Six Apart News & Events

How We Twitter @sixapart

2008-10-03T21:51:58Z

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.

follow sixapart at http://twitter.com

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.

Second Annual Blogger Challenge Starts Today - Participate!

2008-10-01T05:41:18Z

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.

Movable Type Pro: Now With Comments!

2008-08-20T19:00:51Z

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

2008-08-18T21:04:29Z

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.

Movable Type Pro: "It raises the bar"

2008-08-15T04:00:17Z

As anyone who saw last week's opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics knows, a community of motivated energetic people can create a pretty powerful, even beautiful, demonstration of the power of movable type. Since the milestone release of Movable Type Pro as part of the Movable Type 4.2 launch this week, we've seen a similar outpouring that, while a little less dramatic, has been extremely exciting for the whole Movable Type community.

You can see the results across the blogosphere and all over Twitter (Hello to all the new followers of the Six Apart account on Twitter!), but we've seen some great reviews and reactions from the press as well. Here's just a sampling:

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger sums it up in Movable Type launch Version 4.2 and Movable Type Pro: "Today's Movable Type Pro launch marks another important step in the evolution of MT as a platform ... More and more bloggers are looking to find ways to integrate social networking within their communities and to this point most are having to settle for marrying two platforms together (one blogging platform and one social networking platform). Movable Type now offer a solution for an all in one package - something that will be very tempting for some bloggers."
Peter Hagopian of InformationWeek covers the story in Movable Type 4.2 Delivers Speed, Security, And Social Networking: "Movable Type 4.2 was released today with a pile of new features and enhancements that make the payoff well worth the anticipation. ... Building on the solid foundation of its blogging and content management functionality, MT 4.2 adds a substantial new set of functionality in support of social networking. ... Probably the most trumpeted accomplishment of Movable Type 4.2 is the improvement in speed across the board. Page publication speed has been greatly improved, as has end-user-facing search. Movable Type's user community has been clamoring for these improvements for quite some time, and 4.2 really delivers."
Scott Gilbertson over on Wired's Webmonkey leads with New Movable Type Pro Wants to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Network: "Movable Type Pro allows you turn your blog into a full social network platform, with features like user registration, profiles, ratings, forums, "following" tools, and more. ... The update is packed with features -- see the Six Apart blog post for more -- and the pro version especially looks like a very nice option for sites that want a full community-in-a-box setup."
Irina Guseva at CMSWire says Six Apart Gets a Little Social with WCM: "It's been almost seven years since Six Apart embarked on its quest to make publishing available to everyone - and it is still going strong. In the new era, however, it is now all about the ability go beyond blogging and into the social publishing. MT 4.2 is here to offer a new level of interaction between bloggers and audience, integration with social networks and a lot more. ... That is certainly a very interesting development in the world of blogging, and we'll continue reporting on it."
Kenneth Corbin at InternetNews offers Movable Type Moves Toward the Social: "Blogging pioneer Six Apart is souping up its Movable Type publishing platform, with plans to release a new version ... that will include a slate of social networking features such as profiles and discussion forums. ... Six Apart's evolution of its popular publishing platform is very much in keeping with the spirit of adding social features to content sites across the Web"
Brian Heater's covering the beat at PC World's (Movable Type-powered!) AppScout, which has a brief item entitled Six Apart Intros Movable Type Pro.
Kristen Nicole at Mashable says Six Apart Provides Social Networking Capabilities with Movable Type Pro: "Now that companies have begun to find more productive ways of interacting with their customers online, Six Apart is capitalizing on this growing necessity with additional social networking tools that can be integrated with the Movable Type blogging platform."
David Chartier of ars technica offers up Movable Type Pro to meld blogging and social networking: "Six Apart summed today's release with a simple question: 'what are the other things we can do with blogging?' ... Six Apart is certainly gaining a leg on its competition by jumping on the social bandwagon with what sounds to be a very polished and integrated package. ... Movable Type Pro is an appealing all-in-one package for bloggers and businesses looking to ride the social wave."
Rafe Needleman of CNET's Webware says that Movable Type is becoming a social platorm: "The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro. ... Just as blogging is changing publishing, social networking is going to change blogging."
Eric Eldon of VentureBeat has a post titled Six Apart to launch social networking features for blogs: "[F]or some publications, this is a great way to increase the time people spend on the site -- if you feel a part of a community, you often want to spend more time with that community. ... Now, Six Apart's goal is to create mini social networks for blogs. "
Andy Merrett on the Blog Herald offers up Movable Type gets social with Pro version, built on MT 4.2: "Blogging and social networking have been happy partners for some time, so it's not surprising that at least one blogging platform is making the most of that alliance in their latest 'pro' version. ... It sounds like a great 'out of the box' solution for those already using, or keen to use, Movable Type, who want to integrate more social tools."
Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb gets it at least halfway right (kidding!) with The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type: "Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks. With Six Apart's recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more."
Heather Havenstein at Computerworld gets right to the heart of it with Six Apart adds social networking, content management tools to Movable Type.
RSS Applied chimes in with MovableType adds social to the blog: "Considering blogs were the first link in the social networking chain, it seems only right that it would come back full circle. Most bloggers use social networks extensively to extend the reach of their blog, and it has become the common secondary effort of most bloggers. ... So this move by SixApart is a savvy one that accepts the direction the web has gone, and I'm definitely downloading and installing MovableType Pro on one of my personal blogs to see what it's all about."
And James Lewin of Podcasting News wraps it all up Movable Type Wants To Help You Build The Next Digg: "Six Apart today announced an update to Movable Type and the launch of Movable Type Pro, a new version that's designed to let you build your own social networking sites. ... The announcement is good news for all bloggers, because it raises the bar for blogging platforms. If you've got a popular podcast, blog or Internet video, you'll soon be able to turn your site into a social network."

