Blogworld Expo 2008 - Keynote by Anil Dash and Chris Alden of Six Apart

At work, we use Six Apart's Movable Type as our blogging platform. We're very happy with it, so I was excited to hear what these two had to say. They didn't disappoint. In addition to the expected discussions of their company, they talked about where they thought blogging as a social media is going. Here are my notes from their presentation.

• Six Apart is a company of 200 people.
• They recommended we visit blogs.com. I've never seen it until just now as I'm writing this post, so I can't say anything about it one way or another.
• Six Apart Media was just launched trying to help bloggers monetize their sites.

With the preliminary discussion of their company done, they moved on to the meat of their talk. Anil is a broad and emotional thinker. His themes are so expansive and beautiful that notes were difficult to take as I listened. Here's my poor attempt at capturing some of what he said.

Anil Dash
• Bloggers want to connect. Bloggers love the web because it lets us make these connections and share our passions. It’s not about the technology, it’s about making the connections with the other people who care as much about our passions as we do.
• Dollarshort.org (now mena.typepad.com) was one of the first blogs. Anil showed a screen capture or perhaps and archived page of Mena's first post. I wish I could find it, it was quite touching.
• It doesn’t matter what the blogger's affiliation is – MSM or personal, the real question is what are they accomplishing with their blog.
• Anil mentioned how well internal corporate blogging has paid off in GM, Siebel and Boeing.
• Blogging is moving from an activity to an industry.
• Starting in 2007, the majority of Internet users were reading blogs.
• All of the online advertising trends are going up. The media is being transformed, there is almost no barrier to entry now. The power of blogs is the freedom of expression, control of your own site, control of your online identity and management of your advertising. Personal autonomy is key.
• Six Apart is encouraging the discussion of blogging 2.0. What do we, the blogging community, want out of it? Blogging 1.0 was about personal publishing. Blogging 2.0 is about social publishing. It sounded sort of like the merger of Facebook and Blogger, and add to that Vox, Twitter and Tumblr.
• Today’s mainstream social media are like yesterday’s MSM.
• This was particularly exciting to me - Anil discussed the use of OpenID as a way to manage your identity so that your blog is what represents you in the comments on other sites. This breaks down the barriers of registration and allows your participants to bring along their native identity to your site. This is a wonderful concept. I want my identity carried over into the other accounts and I want The Scratching Post to be easily accessible across the network.
• Anil also mentioned Blog It – it will allow you to created content and alert people across a wide variety of platforms. It's another product with which I am unfamiliar.

I really enjoyed this talk, particularly the details they gave about their vision of the future of blogging. OpenID is an idea whose time has come. I work very hard on The Scratching Post and I want it to be my identity. I need to look into this some more.

Chris Alden