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 broadcaster’s website after it had aired a controversial documentary called WikiSecrets about the whistle-blowing site. → 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 longer using and the Six Apart brand name. The price was undisclosed, but this wasn’t really a deal about price. These assets — once so important to Six Apart in blogging’s early days– just weren’t that strategic anymore. The company says little will change for Moveable Type users, because they’d already shifted the line of business to Japan pre-acquisition. This is more closure than anything else.
The deal isn’t huge news, but it’s an interesting milestone for the blogging industry. Moveable Type was at one time the core of Six Apart’s strategy; a behind-the-firewall software product to help any company get up and blogging in a controlled, secure way. Blogging was already an unsteady opening of the corporate kimono, but using an untested, hosted solution was a step too far for many of the Fortune 500 companies and large media giants like Conde Nast and BusinessWeek. I first used it when we started blogs at BusinessWeek, and the magazine was terrified. I can’t imagine us using something as open as WordPress. Moveable Type was like blog training wheels– important for a time, but sadly not so relevant now. → 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 going for — and that’s why VideoEgg bought Six Apart last week, forming this new company.
I sat down with Sanchez the day after the deal was disclosed (we first broke the news of the deal the day before it happened) to get his take on why such a deal makes sense and what it means going forward. → 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 page.
The combined company will reach 345 million global unique visitors, says the company. These are direct visitors to hosted sites as well as third party sites running ads from the companies. The combined company will have over 300 employees, and “the vast majority of Six Apart employees will move over,” says Sanchez. → 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 why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny – CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens. → 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 marketing programs offered by the blogging company.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. → 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 on its TypePad and TypePad Motion products. Culver writes that her next project is developing an iPhone application for Plancast.
Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn’t joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she’s joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver’s blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that’s in private beta. → 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 peer-to-peer hacker best known for his work on Mojo Nation, a precursor to BitTorrent. And Mike Malone, an engineer at Six Apart who was also instrumental in the building of Pownce, the since-deadpooled social messaging service. → 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, Six Apart’s blog hosting service, TypePad, is starting to promote chartbeat by making it available from its stats page. Website hosting service DreamHost is offering a deeper integration, showing a hover-over summary of current visitors and top referring sites on its dashboard page. Chartbeat also has an iPhone app which sends you push notifications every time your traffic spikes or your site is down. → 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 (Director of Platform Engineering at LinkedIn), John Ham (Co-founder & CEO of Ustream), David Jacobs, (VP , Six Apart), Mike Jones (COO, MySpace) and Ryan Sarver (Director of Platform, Twitter). → 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 used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web. → 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 Motion – the first application to launch on the new platform – as the phoenix rising from the ashes of Pownce (which the company picked up late last year).
This is an interesting move for a number of reasons. Let’s tackle TypePad Platform first and take a look at Six Apart’s forray into the community microblogging space afterwards. → 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, you can now post by e-mailing in an article or using your iPhone to publish whatever short posts, links, videos and pictures you want to put up on the web easily and rapidly. → 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 Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board. → 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, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.
Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch. → 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 manager position at Nokia in 2006 to co-found one of the first micro-publishing services, Jaiku.
Engeström talks about what he’s currently involved with at Google and what the further plans with the Jaiku technology are. → 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). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.
ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well. Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. → 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 Moveable Type Pro, the site’s premium service, once it leaves beta in 2009. For now, you can sign up for a free demo of the Beta version here. → Read More
The Entertainment Section: → Read More