Of course, we can continue with the examples forever -- there are already dozens of excited conversations about MT 4.2 and MT Pro all across the web. But perhaps most gratifying is that we're hearing the same level of excitement from the diehard community of Movable Type users as well. That is, after all, why these tools exist.

It's reminiscent of one of the most striking images in those opening ceremonies, the sprouting of the peach blossoms, a symbol of openness. That blossoming was followed by the revelation that all of the intricate, technical movements of the beautiful choreography were pulled off by individual people manipulating a nearly countless number of enormous blocks. While our own small efforts pale in comparison to the grandeur and scale of the opening of the Olympic games, there are still some lessons we can learn from the example. Our work is designed to increase openness, to bring people together, to make something that's designed to be beautiful. And most of all, it's designed to broadcast these things to the world, using the powerful combination of talented individuals and Movable Type.

We can't wait to see what you and your communities do next.

hCard Hacking in Perl

2008-08-11T23:23:50Z

This morning one of our interns finished up one of his hackathon projects (every Wednesday is hack day -- our coders spend all day working on projects that they think are interesting, valuable, or just plain cool. And yes, we are hiring) which is a Perl library to create new hCards and parse existing ones from around the web. The Microformat hCard describes how to represent people, companies, organizations, and places by using a 1:1 representation of vCard properties and values in HTML. When developing this library, we focused on making sure that it worked with hCards in the wild -- including those that might not fully follow the specification -- and making sure that you didn't need to already know how hCard worked to make use of the library.

Some more information from the library's README:

This module handles three existing specifications from Microformats.org:

hCard -- http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

adr -- http://microformats.org/wiki/adr

geo -- http://microformats.org/wiki/geo

Each of them can be used on their own (hCard uses adr and geo to parse addresses and geolocations, but adr and geo have no dependencies on any others, and hCard doesn't need either unless the corresponding elements appear in an hCard), though the primary appearance of adr and geo "in the wild" is as subparts of hCards.

This module exists both to parse existing hCards from web pages, and to create new hCards so that they can be put onto the Internet.

To use it to parse an existing hCard (or hCards), simply give it the content of the page containing them (there is no need to first eliminate extraneous content, as the module will handle that itself):

my $card = Data::Microformat::hCard->parse($content);

If you would like to get all the hCards on the webpage, simply ask using an array:

my @cards = Data::Microformat::hCard->parse($content);

The module respects nested hCards using the parsing rules defined in the spec, so if one hCard contains another, it will return one hCard with the other held in the relevant subpart, rather than two top-level hCards.

