In a message posted on its corporate blog earlier this morning, blogging software maker Six Apart essentially admitted that security holes in its Movable Type product(s) are to be blamed for the recent, prominent hacking and defacement of the PBS.org website, which occurred at the end of last month.
Hackers aligned with WikiLeaks at the end of May managed to break into and deface the US… → Read More
It’s the final chapter of the old Six Apart– literally. Say Media– the videoegg/Six Apart combo platter– has finally sold Six Apart’s Japanese business, something the company has been working on since before the VideoEgg acquisition. The buyer is Infocom Group, a Japanese software company. Bundled into the deal are the global Moveable Type business, an early TypePad code base that Say is no… → Read More
“The rules of media have completely been broken,” according to Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez. Because we’re no longer living in a world where print media is sold on a newstand and video media is only presented through cable television, everything is changing. And as old companies have to adopt to that change, there are opportunities for new empires to sprout up. And that’s exactly what Say Media is… → Read More
Advertising network VideoEgg will acquire blogging and advertising network Six Apart, and the combined entity will be renamed Say Media. The companies will officially announce the transaction tomorrow. VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez will run the combined entity as CEO. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden will step down.
The SAY Media site will launch tomorrow, but we’ve included a screenshot of the home… → Read More
When Six Apart launched Vox, a blogging/social network platform with strict privacy controls, in 2006, investor David Hornik had high hopes. Vox is an “amazing blogging platform,” he said, because “Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them.”
Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart.
What they’re not saying is… → Read More
Six Apart this morning announced the acquisition of NaturalPath Media, which bills itself as an online advertising and media network for “sustainable, healthy, and conscious lifestyles”.
With the acquisition, Six Apart aims to expand its ability to help marketers reach women aged 25+ and provide more opportunities for NaturalPath Media publishers to increase revenue through premium conversational… → Read More
In December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce, a microblogging service that never managed to attract a large following. Pownce was shuttered after the acquisition, but its two-person team joined Six Apart to help integrate the technology into Six Apart’s blogging services. Today Pownce founder Leah Culver has written on her blog that she’s leaving Six Apart, where she spent the last year working… → Read More
Two weeks ago, SimpleGeo raised a $1.5 million seed round from just about every big angel investor in Silicon Valley. Not surprisingly, they’re already putting that money to good use.
Before the funding, SimpleGeo was a team of four including co-founders Matt Galligan and Joe Stump. As of today, they’re now 7, with the arrival of two new hires: Zooko (yes, that’s what he’s known as), a… → Read More
If Google Analytics just isn’t fast enough for you, there’s Chartbeat, a betaworks company which provides realtime analytics to Website owners. It gives Website publishers a second-by-second view of the number of visitors on their site, which pages are spiking in popularity, referring sites, as well as alerts on slow load times and server crashes. It is particularly useful for blogs.
Today… → Read More
This is an overview of what was said during the panel conversation at Le Web on Platforms, which was moderated by our own Mike Arrington. (right)
Lots of panelists for this particular discussion – the conference organizers managed to get all of these people on one stage: Ethan Beard (Director, Facebook Developer Network), Cristian Cussen (Director of Business Development at Ning), Brandon Duncan… → Read More
I don’t recall ever paying for a TypePad blog, but apparently I did. I learned this today when I logged in for the first time in years to see that the site I had set up in 2005 was deactivated because my credit card had expired. Lucky for me, I don’t have to pay anymore because TypePad has finally launched a free version of the service.
TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever… → Read More
Blogging software pioneer Six Apart this morning announced that it’s debuting TypePad Cloud Platform, a new service that enables developers to use the service’s API to build social applications while leaving the storage, infrastructure and organization of the data that is core to such tools to TypePad’s so-called ‘smart cloud’. Synchronously, Six Apart is introducing and open-sourcing TypePad… → Read More
Microblogging is one popular type of cake, and Six Apart damn well wants a piece of it too. The company has just added a new element to its TypePad offering: a so-called ‘microblog-style blog’, which I imagine could just as well simply be dubbed a microblog. If you know what Posterous is and does, it’s easy to explain what the new TypePad feature does: exactly the same.
