Results tagged “sixapart”

One of the most satisfying and fun things I've ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just about the biggest shows in town, and Sippey killed it on the toughest stage around.

As Michael graciously mentions in his own post, the demo wouldn't have been possible without our great developer (and demo god in his own right) Ray Marshall, along with Stephane Delbecque on our team who helped pull the entire effort together. You can watch the whole keynote on Apple's site, or just see a short clip of the TypePad demo for yourself:

But while I'm happy for Michael and the team on such a great demo, it also made me happy to see Michael onstage showing that his knowledge of blogging is second to none. Michael was, along with Peter, one of the people who really inspired me to start blogging, and he's probably under-recognized as a pioneer.

The list of ways he's influenced blogging and our industry are countless: Even the biggest gadget blogs today still make a huge deal out of featuring big-name tech CEOs when they get an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, but Michael interviewed Jeff Bezos for his seminal blog Stating the Obvious twelve years ago. I interviewed Michael for our series on the 10th anniversary of blogging last year, in which Michael talks about creating what was arguably the first link blog, Filtered for Purity, ten years ago. And of course, Mena mentioned Michael's joining Six Apart back in 2004 as our VP of Products. It's a role he's held ever since.

Add in his influence in efforts like advising the original Pyra team, which created Blogger, and it calls to mind the old chestnut about the Velvet Underground: Not everybody has read Michael Sippey's blog, but everyone who did, started a blog. (And at some point in recent history, it's possible that everyone who did started a blogging company.) Congrats to my friend Michael on putting that experience on display on the biggest stage around.

(And oh yeah, if you're the best in the world at what you do, you can work at Six Apart, too.)

Five years ago, I said I work for Six Apart. At the time, that sort of thing was a big deal, not because of me, but because so few of us who loved blogging could get a job doing what we loved.

Since then, amazingly, it's become downright common to work in the blogging business. I have literally dozens of friends who work on creating tools and technology for blogs, and dozens more who blog for a living as part or all of their job. I even get to work with the best of them, from San Francisco to Paris to Tokyo. And now I can celebrate the company and industry I support in the city that I love, since we have an office in New York City.

As always, I'm immensely proud of working at Six Apart, even more proud to count such amazing coworkers as peers and friends, and proudest of all of what our community of bloggers has accomplished. When I started working at this company, my hopes were that we'd be able to teach more people about blogs, and that we'd be able to build a sustainable, ethical company that gave a bunch of talented people a great place to work. But in retrospect, I find it almost impossible to believe the role we've played in helping blogs become so common that they're taken for granted.

That's not to say it's been easy. At Six Apart, we've made a number of mistakes, and learned from them. We've all been through a lot of stress, both personal and professional. But even after all we've been through, Mena wrote a beautiful post in my honor, and last Friday offered one of the kindest compliments to me that I've ever gotten, recognition in front of all of my coworkers, a group of people whom I hold in the highest esteem.

But one point that she highlighted last week was that all acts of entrepreneurship are really acts of faith. My title these days (though I often cringe when I say it), is "Chief Evangelist". I've always been uncomfortable with the religious implications of it, but I've become comfortable with the fact that it reflects a bit of faith. This goes back to why I started doing this work in the beginning:

So I make tools that help people communicate. Mostly because I love technology, mostly because I love to try and build things and to get other people to think these things are cool, too. And certainly because I'm hoping to impress my friends and family with the end results. But some small, central part of the effort is because I know I'm privileged to be able to talk to anyone in my family at any time. In the span of a few decades, my father went from not being able to even send a letter to his father for a few years to being able to instant message me frequently enough to pester me.

Our letters to each other used to be the documentation of the lives we'd lived, the entirety of our correspondence forming memoirs for those who weren't accomplished or pretentious enough to formally write out a memoir. I think that, among many other functions, this is one of the key roles that personal publishing can play in our lives. Weblogs and other social media document the lives we live and let us connect in ways that are, despite the cliché, genuinely new.

This is more true than ever. I am glad to have stuck with a company, and with blogging, through both points of ceaseless hype and endless criticism. Well past any point of blogging being "cool" to the insular world of tech geeks, blogs have become enough of the fundamental infrastructure of communication to actually become interesting to the world at large.