To create a new hCard, first create the new object:

my $card = Data::Microformat::hCard->new;

Then use the helper methods to add any data you would like. When you're ready to output the hCard, simply write:

my $output = $card->to_hcard;

And $output will be filled with an hCard representation, using tags exclusively with the relevant class names.

If you would like to have the parser determine the representative hCard for a page, simply pass the page's URL as an additional parameter to the parse or from_tree methods, and the appropriate property will be found if it can be determined.

Check it out on CPAN and let us know what you think.

Facebook Connects with Movable Type

2008-07-23T22:00:56Z

Blogging is evolving, to encompass the world of social networking and connect to the rest of the web, merging publishing with community. Movable Type users know this better than anyone, since they get first and best access to the coolest social publishing features.

Today marks another milestone, as our own David Recordon joined Mark Zuckerberg onstage at Facebook's F8 conference to demonstrate a live, working implementation of Facebook Connect for Movable Type. Facebook Connect is a powerful new initiative from Facebook that lets you bring your Facebook profile and social graph to other applications and websites while still giving you full control over privacy. We've shown off (and will soon release for download) a free, open source plugin for Movable Type that enables Facebook Connect on any MT-powered site.

Simply put, this is another huge leap forward in the effort to make the personal web more open.

Facebook users who visit Movable Type-powered sites using these new features will see a number of significant benefits:

You can sign in with your existing Facebook account, without the compelexity of creating a new account on a site.
If you choose, your Facebook profile name and picture can automatically be shared with the Movable Type site you're visiting.
All of these capabilties take place without you having to share your password with any other sites.
Facebook Connect for Movable Type honors your privacy, so that no one else will see your information from Facebook unless you've given then permission from within Facebook.
Facebook Connect makes it possible to tell your friends on Facebook where you're participating on the web, by updating your News Feed.
As Facebook brings new capabilities onilne with Facebook Connect, Movable Type sites will be able to provide them to you seamlessly.

Of course, this doesn't just benefit the members of a site's community, there are some huge benefits for those of you who manage and publish Movable Type-powered sites, too.

It's easier than ever to get new visitors to your site to register and participate, increasing engagement and encouraging repeat visits.
Community members can advertise their participation on your site using the Facebook News Feed, driving traffic and new visitors to your site.
You can require sign-in via Facebook Connect or OpenID or other systems, knowing that most active users on the web have an account with one of these systems already.
Site visitors are more likely to participate if they see familiar avatars and names from their friends on your site.
You can manage community members who sign in through Facebook Connect using the same familiar tools you use today -- even on your iPhone.

This kind of open connection between social networks and blogs benefits everyone. Publishers get more visitors and engagement on their sites, Facebook members get to discover more dynamic conversations going on across the web, and everyone gets a better user experience that honors their privacy.

For years now, we've invested in connecting Movable Type sites to the rest of the web. Millions of people visit a Movable Type-powered site or community every day, and they benefit from our work to make the web better. There are initiatives like OpenID, which has grown from its genesis at Six Apart to being part of the fabric of the web, with over half a billion accounts now being able to sign in to your Movable Type-powered community without having to create a new login. (We hope to see Facebook Connect support OpenID soon, too -- that would mean even less work for sites which already accept OpenID.)

We committed to bringing social networking capabilities to any site that wants them with the enormous success of our Community Solution for Movable Type, which turns any MT-powered site into a complete social platform. This was amplified by efforts like Action Streams, which from its launch at the beginning of this year has exploded with support for sharing activity from dozens of social networks, offering aggregation of social networking activity from more sources than any other platform. And the web has seen immediate benefits from projects like TypePad AntiSpam, designed to be a free way to combat blog spam anywhere on the web, on any platform.

Today, this tradition is demonstrated again by bringing Facebook Connect to Movable Type. Like Movable Type itself, it's available for free and will be released under an open source license. And like all of these efforts to make blogging more social, Facebook Connect is available first and exclusively for Movable Type.

