One of the blogging worlds best known brands is no longer with news today that SixApart, the company behind MovableType and TypePad, has been acquired by VideoEgg.

Founded in September 2001 by husband and wife team Ben and Mena Trott, SixApart drove the first great growth wave in blogging through its blog content management platform MovableType.

After taking an initial round of funding in 2003, SixApart launched TypePad, a hosted blogging service based on the MovableType code that for many years became the most popular paid/ professional hosted blog service in the market, attracting pro bloggers and media companies alike.

The company continued to expand, acquiring LiveJournal in 2005, then later launching Vox, a social media oriented hosted blogging solution that was meant to compete with the rise of services such as Tumblr and WordPress.com.

A critical mistake in the early history of the company was to force paid licensing on users of MovableType. It was a move I was highly critical of at the time, and it alone created the rise of WordPress, then a rarely used CMS with little interest in the blogging community, and subsequently drove the rise of Automattic. The effect of that move can’t be underestimated in the long term: although SixApart went on to be successful in other areas, its decision to cut off its community in an attempt to raise money was a mistake. A decision in later years to open source MovableType, while welcomed by many, was sadly for the company a case of too little, too late with WordPress having by that time become the defacto standard in self hosted blogging, and most importantly, the platform with the strongest (free) community development.

SixApart did attempt to branch out into new markets, including blog advertising, with mixed results. The rise of social media sites including Facebook saw a switch in the rapid growth in blogging to one of a mature market, and its products suffered at the hands of trendier, and usually free or freemium competitors.

Although the company isn’t going badly today, it’s once greatness has been sadly dwarfed by others.

Under the acquisition, the combined SixApart/ VideoEgg will be known as SAY Media with VideoEgg CEO Matt Sanchez at the helm. Statements from both companies say that they intend to retain MovableType and TypePad, however speculation is rife that at least one service may be sold off.

Regards to the team at SixApart, including the brilliant Anil Dash, Ben and Mena Trott, and the rest of the team. I may not have always been your greatest fan, but there is little doubt that without your contributions to blogging, this great space may not have risen to what it is today without you.

End Of An Era As SixApart Is Acquired By VideoEgg is a post from: The Inquisitr

Six Apart, the Movable Type/Typepad parent company, has announced a “Journalist Bailout Program” for recovering journalists or bloggers looking for a fresh start. Its slogan: “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay the bills.”

The program offers laid off writers a free TypePad Pro blog account (the pay service typically used by professional blogs), along with a free enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program (in which the user keeps revenue from the display ads) and free promotions on Blogs.com. Six Apart will also provide advice on driving traffic and other online publishing-related concerns.

“While we can’t promise it’s going to replace having a full-time writing gig, it gets you up and running with your own site that you can start to benefit from,” the company says. “We’re offering a platform to publish your work and profit from it. A platform that gives you complete control, with no dependence on the whims of a publisher, and no interference from an outside editor.”

Six Apart is offering the package — which it says is a $150 annual value — free to any journalist. It does require you to submit a link to a recent publication with a valid newspaper, magazine, or broadcast journalism organization to qualify. The company says it’s already gotten a “flood of submissions” and is planning to leave the offer open only for a limited amount of time. No specific end date, though, is provided.

You can learn more about the program and how to sign up here.

“Journalist Bailout” Offers Help to Laid Off Writers is a post from: The Inquisitr

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.

One Word For Zemanta: Useful is a post from: The Inquisitr

Michael at TechCrunch notes that TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs and in his testing was superior to Akismet. Mollom is another new service in this space (I covered it for TechCrunch in April).

The two great features about TypePad AntiSpam: it’s open source and it has a killer price: free, unlike the closed source and pay for serious use Akismet. It’s also available for WordPress blogs as well as those powered by SixApart products, immediately delivering SixApart a huge potential market.

It’s great to see competition in antispam products, and it has been long overdue, but times are changing. We are seeing a move away from local comment hosting to services such as Disqus, Sezwho and others, outsourcing spam management along with comment management to other companies. The numbers on paper may be small so far, but the trend away from local comment management is on, and even sites such as Venturebeat are now using Disqus. Notably both Sezwho and Disqus are using Akismet for spam filtering.

So where does this leave Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam? There will always be a corporate need for antispam tools, and ultimately this is where the potential profits in service provision rest. Some bloggers will remain using local commenting systems and they’ll need services like these, however expect those numbers to become a minority within 2-3 years.

TypePad AntiSpam Is Welcomed, But Times Are Changing is a post from: The Inquisitr