And of course, I had some personal goals, too. I wanted to work with good friends, with people I know and trust. I wanted to show people that New York City is, and will be, one of the centers for real, hardcore technology innovation and invention. (We're hiring!) I wanted to bring together the worlds of the two things I have always been passionate about, technology and media.

As is likely obvious from our announcements this week, we're close to being all of the things I'd hoped a company like Six Apart might become. In just the past year, we've damn near reinvented the company, with Ben and Mena and our CEO Chris Alden have been leading some brave efforts to do what few have the courage to do: Reimagine a company that's already successful and growing, and picture it honoring its innovative roots in a way that's actually new. We've invented, launched, and promoted more things that make the web better in the past year than at any time since the beginning of the company.

That kind of creative destruction, the willingness to take apart something that's working in order to make it something truly inspiring, is actually even more ambitious than I'd imagined Six Apart being when I'd joined. And it's the reason that, after five years, the milestone for me is that it feels much more like I'm starting a new job than that I've been at one for half a decade. I can't ask for much more than that.

I try to keep my social network as open as possible. Here's the thing -- I'm not talking about web applications that mimic real-world behaviors. I mean the real world. The people I befriend, collaborate with, and share ideas with are not constrained by the companies that they belong to, or the tools they choose to use. That's how I like it.

Case in point? From the outside, it seems like peple come and people go and sometimes, people come back to working at companies. In my experience, it ends up being that those with good ideas end up putting their heads together, regardless of where their butts are sitting.

I was reminded of that recently by reading about the end of Jason Shellen's time at Google. I like this guy Jason -- he's smart and funny, two traits that go a long way. And when he and I both started working with the founders of blogging companies to try and help out on the business side of things, we were the only two people in the world doing that kind of work. It's been five years or so since then, and we've bumped into each other at countless conferences and events and even at each other's offices over the years. One time we went down to crash one of his birthday parties with his family and all their kids. (It's well worth it -- these kids know how to make some heart-wrenchingly sweet signs.)

But if you didn't know us, it probably looked like we've been competitors all these years. Someone who didn't know us would say "man, those guys must hate each other". Being on the inside, you realize that you'd be an idiot to hate the only other person who really understands what you do.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying, I don't care if your paychecks are cut by Larry and Sergey or Ben and Mena or Manny, Moe and Jack if you've got something to contribute. Especially if you've got a vision. And I can't think of a better vision to laud than Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph. It is, appropriately, a plan for opening up social networks; It's not so much a collection of thoughts as it is a manifesto. And two of the most creative, innovative friends I know are both working on it. Brad Fitzpatrick is, of course, not merely a hacker or a creator, but truly an inventor. As long as we all have open access to the things he builds, I'm an admirer and a fan for life. And David Recordon (congrats on that Open Source Award! You didn't even have to write any code!) has already proven he knows how to build momentum on the sort of efforts that would be unimaginably ambitious to so many others.

Now I just hope everybody else who hacks on these things has the same desire to have an open social network, and realizes how intrinsically valuable such a thing can be. And I hope that those who are newer to social media familiarize themselves with the history of social media, where people acted like supportive contributors, collaborators, and even friends. Fingers crossed.

Before I crash for the night, I'd be remiss if I didn't congratulate my incredibly talented and passionate coworkers and thank our unbelievable community. Movable Type 4 is out the door. I think it's the best product launch I've ever been involved in during my career, and I can't wait to see the impressions of it six or twelve months down the road.

People who read this site probably know all about what a blogging platform does; You might be more interested in Why we made MT4 in the first place. (I should get bonus points for the old-school screenshot in that post.)

How could I still give a damn about blogs, about the web, after all day, every day for eight years or so? Well, how could I not? Let me show you what it looks like to work with the most talented, most passionate people in the world.

That video is Mena making the announcement of a surprise trip around the world to Kristen, whose moving essay about reconnecting with her father won her and her friend each a trip to Paris, Tokyo, and San Francisco. As I asked on the sixapart.com site, "Ever change somebody's life?"

I haven't, but I work with a team that has. Mena's even captured an image of what happiness looks like. And while Mena and I are lucky enough to get to sometimes put a face or voice to the work that everyone on our team does, there are dozens of other people who are just as passionate.

