Six Apart News & Events

Movable Type security fixes are available

2011-06-09T04:30:12Z

Dear Movable Type Customers,

You may have read reports that the website PBS.org was hacked and some sources claimed that a previously undiscovered security flaw in Movable Type 4 was to blame.

Six Apart and our affiliates have been working closely with the Public Broadcasting System to learn how the hack was accomplished. We are continuously reviewing our code base to protect our customers from any vulnerabilities in Movable Type.

Today, Six Apart released the first Movable Type update since the PBS hacking case. Please see the release note on movabletype.com for details. All Movable Type customers get benefits from this release, so we strongly recommend that you apply this release as soon as possible.

Six Apart is committed to continuing to eliminate bugs, especially when such bugs potentially expose our customers to malicious attacks.

In the past years, Six Apart has made efforts to provide security fixes promptly for major releases of Movable Type, because we understand that our customers are not always ready to migrate to the latest version of our software. That's why we have released updates for the Movable Type 4.3, 5.0, and 5.1 branches today.

This has always been an important policy at Six Apart, and will continue to be our commitment to our user community.

Nob Seki
President & CEO
Six Apart

Six Apart Japan to be acquired by Infocom and assume responsibility for Movable Type and Six Apart brand

2011-01-21T09:30:00Z

We are happy to announce that Six Apart KK (SAKK), a Japanese subsidiary of SAY Media, has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT company, as of February 1, 2011. As part of this transaction, SAKK will assume responsibility for the worldwide Movable Type business, and the Six Apart brand.

We at SAKK are very excited to continue our investment in Movable Type, the Movable Type Open Source project and the worldwide community of developers, publishers and bloggers around the world that use Movable Type.

Below is a translation of Infocom's press release announcing the agreement. And be sure to read the SAY Media blog post about the announcement. And stay tuned -- there is more to come!

Nob Seki
General Manager of SAKK

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Infocom strengthens the expansion of its social media service business

Acquires Six Apart KK, the domestic leader in CMS, as a subsidiary

February 21, 2011 (Tokyo, Japan)
In order to strengthen the expansion of our social media service business, Infocom Corporation (Shibuya Ward, Tokyo; President & CEO: Takashi Yoshino; hereinafter referred to as "Infocom") concluded a contract to acquire all shares of Six Apart KK (Minato Ward, Tokyo: General Manager: Nobuhiro Seki; hereinafter referred to as "SAKK"), the domestic leader in CMS, from Six Apart Limited (San Francisco, U.S.A.; CEO: Matthew Sanchez; hereinafter referred to as "SAUS"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAY Media Inc. (San Francisco, U.S.A.; CEO: Matthew Sanchez).

Overview

In our mid-term management plan beginning from March 2010, Infocom positioned net business as a priority business field and has worked actively to create new business. In the field of net business, Infocom has enlarged its contents transmission and e-commerce businesses with a focus on mobile phones. Infocom has also attempted to establish a new business which would serve as a third pillar. Also, social media service (hereinafter referred to as "SMS") has come to the forefront of the Internet industry. In order to strengthen activities in the SMS field, Infocom invested in the SMS developer Jibe Mobile last October and concluded a contract to acquire all shares of SAKK to further strengthen our activities in this field.

SAKK conducts development, sales and support for Movable Type, a tool which possesses the top share in Japan for updating of homepage information and posting management of blog articles. Furthermore, many customers use TypePad, a product which enables end-users to enjoy blogging.

This acquisition of SAKK shares by Infocom is based on the following judgments:

As the use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook continues to increase, we believe that links between such services and existing homepages/blogs will become even more important.
SAKK has just begun to develop business for "zenback", a service which is capable of connecting SMS and existing Internet media. We expect further development of this business in the future and believe that faster growth and expansion of ad networks can be realized through cooperation with our company.

Furthermore, SAKK will acquire intellectual property rights which are held by the party to the share acquisition (SAUS). These rights are associated with existing products and services such as Movable Type. SAKK also acquired rights for using the trademark "Six Apart", as well as licensing rights for additional software.

