Part of the deal includes Six Apart KK gaining responsibility for the Movable Type service, a move that puzzled some members.

When asked about how the change impacts Movable Type users, Andrew Anker, EVP of Corporate Development at Six Apart responded in the post’s comments:

As far as Infocom’s interest, the acquisition increases their foothold in the social media industry.  The idea is with the increased use of Facebook and Twitter, owning a blogging platform will allow them to improve and increase their connection to these incredibly-popular social media services.

Image courtesy of Movable Type

Food for thought:  Six Apart KK is located in Japan as is their new owner, Infocom.  If the trend continues, Japan will soon become a major, major player in social media — at least in regards to content creation.

The announcement claims SAY Media has an audience of 73 million social techies, 25.5 million moms, and 34 million sports enthusiasts. "Overall, SAY Media’s total audience will rank #1 in Blogs and #2 in Conversational Media, second only to Facebook," the company says. 

CEO Matt Sanchez (who has been CEO of VideoEgg) says, "Media has fundamentally changed and the new models can’t be ignored. Content consumption patterns are being driven by social connections and new types of content creators and aggregators from Huffington Post to Perez Hilton to Angry Birds have built passionate audiences and grown strong media businesses out of the change. SAY Media is a media company designed to meet these new challenges and help advertisers find systemic ways to garner attention."

"SAY Media continues Six Apart’s mission to make passionate creators successful," says Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott. "Whether on TypePad or another platform, developing a game or an application, the company will empower people to create great content and make money doing it. This acquisition marks a new beginning as we launch a modern media company centered on the creators, the content, and the audiences that are redefining media."

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed. 

According to Matthew Ingram at GigaOm, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden is stepping down, and Movable Type and TypePad will continue as products.

NaturalPath claims to be the largest green and healthy living network, and tells publishers to "capture premium and values-driven advertising dollars", while telling advertisers they can engage with over 18 million conscious consumers and align their brands with "leading voices in green and wellness." Six Apart already claims to be the #1 blog property in the U.S., citing comScore data putting it at nearly 90 million sites.

"NaturalPath Media is a valuable addition to the Six Apart Media network and strengthens our ability to help marketers reach highly influential green and healthy living consumers while they are engaging with content and conversations that are important to them," says Six Apart CEO Chris Alden. "By joining the Six Apart Media program NaturalPath Media publishing partners will be able to generate more revenue and increase traffic through our innovative conversational marketing programs which are sponsored by well known brands seeking to build awareness for their sustainability and cause-driven initiatives."

Last month Six Apart launched TypePad Conversations, a feature for blogs, which injects sponsored comments into conversations on the blogs. The company works with what it considers "leading voices" in a given category to come up with questions that are syndicated to "influential" bloggers, who post their answers on their blogs. Dr. Greene.com will be the first Natural Path Media publishing partner to launch TypePad Conversations. Natural Path calls this an integral part of an upcoming ad campaign.

"We’re thrilled to be the first NaturalPath Media blogger to participate in TypePad Conversations," said Cheryl Greene of Dr. Greene.com. "This is a terrific way for us to grow revenue and drive traffic while inspiring our audience to participate in authentic conversations on topics that they are passionate about."

Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

All answers from participating blogs are aggregated in one spot at conversations.typepad.com, and what is deemed "the best" wil be featured below the blogger’s original post.

"If you have ever been to an industry conference like iMedia, E3, Ad Tech, ShowWest, you have experienced a form of sponsored conversation," explains David Tokheim, EVP Six Apart Media. "We are taking that principle online and allowing brands to join in the conversation, and as with those conferences, TypePad Conversations helps brands sponsor discussions without controlling them."

"Participating in the conversation is strictly voluntary and we don’t pay bloggers to post," adds Tokheim. "If you are a member of the Six Apart Ad Program – open to bloggers on all platforms — you will share revenue from impressions generated from the advertising that accompanies TypePad Conversations."

Tokheim compares the sponsored conversations to sponsored tweets on Twitter and Facebook’s engagement ads.

Do you like the idea of TypePad offering sponsored conversations for blogs? Share your thoughts.

"The bottom line is this: cloud services are transforming how web sites and social applications are being built, and we want to help move this trend forward by opening up TypePad’s APIs," says Six Apart Chairman and CEO Chris Alden. "We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube."

Alden says for larger publishers and Internet businesses, they view the TypePad Platform as a new way to incorporate blogs and social networking into their sites. For personal bloggers and TypePad users, they say opening up their APIs means that TypePad will be built into applications that will help them and their readers by paving the way for more apps that enhance the TypePad functionality.

The company also launched the TypePad Developer Program, which gives developers a free beta version  of the TypePad API.

Finally, Six Apart has launched (and open sourced) TypePad Motion, a microblogging app that was evolved from Pownce. Alden says its "extremely easy" to build and customize because it’s written in Python using the Django framework.

"A TypePad Motion site is a place where members come together to share notes, files, photos, videos and audio with others and featured users can aggregate all of their activity around the web onto the TypePad Motion site, keeping their fans or followers up-to-date on their activities," says Alden. "Several celebrities have integrated TypePad Motion sites into their branded websites, such as Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, Heroes) and Ryan Star."

