Toluu

Six Apart News

Welcome to the official Six Apart blog. Anything that affects our company or the entire blogging industry is up for discussion, since 2002. You'll find out about public appearances that we make, new product announcements, major company news and even some peeks behind the scenes.

TypePad Connect, Profiles and Comments for Everyone!Today

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

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

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

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

TypePad and JournalismNovember 18

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

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

Reports From The Field

The Journalist Bailout program exists because we care about the future of journalism at Six Apart. I've worked at a newspaper, our CEO was founder of a magazine, and our staff across the company and around the world have worked in reporting, publishing, designing, maintaining and supporting journalism in print, in broadcast, and of course on the web in a variety of capacities. For years, I've followed pioneers

Changes at Six ApartNovember 11

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

---

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

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

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

From a financial point of view, the com

Barack Obama and BloggingNovember 5

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

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

A Shout Out For Helping StudentsNovember 3

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

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

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

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

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