As we get closer to the availability of Facebook Connect, we'll explain the technical details of implementation, as well as offering an overview of the experience that community members and site owners can expect. In the meantime, you'll want to grab the latest release candidate of Movable Type 4.2, due to be released shortly, and featuring massive performance improvements and far simpler templating in addition to support for the Facebook Connect plugin.

TypePad for iPhone is a hit!

2008-07-15T16:03:44Z

It's only been a few days since the launch of the iPhone App Store, but the verdict is in: Bloggers are loving the new TypePad for iPhone application. We've seen a massive number of TypePad members download the new application for their iPod touch or iPhone, and just as exciting is seeing an influx of new members who finally gave TypePad a try because of the application. If you've got an iPhone or iPod touch and haven't given it a try yet yourself, just download it for free on the App Store.

As we mentioned when it was first announced at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference, TypePad for iPhone lets unleash your creativity from wherever you are: Create posts, upload photos, even resize images taken on your camera. And your posts appear instantly on your TypePad blog (and optionally on Twitter as well) as soon as you're done. You can see it in action in this video clip from the WWDC conference.

But, while we're proud of the success of this new application, you don't have to take our word for it. Take a look at just some of the early press reaction:

AppleInsider lists TypePad amongst its Best of the App Store: "As the only full-scale blogging app on launch, TypePad (free) is almost a category of its own but is nonetheless notable for just how complete it is."
Longtime TypePad member Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press weighs in: "I downloaded a free program for Typepad, the popular blogging platform from Six Apart. It writes, posts copy and pictures and updates the blog I set up like I was at my main computer."
In its own inimitable style, Valleywag lists the new TypePad app as one of the 10 iPhone apps that will drive you into Steve Jobs's clutches.
Eric Benderoff at the Chicago Tribune offers his assessment: "I prefer the Web App for the Typepad blogging software because it allows me to manage -- track where the readers are coming from or approve comments, for example -- the Eric 2.0 blog."
And finally, Scott McNulty, who's been using TypePad for years, offers a detailed first look on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: I'm a big fan of the service ... and that's why I was very excited to see TypePad was coming out with an iPhone native blogging app."

We're just as excited to see what you think of the application, of course. So do let us know: Post about your experiences on your TypePad blog, or let us know via Twitter. (You do follow the Six Apart account on Twitter, don't you?) That's just as easy to do, because TypePad for iPhone supports posting to TypePad and Twitter at the same time. And a tip: One of the new features for iPhone and iPod touch is really handy if you want to write about an application -- just hold down the power button and the Home button to take a screenshot, which shows up as a regular image on your device.

Best of all, TypePad for iPhone joins a whole family of mobile applications for TypePad. There's a powerful iPhone web interface for TypePad, which includes a ton of cool features like statistics and comment management. And just like the iPhone app, they're all free for TypePad members, they're all among the first full-featured blogging applications on their platforms, and they're all exclusive benefits of being a TypePad member.

Better Mobile Blogging for Everyone

We haven't forgotten that some of our most loved bloggers are on Movable Type and Vox, and that we have an obligation to all bloggers to make it as easy as possible to share your ideas with the world. So there are some great iPhone options for these bloggers, too:

For Movable Type, the free iMT plugin gives you a full-featured interface for updating and managing your Movable Type blogs, including the ability to review comments, entries, and more. You can also use the free Blog It, powered by TypePad, to easily update your MT blog while updating other services like Twitter or Facebook as well. (These options work perfectly with Movable Type 4.2, which is now in the Release Candidate stage of testing.)
For Vox members, you can just sign in to Blog It on your iPhone and post to your Vox blog with just a few taps.
For everybody else, Blog It's a good option as well. The TypePad-powered service works with popular blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, and WordPress.

While, honestly, it's a little bit of a thrill for all of us at Six Apart to go to the Apple homepage and see a little TypePad logo tucked away on one of the screenshots, it's much more exciting to realize that a whole new mobile audience is about to discover the power of blogging. We hope you'll give TypePad for iPhone a try, and we're excited that, once again, TypePad members are getting the coolest new features first.

