Tag Archives: Six Apart

TypeLockPick

Asides,

With all the fuss and bother over TypeKey, you’d think it was the end of the world. It’s being called the Patriot Act of Weblogging because it’s an over-the-top reaction to a problem. People are saying they’ll never comment on blogs that require TypeKey. I haven’t seen this much commotion over vaporware since… MT 3. The FAQ tells you everything you could ever want to know about TypeKey, except whether it’s free for commercial use. I think as someone intimately aquainted with many of the technologies surrounding weblogs I can set things straight.

Calm down. There’s no need to worry. You can leave comments like you always have, TypeKey or no Typekey. TypeKey is basically a centralized authentication

It’s just like the old days, when you could comment on anything you wanted without hassle.

(WordPress only accepts trackbacks sent through POST because according to the spec, “TrackBack pings should now be sent using HTTP POST instead of GET. The old behavior is deprecated, and support for GET will be removed in January 2003.” It’s 2004 and Movable Type and TypePad GET trackbacks, so if you’re in a pinch you don’t have to use the trackback post form.)

But what if you don’t care about making people sign on to a centralized system, you just want to keep those odious spammers off your blog? Check back, I’ll have something for you tomorrow.

This is all in good fun, what Tantek would call “pulling pigtails.” I met some SixApart people at SxSW, including Mie and Joi, and they were delightful.

Six Apart and Live Journal

Asides,

I’m a little late to this, but the word is that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. Congrats to the 6A and LJ teams! Big news, however you cut it. However, the question is: what exactly are they buying? LiveJournal has about 5.6 million accounts, but only about 2.4 million of these are active. That’s still pretty nice though, considering I imagine it’s about 24x what Typepad/Movable Type have now. Is it the technology? That’s already open source so they would have access to that anyway, and it’s Perl (which is 6A’s core competency) so I’m sure they could find they way around. (I wonder what will happen to the Open Source project after the dust has settled though?) That leads me to think it must be the people and engineers at LJ that 6A is after. Is this enough to position them against Microsoft and Google, as many have been suggesting?

98.6% of LiveJournal users don’t pay a thing, but that still gives 6A ~93,000 accounts paying $25/year. That revenue will be nice, especially since 6A has so many employees, but I don’t think it’s the coup most people are expecting. Remember the people who invested $10M in Six Apart are expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar business. It’ll be interesting to hear what the official word is on this, if and when an official word comes out. I’m probably missing something obvious. (And where is Yahoo in all of this? They better hurry up and buy someone too.)

Salon Article

Asides

Blogging grows up, not as interesting as it could have been, but a good overview of Six Apart. When I talked to Farhod about two weeks ago I estimated around 15k WordPress blogs. Today the WP blog crawler has over 18,000 in its database. Six months ago the list was small enough to list every WordPress blog on the counter page. Nine months ago you could count the number of WP blogs on your hands. Since I started writing this entry 82 people have downloaded WordPress for free. It’s not where we’re at, it’s where we’re going.