. Movable Type is a fully integrated, scalable, proven social publishing platform upon which to build highly interactive websites, blogs and social networks. For more information please visit www.movabletype.com.
About Six Apart
Six Apart Ltd. provides award-winning blogging software and services that change the way millions of individuals, organizations, and corporations connect and communicate around the world every day. The company provides the Movable Type social publishing platform, the TypePad premier hosted blogging service, Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families, advertising solutions for leading brands and influential bloggers, and a wide range of services dedicated to help bloggers thrive in today’s social media landscape. Founded in 2001, Six Apart is a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco, and offices in Tokyo, Paris and New York City. For more information, visit the Six Apart corporate web site at www.sixapart.com.
Media Contact
Six Apart
Jane Anderson
650-440-0540
TypePad Connects to Google, AOL, Yahoo! and more
If you've already tried out our recently launched commenting service via TypePad Connect, you know that we built in very basic support for OpenID sign in from the start. We did this because we know that just as the future of traditional media wasn't a small group of large publishers controlling all of the news, the future of the social web isn't a small group of large social networks controlling everyone's identity. Today we've made it even easier for anyone to sign in, leave a comment, and have a TypePad Profile (see mine) without having to know their OpenID URL or even what OpenID is.
The TypePad Connect team has now explicitly added support to sign in using your Vox, Google, Yahoo!, Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, or AOL account in addition to your TypePad username and password. This small change means that any blog using TypePad Connect powered comments now has over a half a billion people who can sign in - thus no longer being anonymous - just by clicking a button in the case of Google and Yahoo! or entering their username on AOL, Vox, and the others.
And of course this same idea - bringing your existing identity with you - is built into Motion as well. Our latest application for Movable Type Pro shows off how, just like with TypePad Connect, there are now half a billion people who are able to log into your site, without even having to sign up for a new account.
The Laws of Motion
If you want to check out Motion here are a few easy ways to get started:
- Read all about Motion and find out what it's good for and what features it includes.
- Sign up for a hosted demo of the platform, and we'll walk you through Motion and the thinking that's inspired it.
- Test out a live Motion site where dozens of community members have already registered and tried out the Motion experience for themselves.
(Note: Content on the demonstration site can be reset or deleted at any time, and we regularly take the site offline as new updates to the Motion application are installed.)
The Web is in Motion
Just as important to us as the technologies we've developed are the ideas behind Motion. These philosophical underpinnings are explained in our blog post introducing Motion. We believe that the right strategy for connecting your blog or site to the world of social networking is not to select one particular social network to hold all the cards, but to connect to all of the powerful and vibrant social networks across the web.
In our internal conversations we've referred to these principles (with tongue firmly in cheek) as The Laws of Motion, and given our company name, there are naturally six of them. Here's what Motion is meant to demonstrate:
- The biggest online social network is the internet itself.
- Today's mainstream social networks are like yesterday's mainstream media.
- Reveal the community you already have.
- Your social network belongs under your control.
- Your community should start with half a billion members.
- The web is in Motion.
Facebook Connect? Google Friend Connect? Why Choose‽
The most visionary social networking sites on the web are naturally the first ones to embrace this idea of interconnectedness. For example, the newly-announced Facebook Connect plugin directory features the brand-new, open source Facebook Connect plugin for Movable Type which we first previewed here on this blog earlier this year.This plugin is a free download that works with any Movable Type 4.2 installation, but what's better is that this functionality is built right in to Motion, along with support for authentication through Google, Yahoo, AOL/AIM, and any other popular OpenID provider. There's never been an application like this, which supports the half a billion individual accounts across these services, allowing almost anyone on the web to comment on or favorite your content without having to register to create an account.
And while the technology we're talking about is pretty cool, at this time of year, we know everyone's mind is on the coming new year and what it will hold. Though this geeky stuff can pale in significance to the personal and global issues that rightly come first, at Six Apart we do care deeply about the web and the conversations it makes possible. So as we gear up for 2009, we can't help but see it as a hopeful sign that an ambitious and fairly idealistic vision for the future of the social web has gotten such a positive early response.
We can't wait to see how the open web evolves, continue working to help it evolve faster, and we're even more excited to see what our community does with these new abilities in the coming year.
Welcome Pownce team!