I've been both delighted and touched by some of the other posts I've seen recently from my coworkers. Simon had written a brilliant news post on LiveJournal the other day, then stopped to reflect about the experience:

Because most of my coworkers came from the community I don't think they make the distinction between them and us that I think the community at large does. They get affected. Some of the comments users make hurt them. Deeply. Because I'm often on a different timezone to everyone else I've sat on the end of IM with people who can't sleep out of distress.

This is the flipside of The Cluetrain Manifesto that nobody talked about.

...

I'm a geek and a user and a customer and I'm passionate about the things that matter to me. And, amongst many other thing, LJ matters to me. I use it everyday. We use it for work. I feel a burning urge to make it completely awesome. I get defensive about it with other people. When I'm back in England and I'm talking to my (largely LJ using, nay OBSESSED) friends my eyes shine when I talk about it. I really want to finish search now because I've got a really, REALLY cool idea I want to prototype and get signed off which I hope will completely rock everyone's world.

And there's more. Steve is the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold you might have seen at the end of our Six Apart Holiday Movie, explaining the "O RLY" owl on Blogs By Phone. He explains, for all of us, "this is why I'm here:

Today, though... I'm loving on THIS startup. Don't get me wrong, I'm usually loving on this startup, but today it moves me. I love that I work on a product that would move someone to write this, and that I work for a company that would reward such an action with this (those last two links are very much worth clicking on). I know I'll get half a dozen private messages or IMs from people telling me what a fucking cornball I am, but I don't really care. I'm very proud and happy to work here and be part of what Six Apart does, both in terms of innovation and technical achievement, and personal connections and relationships.

I think, just a few months ago, I was burned out on the trappings of Web 2.0 and all that crap. I had wondered for a minute, "Is it the work?" I knew I love the company I work for, the people I work with, and most of all the community we serve. I really feel like LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type, and TypePad kick all kinds of ass. But maybe I had just gotten tired of it?

And what I realized is that the distractions of being around people who weren't like my coworkers, who weren't just regular members of the community, is what was stressing me out. Paying too much attention to pundits and people who don't give a damn about the web, who weren't passionate about this medium, was what had made me dissatisfied. Part of the solution, for me, was presented when I had the chance to be a little physically distant from that environment. As much as I (already!) miss sitting in the office with my fellow Six Aparters, being in New York already feels like a breath of fresh air, or at least differently stale air, when compared to going to lunch South of Market and hearing someone nattering on about podcasting.

But mostly, what I missed was showing people this passion. We had a party the other night with many Six Apart employees in attendance. And I was lucky enough to get the chance to thank them for being not just an inspiration to me in the work that I do, but in making something profound, making something meaningful just like I'd been hoping for. To thank them for having the passion to eat, sleep, and breathe this sometimes thankless and difficult work.

But in addition to helping so many others, they've also blessed me with the ability to share that gratitude with the world in a simple, direct way. I don't know of anybody else outside our company who loves their job and the work they do the way that I do. So, apropos of nothing, on the anniversary of nothing, but just because we had a really good day, thanks to everybody I work with at Six Apart, and to the community that we've all built together.

Also, I just really love that video of the phone call with Kristen.

One of my favorite parts of my job is getting to write posts for some of our dozens of company-run blogs. I'm particularly pleased with two that went up today:

Step Away From Your Computer:

As a lot of people have noted, Vox isn’t just blogging, it’s blogging enhanced by the power of a smart social network. But if your social network doesn’t work when you’re not sitting in front of your computer, your social network doesn’t work.

Vox on the Nokia N93i

That’s a pretty big problem for us — we want everybody to be able to connect and share and blog with the people they care about. So we have been working with our friends at Nokia for a few years to improve the experience. And today, we are extremely excited to announce a huge step forward for Vox, for Nokia, for mobile blogging, and for you actually being able to share and record your life while on the go.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Nokia announced a bunch of sexy new thin phones. But while the press releases and gadget blogs will cover the tech specs of megapixels and memory cards, we think the biggest milestone is that the new Nseries phones will let you connect directly to your personal blog on Vox. Vox is now Nokia’s global partner for blogging and video sharing.

