TypePad, the popular blog platform owned by San Francisco-based SixApart, has become integrated with VOX, allowing TypePad users easier interface with Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.
At D: All Things Digital, the tech conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal in California last month, we interviewed Chris Alden, the CEO of SixApart. The company owns Vox, TypePad, and Movable Type.
He said the migration of big blog-based publishers like the Huffington Post (which uses Movable Type) and other traditional publishers to a blogging CMS has been very positive for the company's growth.
Beet.TV has used TypePad since the beginning and works quite well for us. Chris speaks about the value of the blog platform to publish video. Amen.
SixApart has has made several announcements recently, including the addition of a WordPress plug-in.
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
Video Transcript
Chris Alden: Last year we did a whole bunch of work putting TypePad on a whole new platform. It's basically the platform that we invented when, when we created Vox and now we brought TypePad to that platform. And that makes it a inherently much more social and dynamic platform and those migrations happened last year. What we're doing this year is changing the user interface to take advantage of some of those capabilities and really thinking about how we can (A) improve sort of the classical blogging, the things that you're doing, make it easier to compose and design your blog, but (B) also connect to allow these great community services out there Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest.
Andy Plesser: And video blogging is sort of picking up but where do you see it going and are people, are videographers using blogging effectively, or what are the opportunities do you think?
Chris Alden: I think opportunity for video blogging is great. I mean you know Ze Frank was one of the earlier you know video bloggers, blogged on our platform. There's a whole bunch, you know, being being started virtually every day. I'm a big fan of it and hopefully the tools are getting better and better and better. There's lot of great other enabling technologies that make video publishing easier and easier. And I think there's going to be a lot of money there. I mean there's a lot of money in video advertising offline, you know on television, of course, and I think you're gonna see that start to come as advertisers figure out how to do effective advertising against online video content. Obviously YouTube has moved things dramatically in that direction. So I think the future's very bright for the video blogger. My sister's a video blogger at whateverhollywood.com and I'm a big fan of it and we obviously want to do everything we can to support it.
Is blogging plateauing? Absolutely not. We see blogging growing on all aspects and it's also growing in the way that it's being used. On the microblogging area, obviously you see the fantastic success of Twitter. In some sense a lot of social networking is becoming more blogging-like. On the other end of the spectrum when you asked about publishers. We absolutely see them depending on blogging as a bigger and bigger staple of what they offer and we also see them depending on blogging tools such as movable type for their content management systems. A lot of publishers realize that, you know, in the past where they would have they're sort of blog sites on the side in the rest the sites, you know, over here, they're looking for now integrated unified solutions. So that they can bring this kind of blog, dynamic commenting, and social communities to their entire sites, and I think it's going to be a big part of what publishing is both on the professional level all the way down to the amateur level.
