5:04 
If you've been following Six Apart for any time at all, you can tell that this is a company founded by bloggers, for bloggers. From inventing a lot of the core technologies of blogging to helping reinvent the medium with cool new announcements, we've always built a lot of great tools and tech.
But if you've been paying attention this year,you've seen the vision for our company and our community going far beyond just the technology platforms and into some important new initiatives like services and media.
Whether it's advertising services or antispam technology, all of this work is based on a few simple ideas:
- We help all bloggers, regardless of which technology platforms you use.
- We're trying to help you succeed, no matter how you define that -- by growing your audience, your influence or just your bottom line.
- We strive to be open in all that we do, to help tell the rest of the world why blogs are a powerful new medium that matters.
With those principles in mind, that brings us to one of our most exciting new announcements of what's already been a milestone year: Blogs.com, the place to find the best in blogs.
Blogs.com combines a few simple, fundamental ideas in a new way that we think harkens back to some of the best parts of the early days of the web. For example, though they get beat up a lot these days, Yahoo was really exciting back when the web was young. There was just something exciting about a human-edited guide to the web, organized by topic. In a similar way, our expert Blogs.com editorial team is assembling Top Ten lists of blogs by category, to help you discover the best sites that you never knew existed. And we're taking your submissions -- so if you are tired of the same old sites getting attention, we especially want to hear from you.
It's like Celebrity Playlists for BlogsA more recent example of a great way to discover cool new stuff is the Celebrity Playlists on the iTunes music store.
Some Recent Top Tens- 10 Blogs Marc Andreessen Reads Every Day
- Alyssa Milano's 10 Favorite Blogs
- Craig Newmark of Craigslist's 10 Favorite Blogs
- Gina Trapani's 10 Favorite Tech, Advice and Techie Advice Blogs
Though sometimes we all read them just to see how inane a celebrity's picks are, or to see if an artist we like shares our tastes, it's impossible to deny that they're often a fascinating way to find new songs. On Blogs.com, celebrity Top Ten lists let some of the best-known bloggers on the web guide us through the sites that influence them, helping dig up some undiscovered gems you might have missed.
Helping you discover the best of blogs also helps fulfill the mission that the team at Rojo had for their popular feed reader back when it launched. Since we acquired Rojo back in 2006, that team has become an integral part of Six Apart,and we've incorporated a lot of what they learned into Blogs.com. As a result,this new site is also going to be the official successor to Rojo.
So, what does it mean to you?All of this fits into our mission at Six Apart of helping people communicate online, by helping bloggers reach a broader audience. We'll be rapidly expanding Blogs.com over time. The site is built on the powerful new Movable Type Pro platform, of course, so we can rapidly add new social and community features based on your feedback. And our team's hard at work rapidly expanding upon the already-extensive directory of blogs on the site.
Which brings us to the question you must be asking: How do I get my site featured on Blogs.com? It's easy! Just add your site on the simple submission form on the site and we'll add your blog to the list of sites we're considering. And we want to work hard to get the word out about the blogs we feature. There is, of course, a Twitter account for the new site, and you'll want to sign up for the Blogs.com newsletter, and pass the link along to your friends or family who may still be skeptical about blogging. It's a good old-fashioned email newsletter offering highlights from Blogs.com, and great way to find highlights from the entire blogosphere, delivered fresh to your inbox every week.
In all, the launch of Blogs.com marks just another milestone in our mission to introduce the world to the power of blogging. Though we've been best known for making the tools to create blogs, we're just as committed at Six Apart to creating the services that help bloggers succeed. Today, we've built the best way on the web to discover what the blogosphere has to offer. We're already excited about the pleasant surprises that keep popping up on Blogs.com -- and we think you will be, too.
TypePad AntiSpam has learned from the platforms that came before: Automattic's team has created a 
The tradition continues today, as we follow up TypePad being the first blogging service to 
I was lucky enough to lead my own Computer Mania Day workshop for the kids, sharing some some of my blogging knowledge, technical expertise, and professional and personal experiences in IT. And we made our own: over 50 girls signed up for their very own Vox accounts! The girls loved customizing their own blogs, and were especially surprised at how easy Vox was to use and navigate. (A few of the girls mentioned it being a lot easier than MySpace.) And they totally loved the Six Apart/Vox schwag, including cute mini-buttons, phone charms, and some very desirable Pink Vox baby tees.
We love social networking sites. We think they let us do great things. So we've spent years inventing the technology that lets any of us fully participate in social networking sites while still having full control of our information on today's personal sites. And today, we call these ultimate personal sites blogs.
But there's a lot more to do: New networks are popping up every day, and we need to invent ways for us to have even more control over the neverending competition for our attention. There are a whole set of new challenges that we couldn't have imagined in the days when personal sites seemed like the simple and obvious way to have a presence online. The chanegs since then, though, highlight an important new opportunity: Personal websites aren't vanishing, they're evolving. We simply won't let something so important and essential to the web disappear. 
What's been amazing to see is that, despite the differences in language, culture, and community in each city, our team has kept some common traits that seem to be universal. There are some serious geeks in every office, hacking on the latest technology, and they work alongside amazingly talented business people, passionate designers, and of course dedicated bloggers. Every office also seems to feature a few multi-lingual superstars who speak two or three or four of the languages that we do business in.
You don't have to take our word for it -- you can see for yourself on our various sites:
The core of the Six Apart Services team comes to us from 
That brings up an important point about our advertising program: We have a unique understanding of how blogging works, and that makes us a better partner for advertisers, too. You can read exactly 