And the one I've been meaning to write for a few weeks, Time Meant "Us", Not "You":

Time made a big splash (and caused a few rolled eyeballs) when they named “You”, the citizens of Web 2.0, as the Person of the Year for 2006 a few weeks ago. But amidst all the congratulations and second-guessing in the blogosphere, one critical point was overlooked:

They should have said “us”.

Because the distinction between Time and the rest of us who blog is imaginary — Time’s writers are bloggers too. And they’ve got a whole bunch of real, honest-to-goodness TypePad blogs, not just some token cobweb-covered corner of their website that’s called a blog. They’re complete with RSS feeds, comments from the community, and tons and tons of regular updates.

Along with my post a few weeks ago about OpenID's growing momentum, I've been really pleased with the quality of posts on that blog. Most people don't know that we maintain over 20 regularly-updated blogs, but I'm hoping in the weeks to come we can help show people all the different things we've been posting.

Remember a few years ago I mentioned that I was moving to San Francisco?
Well, it's time for an update: I'm moving back to New York City!

There's a couple of reasons why, and they nicely mirror the reasons why I moved to California in the first place. At that time, I said:

So, I'm moving to San Francisco to be even more involved in Six Apart. We're doing all this work with developers and partners because there's still another 99.9% of people in the world who haven't heard what weblogs can do for them. I want to be part of spreading that message, and we're going to need help to do it. I'm also moving because I still honestly believe Six Apart makes the best weblog tools in the world, and we're going to be the the company that brings weblogs to a broad audience.

It's been less than three years since then, and literally millions of people have joined the community of bloggers. A lot of my reason for moving in 2004 had to do specifically with Movable Type: it's the product that started our company, and we'd made some first mistakes in communicating about who it was for, what our plan was, and how things were going to evolve. I wasn't sure if we'd be able to get everybody blogging, but I sure as hell wanted to try.

The first sign that things have changed radically is that the idea of people building entire careers on top of blogs went from a hopeful wish to an everyday reality. The best example? Serious Eats. My wife Alaina helped create and launch the site on Movable Type as its General Manager, and the main reason we're moving back to New York is because running this site every day is her job. That blows my mind.

More importantly, Serious Eats a fucking fantastic community, already. I'm just amazed at the breadth of knowledge that the hosts and members on the site have about almost every kind of food. And I could watch Jeffrey Steingarten's insanity every day of the week.

Serious Eats represents the success of the professional blogging community in other ways, too. Back in 2004 when I wrote my post about moving to San Francisco, companies like Apperceptive didn't even exist. Today, they've got a whole staff of smart folks creating blog-powered sites for a living. I love that other people are getting to do something they love for a living, instead of as just a hobby.

But of course, there's still a lot to do. In explaining what I do for a living, or describing all the chances I get to talk about blogging, I'm frankly amazed at the number of people who don't have the faintest idea how blogging can be a great thing. I'm almost equally surprised that after years of talking about this all day every day, it's still exciting to me.

And I've got a lot of things that I feel are my personal obligation to address. There's the basics, like how a blog can make your life better, or make your job easier. But also, people don't know how deeply all of us at Six Apart care about getting new people to blog, to help them connect with people through blogging. Sometimes I think the strangers who attend the random conferences with me have more of an idea what's going on with Six Apart and Movable Type than the "experts" who spend all day reading blogs. That's something I intend to fix -- we haven't forgotten about our original community or taken them for granted, we just needed to talk to these new audiences because nobody else could do it.

There are other challenges: these days, we've got broadcast TV networks producing shows every week that are scaring the shit out of people, thinking that blogging is just "that thing on Dateline where my daughter puts her home address on the web". I think I can help dispel that fear, too. Perhaps more than anything, being outside of San Francisco means I can work on getting a more diverse crowd of people using these tools to make their jobs or their lives better.