The Infocom Group shall actively seek expansion of our net business by adding our specialty of SI to the base established by Movable Type and then conducting sales to major corporations. Also, we will increase the synergistic effect of existing contents transmission/e-commerce through the development of advertising which utilizes "zenback", a service which SAKK has just begun developing. "zenback" is provided as a blog part which is used to display a variety of related information such as related article and Twitter in personal blogs.

Additionally, Infocom shall increase the efficient utilization of our business base. We shall strengthen our partnership with SAKK and shall enhance support for customers using existing products and services. Infocom shall also make every effort to ensure that users and partners can continue to use SA products and services with peace of mind.

SAY: Hello

2010-09-22T13:02:44Z

My husband Ben and I started Six Apart in 2001—and with you, the bloggers and creators, we changed the way people expressed themselves online. In doing so, we have helped to redefine the media landscape. Thank you for embracing our platform and for sharing your voice, your passions and expertise.

Today we announced that Six Apart is joining forces with VideoEgg to form a digital media company called SAY Media. The new company will continue to embrace our mission to make creators successful by helping them grow and monetize their audiences. Together we will create a modern media company that will better serve both creators and advertisers.

As we move forward, I will continue to have an active role in the new company. I hope you will join me, as you always have, in shaping our future. Want to know more? I think you'll like what you see.

With much appreciation and thanks.
Mena Trott, Co-founder

Introducing SAY Media: Good news for advertisers and publishers

2010-09-22T12:55:48Z

Those of you who've followed us over the years have seen us through a number of changes as Six Apart, and the industry we helped to create, has evolved.

What started with a simple goal to make creating and publishing content for the web easy, became a social publishing platform that today powers some of the biggest brands on the web, as well as passionate individuals—those of us who simply want to express ourselves, share our expertise or insights, and reach an audience of like-minded others.

Six Apart helped empower people and companies to publish. And they did. With amazing content they created valuable publishing properties with massive and engaged audiences—the influential audiences that advertisers want to reach. Over the past several years we have grown another side of our business, Six Apart Media, which has focused on helping publishers turn their passions into businesses and on helping marketers authentically engage these publishers and their audiences.

Today Six Apart announced its intention to join forces with VideoEgg to form a modern media company called SAY Media. The new entity will combine the engagement platform and insights of VideoEgg with our social publishing platform, conversational marketing tools, and robust network of publishers.

SAY Media will be a force—powering more efficient, useful and social advertising programs that tie rich and engaging advertising experiences to online communities with meaningful and measurable results. Good for publishers. Good for advertisers.

We believe SAY Media will become one of the world's most significant modern media companies, while still embracing the same goals we've always had at Six Apart—to empower people to create great content and make money doing it. Soon we'll have the capabilities to do it that much better. When you know more, I think you'll be as excited as we are. Get a glimpse of our future at www.saymedia.com.

Chris Alden
Chairman & CEO
Six Apart

P.S. You can follow SAY Media on Twitter at @saymediainc or like us and join the conversation on Facebook.

Thinking About Where to Spend Your Money in Social Media?

2010-09-13T22:39:03Z

Is your company active in social media? Then you’re probably asking yourself where to allocate your budget: to paid media or earned media - or some combination of both. If this is on your mind, we hope you’ll join us at the OMMA Global conference in NYC on September 27th for a panel discussion entitled, Is Your Budget Being Well Spent in Social?

David Tokheim, EVP & GM of Six Apart Media, will weigh in on the discussion, joining panelists from Deep Focus, Catalyst, Bling Media and Rey Interactive. Tokheim will share his insights on how to decide where dollars should be spent and will delve into the role of the media team in a world where not all advertising is paid.

