Six Apart News & Events

Question of the Day Comes to TypePad

2009-06-19T00:09:05Z

One of the things we love most about blogging is the community it builds. One blog post can create a dialogue across the web that features divergent opinions, thoughtful comments and a real sense of conversation.

The Question of the Day on Vox has helped us spark some of those conversations amongst bloggers who might otherwise suffered from a case of writer’s block. Because we’ve seen such great success with the Vox QotD, we decided to introduce the same feature to TypePad. We are really excited to see how this new feature inspires creativity amongst TypePad bloggers and their loyal readers.

Learn more about the TypePad Question of the Day in the FAQ and let us know if you have a question you’d like to ask!

If your question is chosen, we will publish it, along with a “submitted by” message and a link to your blog. It’s a great way to connect with bloggers, and also to get more readers to your blog. Please keep in mind that QotDs should appeal to a wide audience and should be no more than 95 characters.

You can send your submissions for QotDs to qotd@typepad.com.

Enter the “Green by Design” Contest!

2009-06-02T21:32:45Z

In April, we told you about our partnership with One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Cisco, and our Green Badge program designed to encourage everyone to go green, one act at a time. We promised that when the Green Badges received 100,000 impressions across the blogosphere, Six Apart would donate $1000 to The Climate Project. Less than six weeks after that post, we surpassed our 100,000 goal by nearly two million impressions. Needless to say: a check is in the mail to The Climate Project!

So many of you adopted the Green Badges that we designed, we couldn’t help but wonder… What if we asked YOU to create an earth-friendly badge? After all, our bloggers are some of the most creative and eco-friendly out there and who better than you to spread the message that when we all do one act, we act as one, and help the planet? No one!

That’s why Six Apart partnered with One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Cisco to create the “Green by Design” contest. To enter, all you have to do is create a Green Badge with an earth-friendly design and/or message. One winner will be chosen each week in June and that person’s badge will be available on EverythingTypePad for people to put on their blogs, and will appear on blogs all across Six Apart Media’s advertising platform. Plus, when the badges receive a million impressions, Six Apart will donate another $1000 to The Climate Project.

Visit EverythingTypePad for all the details on how you can enter the “Green by Design” contest.

And don’t forget to record your Acts of Green on the One Million Acts of Green website. Because together, we are making a difference.

Social Media Tips from a True Pro

2009-05-21T18:54:03Z

Lauren Kozak, Social Media Director for Britney Spears, recently stopped by our San Francisco offices and shared her views about how corporations can use social media to grow their brands and engage with customers in meaningful ways.

We enjoyed her talk so much that we videotaped some of her advice to share with you.

Lauren's advice is the real thing - it not only comes from her current experience creating social media success for one of the biggest brands in the world, but also from her pre-Britney Spears work as a social media advisor to corporations when the medium was still in its infancy.

We hope you find Lauren's insights helpful. Let us know what you think!

Comcast joins the Conversation

2009-05-04T04:24:06Z

Comcast’s digital approach to customer support has certainly attracted a lot of positive media attention recently, from both mainstream and online outlets. What a contrast from a year ago, when a video of a Comcast repairman who accidentally dozed off on a customer's couch made the rounds in snickering blogs and emails. Congratulations to the Comcast team for starting to steer a very large ship away from a potentially endless negative current.

Check out the BusinessWeek article that covers a Twitter-ful afternoon with director of digital care Frank Eliason. Or the report by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington a few weeks ago of getting frustrated on the phone with Comcast customer support, only to find that a simple Tweet would deliver a solution to his problem in minutes.

Considering the company’s success on Twitter, it’s not surprising that they are augmenting their social media strategy by adding a blog to encourage longer-than-140-character conversations between customers and employees about all things Comcast.

The blog is called ComcastVoices, and it’s on Movable Type. It was launched just five weeks ago, and already the conversations are proving to be lively, informative, and respectful.

Let the folks at Comcast tell you directly what they’d like to achieve with the site:

For you marketing and customer support pros out there who might find the idea of such openness with customers a little daunting, here are a few things to note about the blog:

Comcast can set the tone and keep the conversation productive because this is their platform.

The “Rules of the Road” define expected behavior for the site. It’s very clear that comments are moderated by Comcast and that only polite, on-topic and respectful comments will be accepted.
The “About” page tells customers what they can expect from the blog, and refers them elsewhere for their personal support issues while encouraging them to tell Comcast directly what’s important to them.