That's where I started with this whole thing, trying to find a way to make real connections using my blog. Some of that is habit for me; I told my Vox neighborhood about my move before I posted it here. So I should mention that there was something of an easter egg in my post on leaving New York. I had said:

That's the part I struggle to remember, that I'll be glad to see how the city's evolved in my absence, and that I've already had a wealth of experiences that would last me a lifetime even if I could never return. This is closing a chapter, certainly, but not closing a book, and in the meantime I have what I've had. I worked at the top of the Empire State Building. I got to shake Rudy Giuliani's hand and say thanks. I got to buy the last mango I bought in Manhattan, and all that it entails. I got to watch the hot dog contest and the fireworks on the Fourth of July. I got stuck on the wrong side of the Macy's Parade on Thanksgiving. I walked through a silent Times Square in the middle of a snowstorm and pushed my way past the crowds in the Square on New Year's Eve. I stayed at home a hundred Saturday nights, knowing that there were tons of people having the time of their life out on the town, and didn't regret it for a minute.

The easter egg is that mention of "the last mango I bought in Manhattan". That mango was what I bought in lieu of an engagement ring when I proposed to my wife. A year later (and now, over a year ago!), we got married. And now that commitment is part of what brings me back home. Pretty cool.

One of the most common questions I get from people who know about Six Apart is "What the hell do you actually do there?" These days, that question's easier than ever to answer, but it involves explaining one of the goofiest parts of my job: My title.

You see, these days my business cards describe me as "Chief Evangelist". On the plus side, it's the first time in the history of the company that I've basically only had one job (though I still help out with as much stuff as I can), but on the downside, the title is fucking ridiculous. I hate the word "evangelist" as a description for people who advocate technology not merely because of its religious connotations, but also because it implies a degree of proselytization that I'd like to think I don't participate in. Most of the time, my job is really just simple education.

Unfortunately, there's no better title to describe this kind of work. So, evangelist it is, and the title has stuck. The last time I saw Guy Kawasaki, I made sure to mention that it's his fault I have a title that makes no sense outside of Silicon Valley. Fortunately, it should be a lot more fun the next time I see Guy, which is at the Global Network of Technology Evangelists event next week.

GNoTE is an interesting organization that is just getting started. At its core, it seems to be a group of people who recognize that technology can have a great impact on people's lives, but only if some of us are dedicated to explaining technologies and in helping make them accessible to a wider range of audiences.

If that sounds interesting to you, and you can get to Santa Clara, join us on Monday for GNoTE's inaugural event. (More event details are on Upcoming,) I'm very flattered to be in the company of counterparts from Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, and Sun, among others. As a bonus drinking game, you can take a swig every time the word "evangelist" or some variation thereof is mentioned, and walk out of the place blind stinking drunk!

Hey, how many companies let you make macaca jokes and say whatever stupid thing you want on their official website? Well, my employer does! Check out the podcast that Mena, Byrne, and I recorded, because I think it's far more enjoyable than it really has any reason to be.

I've been told that sometimes I seem frustrated or cynical lately about new web things or Web 2.0 hype, and that's probably because I have been. I grew up with technology and with loving software, and part of the reason why I loved it was because it felt like the people who were creating this stuff when I was a child were convinced that technology was going to change the world, permanently and for the better.

My early experience with blogging was exactly as they pictured it. It had a lasting positive impact on everything for me, from building a career to getting married to starting a whole new life for myself. Almost all of my closest friends are people I met through sharing my ideas or thoughts on my blog, and letting people respond with their own thoughts and ideas.

Five or six or seven years ago, my experiences in blogging were meaningful more often than not. Reading new posts from friends or discovering people who shared my interests felt a lot like the most profound experiences in any media. Being part of blogging felt like seeing one of those few great movies that I can watch over and over without getting tired of, or like a book that I can re-read and always find something new in, or like any of the songs that I can listen to that take me back to the first time that I heard them.

The good old days

But a lot of bloggers who've been doing it for years start to lose that connection. That's why you see people burn out or flame out. And for the most part, I understand how it happens. Despite the fact that my blog is still fun and rewarding, I've had to develop a thicker skin, and that means it's harder to let new people in. After you've been blogging for a number of years, and been through the blog cycle, you might belong to a community, but you've probably stopped being really open to at least some of those meaningful experiences. I think it's somewhat similar to how most people's musical tastes are defined by their early 20s, and seldom change after that point.

