Blogging platform and service provider SixApart have announced an 8% cut in its workforce, along with a management pay cut.

The cut amount to 16 employees from a workforce of around 200 people, 90 of whom were employed in the last 12 months. The job cuts are accompanied by a company wide restructure, including the amalgamation of SixApart’s marketing, community, and support groups in a new “genius group;” an increase in staff via internal transfer into SixApart services, the professional services group that caters to commercial customers; and a renewed commitment to SixApart Media, the launched in April blog advertising arm.

CEO Chris Alden said in a post to the SixApart blog that management would be taking a 15% pay cut as part of the restructure.

More details on the SixApart blog here.

(img credit)

Related posts:

1. Buzz Media cuts 20% of workforce
2. SixApart has aquired Pownce, first action is to shut it down
3. Virgin Media cuts 15% of workforce

The offers from both WordPress (WP) and MovableType (MT) are positive steps forward in the evolution of the self hosted blogging platform, but availability doesn’t equate to takeup. Some social networks in the future may well use MT or WP, but the next wave of social networks will NOT be powered by WordPress and MovableType.

The reason is remarkably simple, and the evidence is already apparent. Time.

Time on two fronts. People are becoming time poor and are finding it harder to split their time between competing services. A new wave of social networks based on WP or MT will only add to the noise, and unless there is a compelling reason to join, most will simply ignore these new networks. The move is on to aggregation, not separation. Then there’s the need to maintain separate logins on each install. There are some OpenID solutions for WP and MT, but they are neither commonly installed nor is OpenID yet commonly used. There appears to be no interoperability between installs like Indenti.ca, so each install will be a walled garden of content, unique to the site, but unable to communicate with other installations.

The second time point is administration. The ability to add guest blogs or forums to blogs has been available in various forms for years, but how many installs do we see? A full blown social network is an administrative nightmare for all but large blogs with a lot of money to throw at staff to take care of that side of the business. And even then, is there a compelling business case to be had in administering these installs? Then there’s the real possibility that these social networks will be spam honey pots. Even in 2008, most still face comment spam, imagine dealing with spam across a full social network.

Of those sites who currently run social networks or even forums, how many are truly successful? Mashable is the only blog I can think of in this space who runs a remotely successful social network, and even then, it’s not exactly a hive of activity. TechCrunch runs a forum that at least while I was there was prone to spam and wasn’t heavily used, at least when considering the traffic of the site itself compared with the activity on the forum.

The Ning Solution

The true success story in the hosted social networking space is Ning. The site has 370,000 social networks as of July, but only manages 3.5 million to 4 million page views per month, or roughly 10 visitors per social network. That traffic aside, the selling case between a local MT or WP install vs Ning is strong. On Ning, your login works across every social network on the site, it is fully hosted so you don’t have to worry as much about spam and abuse, it’s tested, and for the basic service it’s completely free. There are plenty of Ning competitors out there as well, so choice isn’t lacking. You can also pay to map the Ning social network to your own domain and to show ads, so the control argument with a self install is negated some what. If your site did have a compelling case for including a social network (and few statically probably do) I don’t see why you wouldn’t sign up with Ning or a similar service.

Conclusion

I don’t want to sound to be too harsh on either WP or MT for these features being available. They are a positive progression in the evolution of blogging, and no doubt that some will seek to add social networking features to their blogs. However, given these features are in the most part already available both externally and within each site (BuddyPress isn’t new), and similar features such as forums are old school but are not widespread, there will be no rush of MT or WP powered social networks. Nor perhaps should there be.

Related posts:

1. Online Social Networks Now Playground for Hackers
2. MTV Networks Acquires Social Project to Accelerate Reach of Flux
3. Porn leaves a bad taste for Ning

Zemanta is a Slovenian blogging tool that automatically suggests contextual photos and links for any post.

Webware describes Zemanta as “a brilliant product for lazy or otherwise time-focused bloggers” and it’s a fair description. The tool is offered either as a plugin for hosted blogs (WordPress and MovableType), as a browser extension (IE and Firefox) or with hosted platforms including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal.

Image by Roebot via Flickr.

The video above walks through what it looks like on a Blogger blog, on a WordPress hosted blog I’m currently seeing a Zemanta box directly below the publish options on the right hand side. The plugin updates every 300 characters automatically, offering a gallery of context and legal pictures I can use on the this post. Below is a list of contextual articles I can place in the post at any time. Below the WordPress post box is a box labeled “links” with suggestions for links that can be inserted into the post base on words in it, for example with this post it’s showing Firefox, LiveJournal, WordPress, Zemanta and others. The tag box also gets contextual suggestions as well.

I’ve only just installed it, and have really got to give it a more serious workout, but my first thoughts: this is a really useful tool and I can see myself using it and even recommending it to others. Not having to dig around for pics (well at least less often), less stuffing around with link insertion, tag reminders, even related articles. My only two negatives: what are they getting out of this (where’s the catch) and secondly, it insists on inserting a Zemanta button at the bottom of every post every time you hit a button, so if you’re half way through you’ve then got to deal with code stuck directly after your last word. It’s easy to delete it prior to posting and ultimately it’s only a small annoyance.

Example of a contextual link below, the Zemanta button that the tool auto inserted, and the laptop picture above from their gallery suggestions.

Related posts:

1. Zemanta adds four platforms, tweaks Reblog service
2. New Word On Firefox 3 Add-Ons
3. Outbrain gets a revenue model, and it’s rather clever