You can see the negative comments of some customers turning positive as they engage in conversation with employees. For customers, simply being heard goes a long way.

It’s hard to view Comcast as a monolithic, monopolistic behemoth when you see and hear from employees and executives directly.

As we mentioned, the blog is still young, so we wish Comcast as much success with it as they’ve had with their Twitter account. And we hope that other companies will be inspired to open up new conversations with their customers in the same way.

Welcome, Comcast!

One Million Acts of Green & Cisco Partner with Six Apart to Make the World a Greener Place

2009-04-22T21:03:55Z

Earth Day was founded to inspire awareness and appreciation for our environment, and while today might be the official Earth Day, at Six Apart, we believe that every day is new opportunity to help make our planet clean and healthy. That’s why we’ve partnered with Cisco to promote the One Million Acts of Green website.

One Million Acts of Green is a collaborative environmental campaign encouraging everyone to go green one act at a time. The goal? One million acts of green. Because, as we all know, we’re more powerful together than we can ever be apart.

That’s where you—our bloggers and readers—come in. We’ve come up with a few easy ways to inspire you to help the planet because we truly believe that every act of green makes a difference.

Here’s how you can do your part:

1. Adopt a Green Badge for Your Blog & Six Apart Will Donate $1000 to The Climate Project

We created four Green Badges for you to choose from. Each badge links to the One Million Acts of Green, brought to you by Cisco website. By putting a badge on your blog, you’ll not only be spreading the message of the importance of going green, you’ll be participating in an environmental campaign that will impact the world forever.

Plus, when the badges receive 100,000 impressions across the blogosphere, Six Apart will donate $1000 to The Climate Project.

Visit Everything TypePad to learn how to add a Green Badge to your blog.

2. Add the Million Acts of Green Widget to Your Blog

Learn and share tips and advice to help make the world a greener place with the One Million Acts of Green widget. In addition, you can track the total acts of green being performed as well as the greenhouse gases saved as a result of those acts.

Get the Million Acts of Green Widget Now.

3. Answer today’s QotD on Blogs.com

How could you better “green” your life? What’s holding you back?

Read what other people are saying, get new ideas, and share your thoughts at Blogs.com.

4. Visit the One Million Acts of Green Website

Change can start with one person. One action. One million acts of green. Visit the One Million Acts of Green website and register your acts of green.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post and for doing your part. Because when we all do one act, we act as one, and help the planet. And that is what today, and every day, should be about.

Six Apart Hosts Online Seminar: Strategic Social Media in a Customer-Driven World

2009-04-21T13:19:37Z

Update 4/29: Thank you for the comments on the seminar. If you missed the seminar, you can view the recording here. Please have a look and let us know what you think.

Update: Thanks to the hundreds of you who attended the seminar. Please leave a comment and tell us what you thought. Or please fill out our survey here. We'll post the link to the recording as soon as it is ready. Thanks!

This morning at 10 am Pacific we’ll host a seminar for marketers that looks at how companies can easily and quickly join their customers online in conversation. We’ll show many examples of companies that are already building their brands, nurturing relationships with customers, increasing sales and cutting costs through social media. The seminar will be led by Anil Dash, Chief Evangelist for Six Apart. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here.

After the seminar, please check back here to get the link to a recording of the event and to discuss the content. We’re interested in your experience with social media in marketing.

National Geographic Partners with Six Apart

2009-04-03T21:16:00Z

For years, the goings-on inside Guantanamo Bay were a closely held government secret. Now, for the first time, National Geographic exclusively captures what life is like in one of the world's most famous prisons in the television show "Inside Guantanamo."

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.

Thinking Ahead with Six Apart

2009-04-01T21:21:00Z

It's been about a year since we announced the launch of Six Apart Services and Six Apart Media and our new role as a full-service blogging company. These days, Six Apart provides just about everything bloggers, publishers and companies need to achieve success: great technology, personalized services and innovative advertising. As always, our community and customers tell the story better than we ever could. Take the University of Phoenix, which approached us to build Think Ahead California, a new political action site focusing on the issues surrounding the upcoming workforce shortage in California. Their smart and thoughtful ideas were hugely inspiring, but we were also excited because we knew that the combination of technology, services and media that we offer at Six Apart these days was perfect for the job.

The University of Phoenix wanted to create a community where people could contribute and join in a conversation that would really make a difference. And providing a home for that conversation helps University demonstrate how they'll be a key player in the economic future of California. Pulling off something this ambitious would need all three of the capabilities that Six Apart offers.