Come, listen, get some advice, and see how to apply this paradigm shift to your own business and budgets. For more information go to: http://www.mediapost.com/events/?/showID/OMMAGlobal.10.NYC

BlogWorld & The Future of Blogging Platforms

2010-09-10T16:42:12Z

Join us in Las Vegas October 14th-16th for BlogWorld & New Media Expo, the world’s largest New Media event, and take advantage of our special Promotional Code SIXAPART20 to receive a 20% discount!

You’ll learn about content creation, distribution and monetization strategies, as well as step-by-step techniques, and the most productive, bleeding-edge tools—all from the most successful bloggers, social media pros, podcasters and Internet TV and radio broadcasters.

Not to be missed: our own Michael Sippey, Vice President of Corporate Development, will discuss The Future of Blogging Platforms on October 15th 4:00-5:00PM.

For more information: www.BlogWorldExpo.com

Announcing: TypePad Conversations

2010-05-12T10:00:02Z

We launched Six Apart Media just two years ago and can you believe that last month Six Apart Media reached over 42% of all US Internet users*, placing us #1 in blogs and #2 only to Facebook in the Conversational Media category?!

Marketers realize that engaging these influencers is an important part of any brand building campaign and our goal is to help them do so in authentic, scalable, and effective ways. In the past, marketers could only reach bloggers and their audiences through banners or through traditional promotional integration with a handful of sites. Today, with the launch of TypePad Conversations, we aim to change that.

What Is It?

At its core, TypePad Conversations is about powering discussions across a large set of bloggers and their audiences through provocative questions. We ask these questions to millions of bloggers and their readers, sparking conversations across a range of topics. You can join in the discussion here!

If you have ever been to an industry conference like iMedia, E3, Ad Tech, ShowWest, you have experienced a form of sponsored conversation. We are taking that principle online and allowing brands to join in the conversation, and as with those conferences, TypePad Conversations helps brands sponsor discussions without controlling them.

Participating in the conversation is strictly voluntary and we don't pay bloggers to post. If you are a member of the Six Apart Ad Program - open to bloggers on all platforms -- you will share revenue from impressions generated from the advertising that accompanies TypePad Conversations.

Like Facebook's engagement ads and Twitter's Sponsored Tweets, TypePad Conversations is about finding the right balance between the brand's desire to participate in the conversation, the publisher's desire to drive traffic to its site, and the reader's desire to engage with great content.

Nothing like this has existed for blogs before today.

How It Works

We work with leading voices in a category, such as Women's Lifestyle, to create questions that are syndicated to influential bloggers.

Bloggers post their answers on their blogs and inspire their audience to participate. Readers invite people in their social networks to join in by sharing their answers on Twitter and Facebook.

Answers from all participating blogs are aggregated at conversations.typepad.com with the best featured in the "Awesome Bar," a branded content module that appears below the original post on each participating blogger's site.

The best way to understand how this all works is to join the conversation on some of our amazing publisher sites like Betty Confidential, Geekweek, and Jessica Gottlieb.

We are very pleased to be partnering with Sprint and their 4G campaign as the first sponsor of TypePad Conversations. Sprint has been fantastic to work with and we are grateful especially to Betsy Paynter, Sara Devine, Stephanie Wilroy, Jim Clark and Rich Pesce who said:

"TypePad Conversations are a unique way for us to avoid banner fatigue and organically reach highly engaged audiences."

If you are a marketer who'd like to participate, please reach out.

I would like to thank the inspired team at Six Apart that has put countless hours of blood, sweat, tears and magic into the progress we have made over the last two years.

I look forward to seeing you join the conversation!

David Tokheim, EVP Six Apart Media

* comScore, April 2010

What Facebook's Like means for publishers

2010-05-03T22:44:17Z

Last week Facebook announced a new version of the “Like” button that gives marketers and publishers the ability to embed a content-sharing button on their websites. Users can now signal the content they like on the Internet via their Facebook News Feed with a single click.

As we work on ways to help our clients distribute conversations around their brands across the web, Facebook “Like” will be an exciting and effective way to amplify those conversations.

The “Like” button allows publishers and marketers the ability to deliver a compelling social web experience on branded sites without the design constraints of a Facebook fan page. Just adding the Facebook “Like” button to your website or blog integrates it with Facebook.