Bringing Great Blogging Tools to iPhone

2008-06-12T10:00:00Z

Ever since Ben and Mena Trott created Movable Type together so that Mena could blog and build a community, Six Apart has been about helping to get more people blogging. In order to do this we must produce optimized user experiences that take cutting edge technology and make it more accessible. We've been fortunate enough be recognized for our efforts in innovation and today we're introducing a free web application, Blog It for iPhone Powered by TypePad. Built specifically for iPhone's Safari browser, Blog It for iPhone enables you to post blog entries or status updates from wherever you are to more than a dozen different online services.

Blog It for iPhone is essentially the mobile version of our Blog It for Facebook application, which we launched in April. We've been thrilled with the response to Blog It for Facebook (see this ReadWriteWeb post for an example!), and love seeing people use it to create content and share it all over the web. And we also love making it better -- in May we added support for MarkDown so you don't need to write HTML by hand; and in June we added support for FriendFeed and Jaiku, to bring the total list of services we support to thirteen. Blog It now supports creating content on Blogger, Facebook, FriendFeed, Jaiku, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad Vox, WordPress.com, and any WordPress.org site.

Blog It: Free blogging to any platform, from any iPhone

The Blog It for iPhone web application lets you post to your blog and update your status via one easy-to-use interface. Just like the original version for Facebook, you can choose to automatically share your post with people you know on various social networks. And Blog It for iPhone supports all the same services Blog It for Facebook does. To use Blog It for iPhone simply visit blogit.typepad.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

It's so easy that you don't even need to create yet another account; we've integrated OpenID for login to Blog It for iPhone. Our designers worked hard to try to keep it simple so that even if you don't know what OpenID is you'll still be able to just login with your account from Yahoo!. This also means that once you've chosen to link your accounts together, all of your existing settings from Blog It for Facebook will automatically show up on your iPhone and any changes you make will be reflected no matter where you use Blog It.

The Blog It for iPhone web application joins our existing iPhone-optimized TypePad site which we launched last year. TypePad bloggers can visit i.typepad.com from their iPhone to manage comment activity, create and publish simple blog posts and even check on site traffic statistics. To our beloved Movable Type users, we've heard you loud and clear: Blog It is a great way to post to Movable Type from your iPhone, or if you want even more features, you can check out the iMT plugin, which lets you manage your whole Movable Type blog from the device.

To round out blogging support for the iPhone, a native iPhone application for TypePad will be available for free at the launch of the iPhone App Store. TypePad for iPhone enables bloggers to instantly post photos from their iPhone to their blogs and photo albums on TypePad. Michael Sippey, Six Apart's VP of Products, demonstrated this new app during the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Check out the video of the event; his demo starts at about the 30 minute mark.

We're certainly excited about all of the great new things we can provide to bloggers because of the iPhone's great web browser and powerfully simple SDK for native applications. Below are some screenshots of the new free Blog It for iPhone web application, and you can access it from Safari on your iPhone at blogit.typepad.com.

TypePad AntiSpam: What's Good for the Web

2008-05-29T17:10:59Z

At Six Apart, our mission is to help people communicate on the web, and we've always done this by making the best software and services that we can. But part of our larger goal is to help do what's right for the web, and today we're launching the latest initiative in that effort: TypePad AntiSpam.

What's TypePad AntiSpam? A few short answers:

A free, open source system powered by TypePad for blocking comment spam on any site, free no matter how many comments you get.
A service for all bloggers, built into TypePad blogs already and implemented as a free plugin for users of platforms like Movable Type and WordPress.
An open source engine which developers can use to create new antispam services, with customizable rules and logic.
In beta! We're hearing great results from testers so far, but wanted to open up TypePad AntiSpam to a larger audience so we can make sure the system is getting as smart as possible.

One of the reasons that we think TypePad AntiSpam is performing so well already is that its adaptive learning engine has been trained by millions of comments already. Every time any TypePad user reports a comment as junk, the system gets a little bit smarter and is even more ready to fight future spam attacks. The same goes for TrackBacks and Pingbacks.

So, if you hate spam, you're probably wondering how to get TypePad AntiSpam. It's easy!