Think Ahead California was designed, developed and implemented on Movable Type by our Six Apart Services team in New York. In order to drive the right traffic to the site, our Six Apart Media team developed a strategy that builds on our connections to our platforms and to influential bloggers. Custom ad units featuring topical "Think Ahead California" blog posts and an interactive polling widget with content from the site were just a few of the innovative solutions they came up with. And the experience was kept completely consistent across display and email advertising, too.

We're extremely pleased with the final product, and even happier that we are helping the University of Phoenix raise awareness about the looming workforce crisis in California. It all goes to show that when an important cause harnesses the power of great technology, services and media, amazing things can happen. Get in touch, and we'll find out together how we can help you succeed online too.

Skittles: The biggest social network is the web itself

2009-03-04T18:57:03Z

For the past few days, the arresting new design of the website for Skittles candy has sparked a pretty interesting conversation. There have been a ton of responses, covering what the company has done well (embracing what their community is doing across the social web) and what they've done poorly (making a candy site that forces kids to pass an age check before they can view it). And the company's gotten loads of free press for making a few smart choices with their new site.

At Six Apart, we have a lot of experience helping big brands embrace the social web with social technologies like blogging and community websites. Our perspective is that Skittles has the right idea, but has missed fulfilling the full potential of their ideas because they don't yet have the right tools for the job. Fortunately, that's a problem we can help fix.

We've been thinking for a while about how to make connected social sites that work across many different social networks. Our friends at Modernista, known for being one of the more forward-looking agencies around, adopted something similar to Skittles.com's hybrid of sites as their company website about a year ago. And of course, thousands of bloggers have an "About Me" site or page that says "here's how to find me on various social networks" with links to their Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. So the idea of connecting various networks together has been floating around, though there's been no good way for most people to actually build a site using these ideas.

A few weeks ago, we introduced the Laws of Motion, the principles behind our upcoming social platform Motion, built on Movable Type. A few of the ideas we mentioned then are particularly relevant to the new Skittles.com site.

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.

As you might expect, we think that we have the tools to make these kinds of sites possible. But it's not just about technology: we've also learned some terrific lessons from our Six Apart Media team, which helps a wide variety of brands connect in an intelligent way with their community across the web. As a result, Motion combines our experience with software and our expertise in social media, and is actually designed specifically to let a brand or publisher connect these networks together while still having total control over the design and 100% approval over what content appears on the site.

If you look closely, you'll see that Skittles uses YouTube to power video on its site, Flickr for photos, and Twitter for updates. Motion has support for aggregating all of these services, built right in. Even better, Motion has dozens of other social networks as well, so that a brand like Skittles can aggregate its community's ideas from all of these social networks on its site, no matter where the conversations takes place.

Skittles.com reveals a few clear lessons, which we're already working with our customers to build on:

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.

What are you doing to help your brand adapt to this new era of social media? Get in touch with us and let us know.

Six Apart Media: Solutions for Bloggers and Advertisers

2009-02-10T17:44:18Z

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

2009-02-04T18:17:57Z

Signs First Movable Type APS Package Agreement with Datagram

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

Gothamist: Up To Date

2009-01-19T20:19:02Z

We're always proud of the work done by our experts at Six Apart Services, but it's especially gratifying when we personally benefit from the work we do with our clients. For example, we've been friends with the Gothamist team since they started, and have marveled over the years as they've grown into the most established and innovative network of local blogs on the web. While Gothamist's team did all the heavy lifting, it was still exciting to back them up on an ambitious and thoughtful redesign that launched at the end of last year. That redesign wasn't just skin deep; The site now takes smart advantage of the rich social features built in to Movable Type Pro.

But it wasn't until last week's heroic landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River that we got a great reminder of just how much Gothamist means to use as a definitive source of local news. The Gothamist post about the ditched plane wasn't just one of the first detailed stories, it was also one of the most frequently-updated. Dozens of people used the recommendation feature built into MT Pro to make it the most-recommended story on the site, and dozens more chimed in with their comments on the thread. And since our Six Apart Services team is headquartered in New York City, this was a great reminder of how much important reporting our clients do.

The truth is, blogs and social media being among the first to break big news stories is, well... old news. The more significant thing here is that this was a demonstrated success of a well-regarded network of blogs doing what it does best — serving its community in a personal and approachable way, right when they need information the most. So If you haven't done so lately, check out your own city's Gothamist site, and if you want to get the best team in the business backing your efforts, drop our Services team a line. If it isn't obvious, we pride ourselves on keeping a real, personal connection to the projects we collaborate on with our clients.

