The current issue of The Economist has a generous profile of Mena Trott of Six Apart. If you are into blogging then Six Apart is a familiar name. Its products, Movable Type and Typepad, are popular blogging platforms for “power bloggers” with large audiences. Five years back, Mena Trott with the help of her reclusive husband, Ben Trott, started keeping an online diary that caught on. To their credit, they were able to see the future potential of this. They created the two blogging platforms and an online journal platform, LiveJournal, to enable others to get into the act. Now they have 30m bloggers around the world. Naturally the big guys like Google, with Blogger, and News Corp, with MySpace, have entered the space. But Six Apart continues to push forward in extending the concept of self-publishing to newer audiences. Their recent focus is on people who are not tech savvy and are wary of sharing their life details with strangers. Vox, the new launched product, addresses this segment. TechCrunch has a review of Vox and the alternatives here.
As you must have seen in the footer, I use WordPress, an open source blogging platform. Its community leaders don’t get the same glowing coverage in the mainstream media yet, in many ways, theirs is an even more remarkable story. Some day there will be a successor book to Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine that will tell this story.
In case you haven’t read it, a must-read set of articles on the whole phenomena of blogging is The Economist’s Survey of New Media. In fact this survey goes beyond blogging. It also talks about how journalism is changing, describes podcasting, forecasts radial change in media companies, romanticizes metaverses (like Second Life) and, yes, suggests that we are going through the early phases of a media revolution on the scale of that started by Gutenberg in 1448. The benefits of this revolution include the democratizing effects and global reach; threats include pornography, religious fanaticism and terrorism. If you haven’t read this survey, go ahead and do it now.
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