Typing your company or product name into the Facebook search bar will display the site to which you’ve added the “Like” button. In short: ANY web page can now take the place of a Facebook fan page.

Most importantly, fans of your brand will get a consistent experience no matter where it’s accessed. Our powerful publishing and community solutions now have the ability to behave just like Facebook fan pages, leveraging the network for each engagement. And that is great news for everyone.

As we noted last week Six Apart was chosen by Facebook as an official launch partner for this release. Stay tuned for more announcements from Six Apart on how we can help you leverage social media as part of our conversational marketing platform.

Six Apart Likes Facebook's Open Graph

2010-04-22T23:31:45Z

Facebook’s announcement on the Open Graph at the F8

conference caused quite a stir yesterday.

Mark Zuckerberg described this as a technology that pulls together all the different social networks to create a web "that is smarter, more social, more personalized and more semantically aware."

As more and more content pours onto the web our ability to efficiently navigate it becomes increasingly important. Facebook’s assertion is that you are going to be more interested in the things your friends, and others you are connected to, are interested in. We think they are bang on.

Blogging is a great networking tool that allows you to build a community around your passion, hobby or business and we’ve been building features to help customers drive community and link it into social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Six Apart's focus on community and social media resulted in Facebook selecting TypePad as an official launch partner for this announcement. Today we released Facebook “Like” to members of our beta team for testing and feedback. We have already seen some great integrations as well as a ton of positive feedback on the Everything TypePad blog.

This move by Facebook brings endless possibilities. We'd love to get your thoughts on how you think it will impact blogging.

Join Six Apart Product Manager Matt Jacobs at School for the Visual Arts Presentation

2010-03-10T01:07:51Z

Matt Jacobs, Product Manager and Designer extraordinaire, will speak at a School for the Visual Arts (SVA) program titled “The Tablet” on Wednesday, March 10 at 6:30 pm . Matt will join the Design Director for the New York Times, Khoi Vinh, and Sophie Kleber, Experience Lead, HUGE, in discussing how readers’ use of a tablet to consume content frames the user experience, and how interaction designers need to consider grid, typography and behavior in a new way. For more information and to RSVP, please visit the school’s site.

On the Speaking Circuit, continued

2010-02-04T01:08:21Z

As we mentioned recently, Carla Bourque, Six Apart Sales and Biz Dev VP, participated on a panel at OMMA Social here in San Francisco last week. If you missed the event, you can read about it in moderator David Berkowitz’s Social Media Insider column on MediaPost. David asked his panelists to respond in writing to some of the bigger questions that came up during the panel, and the abridged answers are in the MediaPost column, while the extended version is on David's blog, Inside the Marketer’s Studio. Carla offers some valuable insights on some of the conundrums surrounding social media measurement (Full disclosure: David is a Six Apart customer, using TypePad for his popular blog.).

Looking ahead to March, Leah Culver, Six Apart product expert and co-founder of Pownce, will moderate a panel at South by Southwest (SXSW) titled Web Framework Battle Royale. Exact date is tbd. Wear your armor and prepare to be educated and entertained.

For you Django lovers out there, Six Apart New York will host Django Hack Night next Thursday night, February 11, in our offices in the Flatiron district. Bring your project with you and be prepared to show and tell at the end of the evening.

Catch Us on the Social Media Speaking Circuit

2010-01-19T21:05:11Z

We'll be speaking at several conferences over the coming months, and hope that any customers, partners or friends will be sure to say hello if you are attending any of these. As you will see, a common theme is the value of social publishing to marketers and brands, and the importance of measuring that value. We'll share our experience and knowledge with others who are embarking on social media for the first time or simply trying to understand how to measure it.

First up is Carla Bourque, VP of Strategic Partnerships, who will speak on the topic "Measuring Social Media: How to Connect Metrics to Objectives" at OMMA Social on Tuesday, January 26th at the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco.

