Results tagged “typepad”

I am both flattered and mildly insulted by this piece in The Economist. Here's the nut graph:

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may "die" in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

One the one hand, I greatly appreciate someone putting to rest all this nonsense that because some early blog adopters have decided to use Twitter instead of their blog that this marks some kind of decline for blogging. The data just doesn't support that and anecdotes from the elite is no substitute for actual information. With apologies to Jason, the line that "The rest of the world may well have missed the unfolding of his tragedy," referring to his frustrations with blogging, and being crowded out by later adopters, made me chuckle. (In the end I'm envious: being personally dissed by The Economist is certainly a badge of honor!)

And, of course, I appreciated Six Apart, Movable Type, and TypePad getting a mention.

However, it's a little insulting for them to suggest that we are no longer subversives, isn't it? Are we so lacking in imagination and creativity that we, the blogging companies, don't have any more revolutions left in us? Is that all there is? Has blogging finally made it, and change is now reserved for other technologies?

Personally, I don't think blogging is done, in the sense that this article suggests. It may be true that blogs have indelibly disrupted mainstream media and changed the landscape of journalism forever. That revolution may have accomplished its goal already. But I suspect there are more revolutions left for blogging to lead. For example, I believe that today's mainstream social networks have a lot in common with yesterday's mainstream media. And I think blogging -- and bloggers -- will have something to say about that.

At Six Apart we've been working furiously all year to move TypePad to a new platform (the one we built for Vox). The migration was a huge effort and cost us much blood, sweat, toil, and tears, but as we enter the final stages we are starting to bear the fruits this labor. We've been working to improve the core capability of TypePad in many fundamental ways, but one big way is the commenting and community management capability.

That's why I was so excited by the TypePad Connect launch. David Recordon did a great summary post of the news but the basics are that in one day, we launched essentially three things: (1) we overhauled TypeKey and turned it into TypePad profiles.
(2) we launched in beta a new commenting system for TypePad. It's awesome and has a beautiful new design and user interface.
(3) we realize that many folks, like me, have non-TypePad blogs as well as their TypePad blogs (and I'm been informed that in some sad cases there are people who don't even use TypePad at all). So we created TypePad Connect, an easy way to bring TypePad powered comments and profiles to a non-TypePad web site or blog.

So now when you comment on THIS blog (which is powered by Movable Type), your comments and profiles will be powered by TypePad. From my point of view I can manage comments and commenters on my MT and TP blogs in one place, and have the same anti-spam protection.

And a really cool feature: when you create a TypePad profile and view it on *my* R21 blog, it's actually part of *my* blog - served on a page from my MT powered R21 site, with the same styling as my blog. This means my community feels like mine. This is a cool feature that I've only seen provided by TypePad Connect.

This is part of several larger trends from Six Apart. First, dramatic improvements to the TypePad service. The beta commenting service is just one of many steps we are taking to improve TypePad. The second is continuing the Six Apart effort to bring more social capabilities to blogging, as we did with Vox and Movable Type Pro. We now have a commenting and profile system that can go virtualy everywhere. The third is evolving what TypePad actually is as a service. With TypeKey (now TypePad profiles), TypePad AntiSpam, TypePad Blog It, TypePad Blog Link, and now TypePad Connect, the blog service known as TypePad has become a service that can support virtually any blogger, regardless of what their main blogging platform is. This is a way of breaking down walls, and I liked how ReadWriteWeb covered TPC:

Embracing the concept of community that has the ability to exist and live outside the walls of a given blog or proprietary product is definitely a step in the right direction. (For that matter, it doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to see the value of having a TypePad Connect profile as the endpoint for an OpenID URL.) TypePad Connect could be another step toward the realization of a truly distributed social Web.

The world of blogging is getting much more complicated, but, for my money, also much more interesting!

A huge thank you to Brad Whitaker and everyone who worked on this project -- you all did a fantastic job!

I floated this idea while having drinks with Kevin Maney in Washington DC a couple of weeks back: blogging could actually surge in a down economy. It's just a theory, but there is some data to support it. Blogging surged during the last recession, and that wave helped start this company and many others (Movable Type turned 7 last month!).

