If true, this would be a major win for Google – judging from Fitzpatrick’s Wikipedia page, he’s a pretty clever and productive guy.  And Fitzpatrick’s own post on brad’s life explains that he is indeed departing from Six Apart, and continues, “Yes, I’m bored, but that boredom isn’t SixApart’s fault.  I’ve been doing this whole LiveJournal thing for about 9 years now. . . .  I just need a change.”

It’s where he’s going that remains unknown, at least on official terms.  Valleywag’s Owen Thomas has it on good authority that the LiveJournal founder will wind up at the Googleplex, but those words have yet to come from Fitzpatrick’s fingers or Google’s corporate mouth.

On the other hand, it seems that Fitzpatrick may have intentionally ignored the subject.  Around 240 comments follow Fitzpatrick’s announcement, and there’s quite a lot of speculation (and well-wishing) among them if you’ve got some extra time on your hands.

Don’t worry too much about the heavy reading, though – if Fitzpatrick joins Google, we’ll surely hear all about it.  This is one guy who’s not likely to be turned down due to Mountain View’s hiring cutbacks.

According to Liz Gannes at GigaOM, Rojo was struggling to raise funding and attract an online audience. In May, the online feed reader was pulling in only 100,000 visitors per month.

It appears though, that the technology and the talent behind it were of unique interest to SixApart. Rojo.com will stay online, according SixApart CEO Barak Berkowitz, who also plans to use Rojo code in other products.
Berkowitz will be taking on Rojo senior executives Chris Alden and Aaron Emigh at the company as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type, and executive vice president and general manager of core technologies, respectively.

You may know both new SixApart executives from other venues. Alden is cofounder and CEO of Red Herring Communications, while Emigh was formerly the CEO of CommerceFlow.

“We are very pleased that Chris and Aaron are joining us,” said Berkowitz. “They bring outstanding experience and knowledge that will benefit all of our users, including the millions of those using TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox.”

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Mobile is a free application for S60 smartphone that enables users to post photos and entries to their TypePad blogs and photo albums. See here for more on this cool app!

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SixApart Issues Uncensored Apology

The trouble began after Pincus detailed a personal experience with a Harvard Business School rival and confessed school election cheat Murry Gunty. Soon after Pincus’ tale, he received a note from TypePad claiming that use of Murry Gunty’s full name in his personal story was a violation of Gunty’s privacy as well as the company’s terms of service. The mandate gave Pincus 48 hours to edit out Gunty’s surname.

Pincus posted the notice in a subsequent entry, raising concerns and questions about censorship. A short time later, SixApart CEO Barak Berkowitz made his apologies.

From Berkowitz’ email:

Berkowitz’ remarks are followed in the comments section by SixApart customer service and business operations veep Doug Bryan. Bryan relates that the only time the company would interfere with blog content is if a court order demanded it or if there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even then, bloggers are given the opportunity to remedy the problem before action is taken.

“In this particular situation,” Bryan responds, “the Six Apart employee who initiated the request to you was filling in for our normal TOS person who is out on maturity [sic] leave. They simply made a mistake and completely misread the situation. Your post is not in violation with TypePad terms of service.”

I was put on maturity leave once, when I tried to hit on my babysitter. “Come back when you’re older,” she said.

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If he or the SixApart-employed author of a letter demanding the removal of a man’s last name from Pincus’ blog post had gone to journalism school, they’d both have known that in countries where freedom of the press is Constitutionally assured, that using Murry Gunty’s full name is on the list of acceptable practices.

In fact, he can use it as often as he likes. Murry Gunty, Murry Gunty, Murry Gunty, Murry Gunty. Yes, he can say anything he likes about Murry Gunty, as long as it’s a matter of public record, all the way down to his home address, and as long as it is true.

The name Murry Gunty, if there is a birth certificate, a Social Security card, or driver’s license is a matter of public record, whether Murry Gunty is a public figure or not. Printing Murry Gunty’s address would then become a matter of ethics, nothing more, which was the topic of Pincus’ original post about Murry Gunty.