Next, our GM and EVP of Six Apart Media, David Tokheim, will speak about the role blogs and social publishing play in marketers' social media strategy at The Social Graph Clinic, scheduled for Friday, January 29 at New York University's Stern School.

In April, Richard Rocca, Publisher and VP of Sales, will moderate a panel at OMMA Global entitled Making Social REALLY Work For Your Brand. This event takes place March 17 & 18 in San Francisco.

We'll keep you posted on our sundry speaking plans throughout the year, and we do hope to see you at one or two of them.

Happy Holidays from Six Apart

2009-12-23T00:51:30Z

Our best wishes for a peaceful and happy holiday season - and new year - from the team at Six Apart.

Six Apart Media, TypePad Micro, and AVATAR

2009-11-18T05:09:00Z

It’s only been a year and a half since our launch of Six Apart Media and I’m happy to report we’ve made a lot of progress since then. Six Apart Media has the dual mission to help bloggers on all platforms earn more advertising revenue and to provide brand marketers access to a growing audience of bloggers and blog readers. Today Six Apart Media reaches over 193 million people around the world and 67 million US every month (according to comScore) -- that’s bigger than most social networks, blog services, and social media ad networks.

Beyond just reach, our focus has been on creating really compelling, unique and authentic ways for brands to engage with communities online. In a way, we’ve been doing this for a long time since many brands have used their TypePad or Movable Type blog as their first social media outpost. Today we offer many other engagement products that tap into our platform, including blog communities, custom themes, widgets, and conversation starters, for brands like HP, Cisco, Nature Made, Best Buy, Apple and Microsoft.

With the launch of the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion in October, our Six Apart Media Services team has been building great conversational media hubs, such as TweetZone, built for Sprint in partnership with Federated Media. We believe that social media campaigns will increasingly include creative “hub” sites that incorporate blogs, microblogs, and social networks to engage a community of bloggers and brand advocates.

With the launch of TypePad Micro yesterday we opened up a new way for brands to engage communities with social content, and we are pleased to announce our first marketing partner for TypePad Micro: AVATAR.

AVATAR on TypePad

In partnership with Twentieth Century Fox we are introducing the official online community on TypePad, incorporating both an official blog and a TypePad Motion microblogging community. We will be pulling in official AVATAR content from other sites, like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, as well as featuring exclusive content from Avatar such as behind-the-scenes videos.

And now with TypePad Micro we are doing something new: anyone can have his or her own exclusive AVATAR-themed microblog. With a TypePad Micro blog, fans can post notes, photos, and videos about AVATAR, “follow” each other, and easily share text, photos, and videos across their Twitter or Facebook networks.

AVATAR is one of the most anticipated films of the year and passionate AVATAR fans can join the community at avatar.typepad.com today, one month before the premier of Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron’s epic adventure on December 18.

We think this is a fantastic partnership and Jeffrey Godsick, Twentieth Century Fox’s executive VP of marketing, puts it this way: “This is a perfect match for us: Just as AVATAR is a revolutionary moviegoing experience, TypePad is revolutionizing social media. Members of the community will get the latest AVATAR news, see exclusive movie-related content, and participate in movie-related activities. We’re pleased to have a central online place where AVATAR fans can connect and share their excitement for the film with each other - and with their friends on other social sites like Facebook and Twitter.” Thanks Jeffrey - well said!

I am personally really excited about this. I’ve been a huge sci-fi fan my whole life (shocking admission, I know) as well as a James Cameron fan. He has made some fantastic epics that create and define entire new genres of films - and he seems to be on the verge of doing it again. We are thrilled to be working with AVATAR on this great community effort and can’t wait to see the film!

Announcing the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion

2009-10-01T06:37:17Z

It was almost 8 years ago today that Ben and Mena Trott released Movable Type and helped spark the blogging explosion that followed. Before that time, personal web publishing was largely difficult and expensive, but with MT and the great software and services that followed from Six Apart and others, web publishing became much more accessible and, as a result, social. Today we are announcing some major steps in Six Apart’s continuing mission to make web publishing more accessible and social: the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion, a new open-source software social application.