One of the core reasons that blogging has grown so much, in my opinion, is because it gives people a measure of freedom and control over their life. The way I put it with Kevin was "When you don't know where else to invest you invest in yourself." I think there is something inherently attractive to people in a world where so much is happening to them, out of their control, to being able to express themselves in ways they see fit.

Blogging for many started out as a hobby and turned into a career. And even those who don't make a living off blogging can find it valuable - we see countless authors, professionals, entrepreneurs, pundits, and the like blogging as a way to help themselves or their business. I started this blog when I was between jobs, and my blogging tends to be inversely proportional to how busy I am (something I need to change!).

The most eloquent description of the motivations for blogging, perhaps ever written, was Andrew Sullivan's recent article in The Atlantic. Here's a short excerpt, but if you haven't read the article already, please do:

A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course.  

The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is--more than any writer of the past--a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.

Now, I don't necessarily believe that the blog industry, which continues to come of age and grow, will be helped in the short run by the recession. In other words, I would bet that activity will increase, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the business of blogging will be helped more than hurt by the recession. I do think there are some ways in which a recession might help in the long term -- a surge in activity is a long term benefit to blogging, and I suspect that many businesses and publishers will find blogging tools are a better, less expensive tools for web content management -- but in the end I think all of us are going to get hit by what happens in this economy. Companies will have to adjust, restructure, and get more creative, as we are doing.

Still, blogging continues to move forward. There have been some suggestions that blogging  in its original form has or will start to weaken, as other forms of microblogging, social networking, and activity aggregation emerge. I see no evidence of this. Certainly there is evidence of the growth of these other forms of social publishing, and I believe they will all grow, but evidence of growth in one area is not evidence of decline in another. In fact, I believe all forms of social publishing actually help, more than compete with, each other.

Still, there is something special about "original" blogging, and again it's hard to top Andrew Sullivan who wrote "The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation." It was our mission, 7 years ago, to enable literary liberation, and this mission has never been more important. We decided to start a "bailout" program to help journalists in this difficult time, with a free TypePad Pro account and entrance on our Six Apart Media program, among the benefits. It received some praise, and some derision, at first but it's been extraordinarily well received, with hundreds of people applying for the program.

If you have thoughts on how Six Apart should help support bloggers or help start people blogging, in this economy, I'd love to hear them.

We've been fighting spam at Six Apart almost as long as we've been creating blogging tools. Auren Hoffman has written about the "black hat tariffs" that in essence act as a tax on the consumer Internet, imposed by bad actors. We made huge strides improving our spam fighting on TypePad over the last year, and services like Akismet have done a great job fighting the good fight for blogs of all shapes and sizes. However, we felt like we needed to do more to reduce the cost of spam, which siphons away resources that should otherwise be used to move blogs forward.

So we have opened up our TypePad AntiSpam service to everyone, for free. This will help improve the TypePad service for TP members, but also means that anyone, Movable Type, or WordPress, or other blogger, small or large, can get free spam protection.

But in addition to free, we made it open. We released the framework in open source so now you too can create your own anti-spam service! We hope that by making the backend open, it will help the fight by encouraging more services to emerge to fight this scourge. Thanks to Justin Mason, who knows more than a bit about fighting spam, for testing the service and giving our OSS move the thumbs up.

TypePad AntiSpam now joins an impressive line up of open source projects that we maintain. It's an often overlooked aspect of Six Apart -- we play a key role in many technologies that are vital to Web 2.0 and the internet.

TechCrunch was also really kind to test the service and so far seems to be getting good results: "[a]fter a week I'm pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us." But this isn't a move against Akismet -- it's a move against spam -- and to help eliminate black hat taxes. While we feel good about how the service has performed to date, we need to be humble that the bad guys can always strike back hard.

The new TypePad AntiSpam blog has some details about ow the service works, and will post updates:

The fundamental mission of TypePad AntiSpam is to protect open blog comments from being abused by spammers. The service does this by combining several adaptive learning engines to score inbound comments, TrackBacks and Pingbacks, to determine whether they are "spam" or "ham." The filters learn from user reports, enabling TypePad AntiSpam to quickly adapt to new spam attacks.