So, even though I spend all my time online, I don't have many websites that I care about in the same way I care about the great films, books, and songs that move me. There are some web communitities that I participate in where there's a real emotional connection, but it's almost always in a smaller, private setting. Honestly, I was reticent to share the story of my marriage on my public blog because I was afraid of the reaction from people who didn't care. I'm not surprised that total strangers wouldn't care about my wedding, mind you, but rather I was unwilling to have something so important to me be dismissed by people who were (understandably) uninterested.

Experiencing something important helped me realize that I wanted to share the most important thing in my life with people who had enough connection to me to find it meaningful.

And connecting, communicating, creating, and sharing the things that matter should be a meaningful experience whether it's in old or new media. We seem to have lost a lot of our bigger ambitions for the web, instead settling for doing things simply because we can. I spend all my time being an advocate for blogging and the medium in the best way I know how to make those connections. But it's not my vocation (and avocation) because I think everybody needs more software. It's what I do because it's made my life better and I think this medium can do that for other people too, and I want it to. I want us all to still be that ambitious.

The great parts of blogging still happen every day, but if you've been doing this for a while, it almost seems like it's despite the technology, not because of it. People who are familiar with blogging really seem to think that, from a technology standpoint at least, it's a solved problem. Blogging is not a solved problem.

But when I have met people in person at conferences or events over the last half year, the one post they most often mention that they remember reading on my blog is the one I wrote on the day of my wedding. And on some of the private community sites where I feel like I know everyone who's participating, someone can do something as simple as posting a photo of a loved one along with a story and it can be profound and beautiful expression. It's especially true because in these environments, most people are respectful. The sad truth is, though, that it's hard to elicit that kind of response when I'm not seeing someone face-to-face, because on this site, I've got a different kind of forum. It's one I'm very happy and privileged to have, and I will always try to do justice to that, but sometimes I just want to hang out with my friends. Or even make new friends. But either way, it's about having a real connection.

Making Something Meaningful

If you believe that tools influence content, and I absolutely do, then the most important thing we can do with all this technology is to try to build tools that encourage meaningful expression. In fact, I'd say it's even stronger than that; One of our obligations is to build tools that help people connect with their friends and family in a meaningful way.

That's not to say there isn't room for all the other more practical and prosaic uses for these tools, but rather that it's important to articulate that this is a goal. In thinking about this, I realize it's always kind of been in the back of my mind. It's something that has been with me since I started trying to make this the thing that i do with my life.

The vocabulary I'm using for the idea, describing this as being "meaningful", comes from Linda Stone. She's long had the ability to articulate trends or concepts that we are all living with but don't necessarily have names for. One of the signs of true genius is people who can identify something so profound that it seems obvious in retrospect.

I saw her most recently at Mark Hurst's Gel Conference, but the topic of her talk was very similar to the ETech talk transcribed here. The key point to me is towards the end of Linda's presentation:

Does this product, service, feature, or message enhance and improve our quality of life? Does it help us protect, filter, create a meaningful connection?

It's a simple statement, but it's important. Is this damn thing making my life better? That question's been bouncing around in my head, in one form or another, for a while. I stopped reading feeds. I stopped having my IM client log on automatically when I start my computer in the morning. I've tried to eliminate many of the parts of my day that Lane would describe as making things un-bold.

That's a pretty low bar, though, just getting rid of the stressful things. What about the stuff that I can't wait to do? What are the sites that I'd like to curl up with like they're a good book? There are some things that just feel good to use, like I'm spending my time in a worthwhile way instead of just killing time by clicking.

So, I'm talking about Vox, of course, to some degree. It's the biggest new thing that's being built where I work, so it naturally commands my attention. But as that's still a work in progress, I'm more interested in what we can do with these ideas in general.

The sense of fun, of discovery, or even of explicitly being "meaningful" in the way that Linda has described was referenced implicitly or explicitly by the first posts about Vox from Andre, Mike, Nat, Matt, Heather and others.

But more important than the testaments from the technologically savvy is what I felt in just the first week that people began testing Vox. I found out that the friend that introduced me to my wife went to high school with one of my co-workers I see everyday. I discovered something as simple as a friend whom I don't get to talk to enough likes the same remix of a song (and the same bit) as I do. Later on, I found out that some of the last people I'd ever expect to talk about books with have great recommendations about what I should be reading.

Well, So What?