If you’re a TypePad user… → Read More
A group of Movable Type specialists – some of them former Six Apart employees – wanted to speed up the development of the open source version of the popular publishing platform and decided to group together in a quest to build an independent, community-driven CMS for bloggers and other publishers.
The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software… → Read More
Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later… → Read More
I just finished moderating a panel with Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström about emerging social behavior on the web at the Next09 conference in Hamburg, and I got the chance to speak with both of them separately afterwards and recorded part of the conversations on video. The first one I’m featuring is the short talk I had with Engeström, the Finnish entrepreneur who left his senior product… → Read More
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). … → Read More
Six Apart, the company behind blogging platform Movable Type, has just announced a new social application called Motion that integrates social network-like activity streams, microblogging support, and dead simple login functionality for visitors that allows them to quickly leave comments and even tie in their own activity feeds to your site. The new application will be free for all users of … → Read More
Pownce is dead. So what. Micromessaging has always been about the next phase beyond email, and oh so not about competition between micromessaging vendors. Twitter is the Kleenex of the space and has survived its most difficult phase. There is no competition for Twitter, not even close. FriendFeed is the reason Twitter has won. It’s the toolkit for providing innovation around Twitter. It has… → Read More
Six Apart is finally doing something with its Blogs.com domain. It is creating, well, yet another blog directory. And I do mean that in the early-days-of-Yahoo sense: it will be edited by a small group of about five human editors, and will feature top-ten blog lists from the likes of Web celebs such as Marc Andreessen and Craig Newmark (Michael is still working on his). This is not a… → Read More
The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST. Facebook’s press release is here. Live Coverage In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is… → Read More
Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based on very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well. As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site… → Read More
Six Apart has introduced an iPhone version of their BlogIt software, which allows users to quickly post updates to their blogs, Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Facebook. The current version of BlogIt is a traditional iPhone web-based app, though we can expect a native version on the way (Six Apart announced a native version of TypePad at Apple’s WWDC conference earlier this week). → Read More
Feel like sharing? Two ex-Ebay/Skype execs have created Tokoni, a social story sharing site that they hope will become the web’s virtual “front porch”. The site, which quietly launched last December, hopes to foster a warmer and better connected sharing environment than other similar communities on the web. Tokoni is essentially a community of connected blogs with a social… → Read More
Six Apart, creator of the blogging platform Movable Type, has partnered with LightPole, a mobile application provider. The two companies have co-developed a plugin for Movable Type that will allow bloggers to geo-tag their posts, create geo-located Points of Interest, and publish content through LightPole channels to mobile phones. The plugin brings Movable Type to two distinct (and important)… → Read More
Six apart is launching an advertising network for blogs and will begin offering professional services (design, implementation, development, optimization) after acquiring New York based creative agency Apperceptive (this was correctly guessed by Cameron Barret in a Friday post (see comment 156) asking for readers to tell us who they thought Six Apart acquired). Advertising Network – Six Apart… → Read More
San Francisco-based blogging startup Six Apart has made a significant acquisition, we heard today from someone with knowledge of the deal. “Significant” in the sense of a possible strategic shift for the company, if not in terms of deal size. It will be announced in the next few days. Who did they acquire? Put your best guess in the comments. First comment that is correct gets a 2 GB… → Read More
Six Apart just made designing a blog layout so easy that even a dummy like me can do it. On its TypePad service, it added a few more themes to bring the total up to: “100 themes, over 1000 professional designs, and an infinite number of customization possibilities.” You can try it out here on TypePad’s new Design Assistant, which recently made its debut on Six Apart’s… → Read More
Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel. TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn… → Read More
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