TypePad AntiSpam is a free, automatic upgrade for TypePad users at any subscription level -- it's built in! You can read up on Everything TypePad to find out how this helps your TypePad blogs and be sure to check out the screencast.
The service is included in the brand-new Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 1 and is available as a free plugin for any user of MT 3.3 or later.
For users of other platforms, TypePad AntiSpam is a free plugin. Users of WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 can download the plugin for free, and other platforms can use our 100% Akismet API-compatible implementation to extend their existing antispam support to use this service.

So, why are we releasing TypePad AntiSpam now? It all comes back to our mission, as stated above: We want to increase the quality of conversation on the web. At the highest level, we wanted to change the economics of blog spamming by introducing variety into the ecosystem.

The more different implementations of spam-fighting technology that exist, the more complex and challenging (and expensive!) it becomes for spammers to keep attacking our communities. At the same time, we want to make sure our economic incentives at Six Apart as a business are aligned with the best interests of bloggers, so that we feel the pain and cost of spam just as you do. And we want to get these weapons in the fight against spammers into as many hands as possible. One of the earliest sites to deploy the new platform has been popular tech blog TechCrunch, which just offered up a review of TypePad AntiSpam from the site's founder, Michael Arrington:

[L]ast week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I'm pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.

TypePad AntiSpam has learned from the platforms that came before: Automattic's team has created a dead-simple API for Akismet, and we're 100% compatible with their API. (As Dave Winer once said, "Invention here is hardly the issue. What matters is adoption and forward motion.") The smart work at Defensio has made it clear that bloggers want more competition in the antispam market. And years of work on SpamAssassin has shown the success of making an open source antispam engine that anyone can extend and customize to their own needs.

But most important, we made TypePad AntiSpam so that you don't have to think about spam. So grab the plugin (or TypePad users, just keep on blogging) and join the fight against blog spam.

Hey Bloggers: Get Out! (With TypePad)

2008-05-14T07:08:01Z

Maybe everything interesting in life happens in front of a keyboard. But we don't think so, and we know that's not true for TypePad members, or for bloggers in general. We think you want to get outside and live your life or run your business, while still being able to stay connected to your blog.

That's why TypePad is the only blogging service that does mobile blogging right. So you can say what you have to say, from wherever you are.

We've been working to boost TypePad's cutting-edge mobile blogging features for years. And Six Apart has marked milestones as the best company for mobile blogging for years, like showing off our work at DEMO all the way back in 2004. And we've stayed on the cutting edge -- our Vox service is built in to every single Nokia N95, one of the hottest phones available worldwide.

The tradition continues today, as we follow up TypePad being the first blogging service to support the iPhone (and, as Apple noted, there's a dedicated iPhone client on the way) by launching another first: TypePad for the Blackberry Curve and Blackberry Pearl.

The new Blackberry client is a free upgrade for every TypePad member, just like the Windows Mobile and Palm and Nokia Symbian clients before it. And as a Blackberry user myself, it's been really satisfying to see how brilliantly TypePad is integrated into the device; I just take a photo like I always have, for example, and I'm seamlessly prompted afterwards if I want to send the picture to my TypePad site. Adding text is just as easy.

It's no surprise that a Blackberry client would be a good fit for TypePad members, though. Even as they're increasingly popular in personal life, Blackberry devices have always been associated with professionals who really need to get their email on the go. And TypePad's always been the blogging service that focuses on professional needs, whether that's mobile blogging, having total control over your site with no unwanted advertising on your blog, or just having a dedicated support team to back you up when you need help.

Of course, you might just be warming up to the idea of mobile blogging. In that case, the TypePad community is here to help: James Kendrick and Kevin Tofel of jkOnTheRun are using their TypePad-powered blog to run an awesome contest. You can win a Blackberry handheld, and two years of service to TypePad.

So, don't wait -- get your TypePad account, get your Blackberry, get the new client and then get out there and start blogging!

It's Computer Mania!

2008-05-05T20:57:21Z

Did you know that in 2006, only 10.5% of Computer Science AB test takers were girls? Sounds hard to believe, now two years later, when one of the serious contenders for the US Presidency is a woman, the majority of bloggers are women, and we're a company whose co-founder and President is female. (Yeah!)