The (valid) criticism of these kinds of discoveries is that they're trivial, the kind of boring or banal memes that "serious" bloggers like to mock as being the domain of teenagers or stupid people. But the most important things are the things that we arrogantly want to dismiss as trivia. In every aspect of life, the most profound things are so common that if they don't affect someone you love or care about, they can seem meaningless.

What I'd like to see is technology being used in service of helping me share and record those moments. And I'd like to see technology be used to help create those moments. Perhaps even more, though, I'd like to see that measure of being "meaningful" as a metric that's used when evaluating new technologies, instead of just better/faster/cheaper or whatever else we fall back on.

Of course we aren't there yet. This is a starting point for Vox, and it's a nascent idea for most people who work with technology. It's tough to try to articulate a goal that I can't even do justice to. But I do like the idea of aspiring to make people's lives better, and of promoting that goal explicitly instead of just assuming everyone's on the same page. There have been tremendous advances in usability ever since people started articulating the need for addressing user experience explicitly, and this is really just an obvious extension of that work.

Instead of being exhausted spending our days unbodling things, what if there we made places online that we could be excited about? Sites that we'd make the time to remember to go and visit, instead of having to check them off of a list of things to do?

The new checklist

I guess the bottom line is that my own solution for Web 2.0 malaise or New Bubble Backlash is to try to remind myself to evaluate all the novel new sites and gizmos that I see based on a simple measure. It's been less than a year since the Web 2.0 checklist was created. Now, mercifully, the list has gotten much shorter:

Is this meaningful?

I'm moving to San Francisco.

That probably bears some explanation. As I'm sure all of you know, I work for Six Apart, which is based in the Bay Area, and they've been asking me for some time to make the jump to the west coast. But I love New York City, as I may have mentioned before, so this was something that I'd been reluctant to do, and I thought it might be worthwhile to explain how and why my position changed.

I should mention, since I'm sure people will ask, that I do expect to return to New York City, both because it's my home and because I have an obligation to the city I love. More on that in a few days. Today, I want to talk about what's motivated the move.

The past week has been really busy. We announced a new product, clarified the announcement, solicited feedback and did all of those things while dealing with an overwhelming response from thousands of users around the world.

But for me personally, this week was pretty rough. The new licenses and prices for Movable Type have been one of my main projects for the past few weeks and months, though of course we all had a hand in reviewing them. And the botched communications about them is something I feel a lot of personal responsibility for. Making mistakes on an extremely public scale is never fun, and doing it in a community that we've helped give a voice to is even worse. As Clay pointed out, people have an emotional attachment to these tools. To use the requisite automotive analogy, if Six Apart were a shiny new car, I feel like I was the person who put the first dent in it, and then a couple thousand people stood around pointing and saying "It's totalled!"

Inside Six Apart, though, I discovered a lot of very positive things. I found that not only do I have my dream job, I have a place where I can make, well, a pretty big mistake and the response is "This is something we can fix." or "What did you learn?". More importantly, I still work at a place that makes a difference. Though they might be saying "You messed up!", the reality is that thousands of people used tools we gave them and the TrackBack protocol that was invented by our co-founders to say how they felt. And we responded, much faster than I've ever seen any software company respond. I'm sure we'll be responding more.

We also got a lot of stuff right. People have wanted to sell services and products like customization or installation or plugins around Movable Type for a long time, and now they can. Web hosts have wanted to be able to license Movable Type for their users, and now they can. Businesses and end users wanted a simple ticket system where they could submit help requests and get an answer, and now they can. Now the list of people and companies that can benefit from Movable Type doesn't end with Six Apart.

But for me, what matters more is the parts internal to the company. The team members here are the best in the world at what they do, starting right from Ben and Mena themselves. I'm not the sort of person who's prone to breaking down at his desk, but when I finally lost it at some point well past midnight on Friday night, it was Mena herself who was still there, still checking in to make sure we were all okay.

And the development and support teams who saw all their hard work and preparation for this version get overshadowed by the response to the licenses didn't begrudge the business team for one minute. Our international offices chipped in, more than carrying their weight while we scrambled to recover. And our development community and a lot of long-time users were as supportive as they've been since the first day Movable Type launched, representing us better than we were even able to do ourselves, and explaining ideas or even, yes, buying licenses. It's easy to find friends when you're popular, but I found a company and community that stuck with me when things were confusing and screwed up.

