Six Apart News & Events: May 2007

Last week we added a new cub to the den, as Tracie Lee joined the team at Apperceptive. Tracie is a web designer and artist who has been involved in the industry for over seven years. Her mission is to create sites that are beautifully designed, elegantly built and a joy to use. Tracie recently worked on Planet Billard, which won a 2007 Webby People's Voice Award for Best Personal Website.

Welcome to the crew Tracie! May your days be like all days at Apperceptive, filled to the brim with pixel-perfect comps, a dearth of browser bugs and perl code worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Serious Eats has been honored as part of The Morning News' 2007 Editors’ Awards for Online Excellence:

We hate the way food and cooking have been sold as a separate culture, understood only by the dedicated, replete with stylists and snobby wonks and glamour—but Serious Eats is fun, informed, and fair-minded. And it’s no amateur production: a social network, a content producer to rival Rachael Ray, a video haberdashery of trends in cooking and food. It all smells fishily like a bid for a buyout—but who are we to knock ambition? We can’t blame them for the company they keep; if anything, we award them for producing such high-quality work. We just hope they don’t take themselves too seriously.

We get a lot of customer feedback here. A lot. All of it is incredibly helpful and informative. Much of it also helps affirm that we are doing the right thing for our customers. Here's one that came this week from a new TypePad customer Rick Stilley whose blog is at http://safezonellc.typepad.com/:

"I'm sorry to bother you but I just had to send this. I struggled for three days trying to set up (a popular free service) with its bloated documentation, snarling support (when you could get it), and its avalanche of code. Then I found TypePad. Salvation! Not only was I up and running (with ads) in under 30 minutes I was having fun doing it! Forgive me, I hope my singing didn't bother the rest of the support folks while I typed this out. Oh, yea. About that 30 day free trial...yea, right. Like I'm leaving."

I've taken the name of service out because it's our policy not to denigrate competitive services. Yes, we strive to make our stuff better than any other, but more important, we do everything we can to make it work great for the people who use it. In this instance, we seem to have the mark. Thanks for the feedback, Rick!

Well, in a recent article from Reuters titled "Blogging economists draw cyber-crowds", five of the six economists mentioned indeed use Six Apart's tools - four are on TypePad, the fifth on Movable Type. They've voted with their pocketbooks.

Seriously, it's great to read about customers succeeding with their blogs. Mentioned in the article are:

"(Dani Rodrik), the professor of international political economy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, started his blog in April at http://rodrik.typepad.com/."

"Daniel Drezner, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He blogs on global political economics at http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/."

"The Big Picture (http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/) following the market impact of everything from the Federal Reserve to housing."

"Brad DeLong, who teaches economics at the University of California at Berkeley (who) writes regularly at http://delong.typepad.com/."

"Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon, writes Economist's View at http://economistsview.typepad.com/."

So why are these economists blogging?

"It's a way for me to keep a voice in the conversation," Drezner said, adding that blogging has helped raise his profile. "The New York Times Op-ed page now returns my phone calls."

That must help make the dismal science a bit more sunny.

Technorati : Blogging, Reuters, Six Apart

In 2006 we dedicated ourselves to helping to move business blogging from being a cutting-edge technology to being part of every company’s communications plan. Just by looking at the numbers from the first few months of 2007, there’s no question that we have made remarkable progress, thanks to the help of our community and our incredible partners.

Take a look at just a few of the many highly regarded companies and institutions that have become Six Apart customers just this year:

• GlaxoSmithKline
• Johnson & Johnson
• PriceWaterhouse Coopers
• Oracle
• Weather Channel
• CondeNast
• Warner Bros
• Advertising.com
• Penn State
• University of Melbourne
• Grainger
• Accuweather
• LifeTime TV
• The Australian Broadcasting Company
• Fiji Waters
• ClubMom
• Bell Canada
• BabyCenter

And the list goes on and on, and when you add these to the multitudes of small businesses and professionals who have installed Movable Type or signed up for TypePad accounts (many of which are featured here), the picture is clear: Businesses have decided that blogging is good. And blogging going mainstream is a sign that these companies are seeing measurable results. So, if you’ve started blogging for you business, or you’ve helped others get started, or you just engage with businesses through their blogs, we wanted to say a quick thank you for helping bring business blogging to a new level.

Today Apperceptive adds a desk, a MacBook, a new monitor and, most importantly, Natalie Podrazik. Natalie is a recent grad who chews up puzzles and spits out elegant solutions in the form of C and Perl code. Pulling work experiences from Microsoft and the Department of Defense, she is a developer with an eye for efficient design, meaningful content, and universal user-friendly accessibility.

The rest of the Apperceptive crew is thrilled that Natalie has arrived. Now that we're at six, we can finally field an Apperceptive hockey team.