Since 2003, the Center for Women and IT has been throwing a half-day IT-love fest at UMBC to keep the minds of middle school girls open to careers in technology, and, unabashedly, the event's name is Computer Mania Day. This past weekend, CMD '08 invited over 800 Baltimore-area middle school girls to personally interview a virtual-anime-puppet, work with PhD students to learn about haptics, and create their own hot air balloons, among tons of other real-life workshops presented by women in the industry. Meanwhile, the girls' parents participated in their own informative sessions about the status of women in IT led by industry leaders and Maryland Public School officials.

I was lucky enough to lead my own Computer Mania Day workshop for the kids, sharing some some of my blogging knowledge, technical expertise, and professional and personal experiences in IT. And we made our own: over 50 girls signed up for their very own Vox accounts! The girls loved customizing their own blogs, and were especially surprised at how easy Vox was to use and navigate. (A few of the girls mentioned it being a lot easier than MySpace.) And they totally loved the Six Apart/Vox schwag, including cute mini-buttons, phone charms, and some very desirable Pink Vox baby tees.

Events like these remind me that we should constantly work to enrich the core of the IT industry: its people. I had no problem gushing to the girls about the entertaining, challenging, and important job I've had with Apperceptive and now Six Apart, and I (not so) secretly hope that these girls grow up to bloggers and join the Six Apart staff! That being said, if you know of a young woman or man looking to start a career in technology, Six Apart is hiring everything from developers to designers to business development and account managers.

You can check out computermaniaday.vox.com for the links to the blogs made and a liveblog entry chronicling the day. More information about Computer Mania Day can be found on the UMBC site, as well as the CMD homepage itself.

Hell no, personal sites aren't dead!

2008-04-30T19:42:16Z

A few days ago, venerable web designer (and standards advocate) Jeffrey Zeldman posted "The vanishing personal site". Jeffrey lamented the fact that a lot of people who, in the past, might have made personal web sites are instead sharing their thoughts, ideas and creations on social networking sites that they don't control. His post inspired an important conversation across the blogosphere and in media like Wired, which asked the question, "Is the all-in-one personal website headed for extinction?"

Our answer is: Hell no. Six Apart is a company founded in the rich tradition of personal sites on the web. Members of our team have been publishing personal sites continuously for a decade or more. We know that blogs have inherited the mantle of the personal website. We believe fundamentally in people controlling their own information online, and think this makes our platforms better for everyone from individuals to businesses.The promise, the greatest potential, of the web from its very beginning was that any of us could share and connect with friends, family, coworkers, colleagues or strangers around the world using websites and tools that we own and control ourselves.

We love social networking sites. We think they let us do great things. So we've spent years inventing the technology that lets any of us fully participate in social networking sites while still having full control of our information on today's personal sites. And today, we call these ultimate personal sites blogs.

This isn't just about aggregation. This is about smart, two-way connections between blogs as independent personal sites and the entire universe of social networking sites. It's an idea that's been referred to by many names, including "unified social networking", but it's a vision that's shared by any of us who have experienced that signature first moment of realization about a website: "I could make one of these!"

Connecting your blog to everything you do around the web

This isn't just some philosophical discussion -- we've already launched a number of projects to fulfill this vision of new, smarter personal sites that understand the world of social software. And the reality is, your friends are only going to belong to more and more social networks; The most popular networking sites change every year, but the fact that there are increasing numbers of networks doesn't. So here's what we've done to make it all manageable, and to let you use all of these sites while still having your data and your activity live on your own personal site.