So, I'm moving to San Francisco to be even more involved in Six Apart. We're doing all this work with developers and partners because there's still another 99.9% of people in the world who haven't heard what weblogs can do for them. I want to be part of spreading that message, and we're going to need help to do it. I'm also moving because I still honestly believe Six Apart makes the best weblog tools in the world, and we're going to be the the company that brings weblogs to a broad audience. Best of all, I'm glad to have made the decision before all the events of the last week, since nothing confirms a hunch like having it thoroughly tested by circumstance.

I think weblogs have already changed the world a little bit, and that's happened while we're only just getting started. So, thanks to everybody who's supported Six Apart and me, and thanks to everyone in Six Apart for being my motivation to make a public (re)commitment to the company. See you guys at the office.

(And any of you who want to join us in either California, Tokyo, or Paris, get in touch. It's a great place to work.)

A few weeks ago, I had started an entry with the phrase, "Though I work in the weblog industry..." and I had done so mainly as a tongue-in-cheek joke about how seriously the blogosphere takes itself. I was talking to Matt a few days later and he told me he'd pictured me coming up from the weblog coal mines, covered in soot, bringing home the permalinks. But I had time to think about it since then, and to talk to a lot of people about where weblogs are going, not just what they're doing now and what we've done so far. And I realized that, maybe a year from now, there will be a weblog industry, and not just the few scattered groups of friends and colleagues that I've watched building tools and technologies and companies over the years.

And oh, yeah, building great sites, too.

Because that's the part that mattered to me, and still does. The connection. I've had this site for just a bit shy of four years in its current form, with a weblog. And I've mentioned before on this site all of the ways that it's improved my life. But in deciding to leave the familiar industries I'd worked in, which covered IT and computers and technology, of course, but also television and the music industry and print publishing, I did what all of the career counselors advise you to do: I sat down to think not just of what I wanted to do, but why I wanted to do it.

One of the things that I keep coming back to is the importance of communication. I started using computers regularly when I was about 5 years old. At that time, we thought computers were for, you guessed it, computing. Even some of the people who invented the PC itself took 10 or 15 or 20 years to figure out that a personal computer's highest calling was for communication. Not surprisingly, some of the guys I look up to as heros were able to anticipate that communication would be as important as calculating, and they've ended up working in weblogs, too.

There was a more significant reason that I understood the value of communicating through technology, though. I've seen how it can broaden not just people's experiences and lives, but their ambitions. My father first came to the United States forty years ago this fall. When he came here, just before President Johnson signed the immigration laws that radically increased immigration from Asia to the U.S., there were only a few thousand people of Indian descent in the entire country. And my father's village in India had no running water or electricity, let alone a phone. So his arrival here isolated him from everything he'd ever known in a way that I've often told him I could only duplicate if I decided to emigrate to the moon.

But he'd still had the desire to come here for his education and his career, due to having read about the possibilities of life in the United States. Most of the people in his village didn't know such things were possible, and most of the people in his district couldn't have even found out about the opportunities because they were illiterate. The biggest factor limiting the life they tried to live was simply not being aware what their potential truly was.

So I make tools that help people communicate. Mostly because I love technology, mostly because I love to try and build things and to get other people to think these things are cool, too. And certainly because I'm hoping to impress my friends and family with the end results. But some small, central part of the effort is because I know I'm privileged to be able to talk to anyone in my family at any time. In the span of a few decades, my father went from not being able to even send a letter to his father for a few years to being able to instant message me frequently enough to pester me.

Our letters to each other used to be the documentation of the lives we'd lived, the entirety of our correspondence forming memoirs for those who weren't accomplished or pretentious enough to formally write out a memoir. I think that, among many other functions, this is one of the key roles that personal publishing can play in our lives. Weblogs and other social media document the lives we live and let us connect in ways that are, despite the cliché, genuinely new.

As of today, I've got the privilege of working with good friends for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect. And I get to work in the medium I know best, doing work I love. It'd be a dream job by anyone's measure. That the realm we're working in might actually turn out to be important makes it even better than a mere dream.