The TypePad Platform

In 2003, Six Apart launched TypePad, which quickly became and remains the leading premium hosted blogging service. According to comScore, Six Apart is the leader in the blog category in the US and reaches over 183M unique visitors per month around the world - that’s bigger than MySpace - and TypePad is the cornerstone of Six Apart’s hosted services.

In the last year we’ve rebuilt TypePad from the ground up and introduced social networking features such as profiles, following, microblogging, and status updates to our bloggers. We've invested in making TypePad the most secure, stable, scalable and social blogging platform, but until now the only way to use it was through TypePad.com. Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of the TypePad Platform, where any developer, blogger, publisher, or corporation can use the TypePad “cloud” through our open APIs.

Cloud services didn’t exist in 2001 the way they do today, but now services from Amazon and others make building and launching new web sites much easier and less expensive by providing infrastructure level “cloud” services. Users of Flickr, Facebook and Twitter have transformed the internet by sharing their media and building relationships online, in part because of the flexibility of experiences that those platforms' API have enabled.

We hope to take cloud computing a step further with the TypePad Platform with this “smart cloud” service - combining the flexibility of infrastructure-focused services with the building blocks of our social application platform. Our platform enables developers to use structured object, like blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups, and tags, to quickly and inexpensively build next generation social applications on a reliable, secure, and scalable platform.

That all may be a bit too much jargon, I realize, so the bottom line is this: cloud services are transforming how web sites and social applications are being built, and we want to help move this trend forward by opening up TypePad’s APIs. We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.

For larger publishers and Internet businesses, we see the TypePad Platform as new way to incorporate blogs and social networking into their sites - offering an alternative to completely local software solutions or completely hosted SaaS solutions. With the TypePad Platform, publishers can use the presentation layer and templates of their choice - be it via MT, PHP, Django, Java, etc. - while not having to install and support an expensive back end.

For personal bloggers and TypePad users, opening up our APIs means that TypePad will be built into applications that will help the bloggers and their readers, paving the way for more applications that enhance TypePad functionality. For our larger TypePad customers it opens up a large set of possibilities about how they can integrate their TypePad blogs into their existing web sites. For our Movable Type and Six Apart Services clients, this opens up many more ways that TypePad can be used in conjunction with, rather than an alternative to, Movable Type or other installed blogging platforms.

The TypePad Developer Program

To help folks get started using the TypePad Platform, we’ve launched the TypePad Developer Program to provide developers with a free beta version, or Developer Preview, of the TypePad API, available today. Commercial versions of the TypePad Platform will come later, but the TypePad API for developers is free. Developers will find documentation, a forum, mailing list and group where they can get their questions answered quickly at developer.typepad.com.

TypePad Motion

To show what the TypePad Platform can do, today we are announcing and open sourcing TypePad Motion as the inaugural open source application built by Six Apart for the TypePad platform. Typepad Motion is a microblogging app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community, It’s written in Python using the Django framework, making it extremely easy to build and customize. It’s a great example of how developers can use TypePad for the heavy lifting without sacrificing the flexibility and control of an entirely separate presentation layer, like Django, to maintain templates and build pages.

A TypePad Motion site is a place where members come together to share notes, files, photos, videos and audio with others and featured users can aggregate all of their activity around the web onto the TypePad Motion site, keeping their fans or followers up-to-date on their activities. Several celebrities have integrated TypePad Motion sites into their branded websites, such as Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, Heroes) and Ryan Star.

For more information about TypePad Motion, please visit typepad.com/go/motion.

This opens up a new chapter for TypePad and Six Apart, and it’s just a start. The TypePad Platform is new and now primarily for developers who wish to preview and test the service. We’d love your feedback. It is Six Apart’s continuing mission to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market while increasing the capability and scalability in building social applications. We’re hoping to make web publishing even more accessible and social and we hope you will join us.