TypePad Connects to Google, AOL, Yahoo! and more

2009-01-14T21:42:15Z

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

2008-12-29T16:18:07Z

About a week ago, we launched a beta test of a new application for Movable Type called Motion. It's a powerful new social application that combines the insights we've learned from the smartest social sites across the web with unique new open technologies we've invented here at SIx Apart. We've gotten a great response from the community about Motion, and it's on track for release in early 2009 as a free application for any user of Movable Type Pro.

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.

We've explained each of these principles at length in the Motion announcement on our blog, but the most exciting news is that unlike even a year ago when the number of companies that believed in these principals could be counted largely on one hand, today our partners and peers all over the World and across the web agree with these ideas and have begun the work of connecting all of our sites together.

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.

A WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Guide (Really!)

2008-12-11T00:32:43Z

Back when WordPress 2.5 came out earlier this year, we wrote a cheeky post called "A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide" which pointed out some of the areas where we think our Movable Type platform offered a good option for people who wanted to consider alternatives to WordPress.

But today, WordPress 2.7 is out, and any day a great new upgrade for a blogging platform is released is a day that's good for all bloggers and for the web. So, to celebrate the release of WordPress 2.7, we've put together a list of resources that show how we at Six Apart are committed to helping all bloggers, regardless of platform. Here's a quick list of how Six Apart can help WordPress bloggers. Most of these services are powered by our completely reinvented TypePad infrastructure. And as you'd expect, all of these options are either free or open source or both.

TypePad AntiSpam: TypePad AntiSpam is like Akismet in that it blocks junk comments on your site. But TypePad AntiSpam is different because it's built on an open source engine, it's free (no matter how you use it) and our users tell us it has fewer false positives, while still being 100% compatible with the Akismet API. We've even got a WordPress plugin that makes connecting to the service a snap, and some great giant WordPress-powered sites like Techcrunch have seen great results with it.

Six Apart Media Advertising: Want to try actually making money with your blog? We've got over a thousand bloggers in the Six Apart Media advertising program already, with many of their sites powered by WordPress. Both our bloggers and our advertisers tell us they love working with a partner that really understands blogging. (If you're on WordPress.com and can't run your own ads, we can help you get set up with a blog where you can.)

TypePad Connect: This free service just launched in beta and easily connects to any WordPress.org blog to offer really powerful commenting and beautiful, customizable commenter profiles on your site. Naturally, since OpenID was born at Six Apart, TypePad Connect and these cool new TypePad profiles have OpenID baked in, too. (WordPress.com users can't install a service like TypePad Connect yet, but perhaps you can suggest the idea and hopefully it'll be added.) If you want, you can just get your free TypePad profile and use it to track your comments or to provide links to your other accounts — this replaces the old TypeKey system that you might remember.

Blog It: This great, free application powered by TypePad lets you easily update multiple blogs and services from an Apple iPhone or right within Facebook. With one click, you can post to blogs on WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger and most other blogs, while also updating your status on Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter. Write once, and publish anywhere.

Blog Link: In an economy like the one we're facing today, even our blogs need to play a role in helping out our careers. We make that easy with our new, free LinkedIn application Blog Link, powered by TypePad. Blog Link automatically displays headlines from any blog you use (whether it's on WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type or anything else) right on your LinkedIn profile. Now the ideas you publish on your blog can be part of what your employers or partners see when they check you out on LinkedIn.

All of these services and tools are just the beginning of what we're already offering to millions of bloggers around the world, regardless of which platform you use to publish your blog. For example, our Six Apart Services team has built some of the biggest social media sites in the world, including ones powered by WordPress, though of course we think they're the best Movable Type and TypePad development teams in the world.

Blogging and the future of the social web is bigger than any one platform or any one company, and that's why we've always offered different platforms for different audiences, and worked hard to be a good resource to all bloggers. So we offer our congratulations to the whole WordPress community on an exciting launch, and especially to the many WordPress bloggers who are Six Apart customers as well.

There are, of course, official docs available if you're looking for help upgrading your WordPress install, and we strongly recommend it as it's important to stay up to date in order to keep your site secure. And finally, while we're of course proud first and foremost of the tremendous effort with put into Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, we do sincerely hope our roster of services offer a nice set of upgrades to make this new version of WordPress even better. Let us know what you think.