A huge thanks and kudos to all the folks at Six Apart who have worked tirelessly to make this happen. Spread the word!

We just released a very cool new service called "Blog It," which is powered by TypePad. It's a free Facebook application that makes it easy to write once and publish everywhere. As blogging expands, and becomes more social, many of us have multiple blogs and countless status services. Blogging is no longer just about posting, but also alerting people through various channels --such as Facebook and Twitter -- that you've posted. Blog It makes this easier than ever before and is a great step in bringing blogging and social networking together.

We've received phenomenal coverage on this already from the likes of ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Mashable, Webomatica, Blog Herald, CNet, Wired, Macworld, eWeek, InformationWeek, PC World, Computerworld, AllFacebook, eFluxMedia, and NewCommReview.

RWW suggested that "BlogIt could be a small wedge into a series of game changing moves in social media," and CNet wrote "The Web might have just gotten one step closer to a universal 'social dashboard' capable of managing an array of blogging, messaging, networking, and media applications," and I especially liked what Scott Gilbertson from Wired wrote:

It's the easiest way I've seen to broadcast posts across platforms. It offers the ability to pick and choose which posts go where on a per-post basis so you're always in control of who sees what. Every time you add a new service to update, Blog It offers the option to automatically post to that service, though you can always uncheck any of the services when you actually post something.

Blog It is a pretty slick Facebook app, perhaps the best I've used.

eWeek took another angle on the story:

Blog It is also great news for data portability evangelists trying to break down the walled gardens created by seminal social networks that erected barriers between networks of friends.

Congratulations to David Recordon, Bryan Tighe, and all at Six Apart who made this happen! And of course, this was posted using Blog It!

Here's a video introduction to the service.

Start using Blog It now

Try TypePad today with a Free Trial »

Six Apart is full of awesome people. Just awesome. It's full of bright, positive people committed to making a difference in the world. It's a joy to come to work with people who are so passionate, talented, and creative. I never worked at Apple, but from talking to friends who worked there in the formative days, I imagine its a similar experience.

This is one of the reasons that we are so jazzed by our relationship with Apple and have enthusiastically embraced bringing TypePad to the iPhone. Since the iPhone didn't have an SDK the first form of integration was web-based. And one of those awesome people I was referring to above, Walt Dickinson, who banged out the interface in a Six Apart hackathon, made it happen. Passion, talent, and creativity.

When Apple announced its SDK we got in line immediately to be a developer (with 100,000 other folks apparently!). Next up: a native app. Brought to you by more of those passionate, talented, and creative people (I'll blog about them when they ship it ;) ).

Here's some of the Everything TypePad post. I get the quote, but Walt and the team should get the credit:

Following up from our Movable Type Design Assistant announcement, we have brought the same to TypePad. If this was awesome for MT, it's awesome *plus* for TypePad. Here some excerpts from the Six Apart post:

As we have been saying for some time, we take design incredibly seriously at Six Apart. In that post, we were talking about empowering bloggers to have complete control over their blog designs. Today we take that next step in educating bloggers about design by combining the most powerful set of design tools available with the largest set of blog themes on any hosted blogging platform and making them all available as a free upgrade to all of our TypePad members. And you don't even have to be a TypePad member to get a look at some of the amazing new design capabilities.

The new themes on the TypePad service follow up on a commitment made by all of us at Six Apart from our CEO down, to making 2008 TypePad's best year ever. That commitment was met with an immediate response from hundreds of you in the community, and you echoed back a clear desire for more and better designs for your TypePad blog.

Read the rest of the post here (and check out the Everything TypePad post too). Congrats and a hearty thanks to the Six Apart teams who pulled this together.

I wanted to personally thank all of the fantastic TypePad members who responded to my recent letter and the follow up post on Everything TypePad. In addition to the helpful comments on the blog, and responses to our survey, I've received hundreds and hundreds of emails from you personally. Nearly every email is positive and has a productive suggestion on how to move TypePad forward. I am reading and responding to all of these emails as soon as I can. If you are waiting for a response, please bear with me! (I did take some time off during the Super Bowl!). And thanks again for all of the great feedback. We know how important TypePad is to you and we really appreciate you helping is make it even better.