Six Apart views these announcements as a new chapter for the company and for TypePad. More information on the APIs, the developer program, and TypePad Motion can be found here.

"If you’ve already tried out our recently launched commenting service via TypePad Connect, you know that we built in very basic support for OpenID sign in from the start," explains Six Apart’s David Recordon. "We did this because we know that just as the future of traditional media wasn’t a small group of large publishers controlling all of the news, the future of the social web isn’t a small group of large social networks controlling everyone’s identity. Today we’ve made it even easier for anyone to sign in, leave a comment, and have a TypePad Profile (see mine) without having to know their OpenID URL or even what OpenID is."

Basically what this means, is that anytime you read a blog post on any blog (that supports Typepad Connect-powered comments), you can leave a comment using your identity from an account you already have. This is just one way the web is becoming more unified among varying services, and you can expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future.

Recordon says that now any bloggers that are using Typepad Connect powered comments have over half a billion people who can sign in and comment instead of being anonymous. This could significantly reduce the amount of anonymity in the Blogosphere. Not entirely of course, but for all of the people who don’t want to take the time to sign up for an account just to leave a comment will be able to easily make themselves known in another way. This should be good news for people who like to utilize blog comments to increase brand exposure.

- The biggest online social network is the Internet itself.

– Today’s mainstream social networks are like yesterday’s mainstream media.

– Reveal the community you already have.

– Your social network belongs under your control.

– Your community should start with half a billion members.

– The web is in Motion.

"We believe that the right strategy for connecting your blog or site to the world of social networking is not to select one particular social network to hold all the cards, but to connect to all of the powerful and vibrant social networks across the web," says Six Apart Chief Evangelist Anil Dash.

We’ve recently seen other big data portability services come to the forefront like Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. Motion has a similar function, but is open to more services, kind of like Meebo does for instant messaging.

"There’s never been an application like this, which supports the half a billion individual accounts across these services, allowing almost anyone on the web to comment on or favorite your content without having to register to create an account," says Dash.

I think the first of Six Apart’s laws sums it pretty nicely. The Internet is the biggest social network, and we’re just seeing more companies allow the connection between big parts of it, so it all becomes inevitably more connected altogether. It’s going to be an interesting year for this kind of concept.

The Pownce team announced the imminent closure of the service via their blog this week: “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009.”

The Pownce founders and technology are moving across to Six Apart, the company behind blogging platforms Vox, Movable Type and TypePad. Leah Culver and Mike Malone will be joining the engineering team at Six Apart, hoping to continue their vision there.

We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products.

For current users, the team has set up an export function so that Pownce posts can be shifted across to other blogging platforms such as Vox or WordPress.

The adoption of the Pownce team is yet another move is what appears to be a bigger play by Six Apart. Six Apart has also welcomed Kevin Rose (co-founder of Digg, Revision3 and Pownce) and Daniel Burka (who has a history with Digg, Silverorange and Pownce) as advisers.

Six Apart has been a significant player in the social blogging movement since the early days. The transition of the Pownce team and technology across to Six Apart should bode well for further exciting innovations in the blogging and social media space.

Comments

 Leah Culver

There’s no shortage of options, anyway, and Pownce isn’t making the adjustment hard.  "Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function," cofounder Leah Culver explained on the Pownce Blog.  "You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress."  Pownce Pro users can even get a partial refund or free one-year subscription to TypePad Plus.

As for the details of the acquisition, financial terms haven’t been disclosed, but both Culver and Mike Malone, another cofounder, will be joining Six Apart.  Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will act as advisors.

It also appears that an important new social blogging product or service of some sort is already in the works.  Culver wrote, "We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009."

If Compete’s data concerning Pownce’s unique visitor count is at all accurate, at least 180,000 people will probably be quite interested.

"In short, the program as described offers up a TypePad blog, a place in our Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, and a healthy dose of our expertise and insights into helping publishers and bloggers succeed online," explains Anil Dash, Chief Evangelist for Six Apart, makers of MovableType and TypePad.

To me, this symbolizes the idea that blogs are far from dead, despite recent commentary on the contrary. Blogs are more alive than ever, and Six Apart and TypePad are going out of their way to make sure that remains true. As far as the old media vs. New Media debate, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb offers the following wisdom:

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you’re wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington’s recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

Six Apart knows blogging isn’t going anywwhere. "We’re a company founded by bloggers, and we’ve supported online journalism from the beginning," says Dash. "During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we’ve put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence."

A great many indeed. And the company has already seen on overwhelming amount of positive praise based on the program. Dash shares a few responses:

- "Thanks for coming up with such a smart solution to the journalist’s dilemma! Hope we can work something out."

-  "You have no idea how many questions this answers for me that I never even quite understood how to pose."

-  "Dear Six Apart, thanks very much for your kind offer, glad you are getting such a great response. I’ve been thinking about starting my own blog, and this seems like a good and fun way to do it."

The program started as Dash intended to provide it to a few friends that have lost their jobs, but word got out and now hundreds have already signed up to participate in less than a day. It’s always nice to see Internet professionals helping each other out.