Action Streams: This system, first available as a completely free and open source Movable Type plugin, lets you aggregate your activity from over 50 social sites across the web. And it's easy to add new services, so when community members wanted to import TripIt journeys or Fire Eagle locations or Amazon wishlists, they just get plugged into the system.
Blog It: Blog It is a free Facebook application that posts to your blog or microblogging service, keeping all your networks in sync. And when we say "your blog", we don't just mean our platforms -- Blog It, while powered by TypePad, works with Blogger and WordPress and Twitter and Pownce, in addition to Movable Type and TypePad and Vox. But a picture's worth a thousand words: Check out the Blog It introduction video to see for yourself.
Opening the Social Graph: One key aspect of controlling your social networking behavior on your own site is that you have to be able to declare and manage your relationships on your own site. We've worked with the entire community to enable this kind of data sharing while preventing any ugly surprises that can happen when you inadvertently reveal relationship information you didn't intend to share. That's been a consistent theme ever since we were the only partner to provide a completely opt-in implementation of Facebook's "Beacon".
Profiles Elsewhere: Every one of our platforms, from Movable Type to TypePad to Vox, has the simple but essential ability to publish links to a list of your profiles on other services. It's easy to take these little bits of connection for granted, but expressing those relationships in a format that web software can understand sets the groundwork for future innovations. And it takes a big step towards your personal site being the place that people go first to find you online, instead of a social networking site you don't control.
OpenID: We invented OpenID at Six Apart with the fundamental concept is that your web address is part of your identity, just like an email address. It's a point that's obvious to any of us who use our personal web sites on our business cards (or Moo cards!) to tell people who we are, but OpenID takes that concept and bakes it into the technological underpinnings of the web. And every one of our platforms has OpenID built-in, with more and better support to come in the future.
OAuth: This is sort of the software-focused counterpart to OpenID, based on the idea that smart services should automatically integrate into your blogging platform. Vox has done this since it was created -- you can insert Flickr photos or YouTube videos as easily as if they were built directly into Vox itself. And all of this is done with the idea that you shouldn't have to share your password just to share your ideas.

Of course, there's a lot more to come. All of these technologies are available today and are generally free and open source. Most importantly, all of this work speaks to our belief that our innovations should support independent personal web sites, and should honor the tradition of creative individuals being able to fully participate in the web while still retaining complete control and ownership over their ideas and information.

But there's a lot more to do: New networks are popping up every day, and we need to invent ways for us to have even more control over the neverending competition for our attention. There are a whole set of new challenges that we couldn't have imagined in the days when personal sites seemed like the simple and obvious way to have a presence online. The chanegs since then, though, highlight an important new opportunity: Personal websites aren't vanishing, they're evolving. We simply won't let something so important and essential to the web disappear.

In The Great Cities of the World...

2008-04-28T18:19:09Z

There are many incredible cities around the world that are known for leadership in culture, finance, the arts, or technology. But any list of the world's great cities would certainly include Tokyo, Paris, New York and San Francisco. That's why we're so proud to have a Six Apart presence in all of these cities, and in so many places in between.

What's been amazing to see is that, despite the differences in language, culture, and community in each city, our team has kept some common traits that seem to be universal. There are some serious geeks in every office, hacking on the latest technology, and they work alongside amazingly talented business people, passionate designers, and of course dedicated bloggers. Every office also seems to feature a few multi-lingual superstars who speak two or three or four of the languages that we do business in.

Surprisingly, Six Apart people worldwide aren't just smart, they're also often smart-asses, too, with a sarcastic but still playful and fun sense of humor in all of our offices. Whether it's loving good food or playing Nintendo games or trading cycling tips or sharing music recommendations or just keeping tabs on the latest in the blogosphere, the connections between each of our offices go well beyond the usual stuff like technology or business planning, and into some really great human connections about what we find in common regardless of culture. (It probably helps that we have a ton of blogs inside the company and on the public web that keep us in touch.)

As you'd expect, each of our offices has its own web presence, too. They each reflect the personality and focus of our various teams, with a unique local flavor.

You don't have to take our word for it -- you can see for yourself on our various sites:

Six Apart Europe Information Center, from our team based in Paris
Six Apart Japan, from Tokyo
Apperceptive Blog, from the team that's become our new New York office

And of course, our Six Apart blog that's the voice of our world headquarters has recently been completely redesigned, too. We'd be remiss if we didn't mention that we're hiring, but perhaps the greatest thing about having a worldwide presence for Six Apart is that it's made our products better, made our business stronger, and most importantly made our company an even more exciting and inspiring place to work for those of us who get to collaborate with our coworkers all around the world.