We have been impressed not only with the vision for Pownce but the great work of Leah Culver and Mike Malone and are very happy that they will be joining us. We’re also very excited to welcome Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as advisers to Six Apart. The Pownce team and Six Apart share the same passion for social blogging and we’re really proud to have them on board.
For Pownce users, we are very sorry the site will be closing. We welcome you to join us on Vox - Leah and Mike are there! - and we hope the Pownce and Vox communities can come together, just as the teams have, towards a better future. For the Pownce Pro users, we would like to offer you a free TypePad account for a year. All Pownce users will receive an email with further instructions about exporting content out of Pownce and signing up for Vox or TypePad accounts.
We’re planning on doing great things with the help and expertise of the Pownce team, and can’t wait to see all the results of their hard work.
TypePad Connect, Profiles and Comments for Everyone!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Movable Type Pro: Now With Comments!
We've always tried to keep a sense of humor about ourselves at Six Apart, and not take our work or ourselves too seriously. Last week, when we released the widely-acclaimed Movable Type Pro, we included a short video that explained some of the exciting ideas behind MT Pro. We weren't exactly trying to show the full list of the new features in the video, but we definitely set ourselves up on this one — these things always tend to focus more on telling a story than on getting into technical details.
We focus on the story for a simple reason: It's not about features, it's about the future. Honestly, we assume that that everyone else on the web will respond by copying great ideas, as they usually do. Hell, we want them to, so that more people can benefit from open communities on the web.
Movable Type's had really great social networking features for more than a year, and MT Pro puts them in everyone's hands. So we're glad to see our friends at Automattic follow our lead by planning to provide some of these abilities for WordPress in a collection of plugins that you should be able to assemble around Christmastime or so. Until then, they've created a parody of our video.
We think that's a pretty funny way to respond, too! So we thought we'd share their parody of our video:
Of course, the joke in the video is that MT Pro's big feature is comments. LOL! So true, so true, we totally have comments! And lots more. You can view our original video, but one great thing the parody does is promote an MT Pro feature that we'd omitted — you can definitely get full social networking features on your own site, without having your site look like another Facebook or MySpace clone. (We'll even help you design it.)
Because maybe it's a little idealistic, but we think communities on
the web can be freed from having to live within the constraints of
someone else's social network where they have no control. It's just like how blogging freed people from having to use complicated publishing systems that they couldn't control. Or freed all of us from only consuming media that was produced by giant corporations, instead of by the friends, family or peers we know and respect. Blogs are good at breaking down barriers.
We think it's time for blogging to evolve and assume that successful communities will consist of dozens or even thousands of blogs, forums, and individuals, all connecting together in an open way. And we don't just talk about it: We invent what needs to be created, release it to as many people as possible, and try to do the best job we can of telling people the story of how the web is going to look in the future.
MT is great at all kinds of other unique abilities, of course, like managing an unlimited number of blogs and aggregating content across them. Or managing forums. Letting your members and commenters create their own profiles and follow each other. Rating and recommending content. Providing free and open source TypePad AntiSpam for blocking junk comments, instead of a proprietary centralized service from Automattic. Support for cutting-edge tech like OpenID 2.0 and OAuth. Exclusive new themes like Mid-Century. Our long-held reputation for publishing highly scalable, "Digg-proof" pages. And comments! Don't forget comments.
[Note: To be fair, it is possible to remedy some of the missing features in WordPress if you have enough free time to find the appropriate plugins. However, prominent independent security researchers do warn, "[T]he abysmal security practices of WordPress plugin developers places the entire Internet at risk". That's on top of WordPress being one of top ten least secure applications around, and the Department of Homeland Security's data showing WordPress having twelve times as many reported security vulnerabilities as Movable Type. Quick, time for more parody videos!]
But all of the features in Movable Type Pro are in service of something bigger. The great technology rests on top of world-class support, an incredibly talented professional services group, and a media services team that will help your site and your community succeed. Our vision at Six Apart is really about finding ways to help you achieve your goals while making the whole web better. The great part is, our community is innovative enough that they can take our ideas and use them as inspiration to build many of the most amazing and innovative sites on the web.
So thanks again to the team at Automattic for the laugh, and most of all for spending your time on making videos. In all seriousness, we think it is a fantastic way to compare your work to Movable Type Pro and to what we're trying to accomplish at Six Apart.
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.
Some Recent Top Tens
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.