Pincus didn’t print Murry Gunty’s address or contact information, nor did he tap a phone call or examine Murry Gunty’s email records. He simply retold a true story about a young man who cheated in an Ivy League business school election. The story was first told by Murry Gunty himself, in the school newspaper along with an apology.

It was later picked up by the Wall Street Journal, not because minor college club scandals are newsworthy, but because graduates of Harvard Business School go on to become Masters of the Corporate Universe, and Murry Gunty becomes the fodder for a fine discussion on Harvard’s stance on ethical business practices.

But that’s a whole other matter. The issue at hand is whether or not is it ethical, or sensible, for Typepad to attempt to censor a well known blogger after misinterpreting the company’s own terms of service. It is also important to make clear under what parameters a journalist (at the end of the day a blogger is a brand of journalist, with or without the proper training) operates.

From the SixApart letter:

Feedster founder and Ookles-promiser Scott Johnson examined Typepad’s terms of service on his blog. It doesn’t say anything about using a person’s full name, not even Mr. Gunty’s. It does mention defamation, which only applies if a statement is untrue. It also mentions contact information like phone numbers and addresses, neither of which Mr. Pincus published. Since Pincus is not in apparent violation of the ToS, was it that SixApart just didn’t want him talking about Murry Gunty?

In answer to Mr. Pincus’ question about whether a company has a legal right to stop the publication of a damning story about Murry Gunty, well, as a hosted service, they can dictate their terms of service as they see fit, as long as the story is published through their service. But it could be mighty stupid to censor a blogger. It just doesn’t look good.

If this were a court of law (I’m not a lawyer), and if Mr. Gunty wished to sue you for defamation, or just because he didn’t like what you wrote, his case would get nowhere because of the freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution. If it’s true, then it’s fair game.

And remember, matters of opinion cannot be argued as true or untrue. For example, when you said, “Murry was one of those annoying kids that was hated by his peers and loved by his bosses, also called suckups,” that is a matter of opinion, and is protected speech.

Just like I can say, “I think SixApart was phenomenally stupid if they tried to censor a blogger.” That’s just my opinion and I’m allowed to say it.

It has been over 48 hours since Pincus received the demand to remove Murry Gunty’s last name, and the post still remains.

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The nurse-in BreastfeedingIsNormal.org, a lactivist (their term, not mine) organization promoting healthy alternatives to the formula use. Though the organization reports thousands of letters being sent to LiveJournal to change their policy, Valleywag reports they were only able to get three breast-baring mothers to show for the nurse-in.

The saga begins mommy-bloggers posted images of breastfeeding on their blogs. LiveJournal suspended users displaying the 100×100 pixel icons that were deemed “inappropriate.” The debate escalated to a discussion of areola color, whether real or bottle nipples were okay to show on television, and what exactly can be considered “sexually explicit.”

After asking for clarification of the site’s policy regarding what constituted sexual explicit material, LiveJournal changed the wording to include “nudity.”

From BreastFeedingIsNormal.org’s press release:

ProMom.org has a picture gallery of banned breastfeeding icons on the site. Some of the images come with captions like “suck this,” “LiveJournal: Where Areola Size Matters,” and “Feeding our babies with our breasts since time began.”

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Contrary to defining blogs as a technology or platform, instead Dash described a blog as “a way to connect.”

Ratio of writers to readers in the SixApart network have changed from 1:40 to about 1:1000 for blogs that are “public facing.”

Two thirds of the users on LiveJournal are female. “A haven for those who want to communicate in a way that’s private and controlled.” On LJ, it’s more like 1:6 or 1:8 of writers to readers.

“You might read 1000 feeds…but you don’t have 1000 friends.”

“Real influence is not measured in raw numbers. Real influence is related to the number of people who you are connected to who really care about what you think.”

“The New York Times thinks they compete with the Washington Post. The New York Times is not competing with the Washington Post. The New York Times actually competes with recipes from my grandmother. The New York Times competes with information from my friends.”

“There are only a couple of different ways to connect. A person can connect at a really high level with 6-8 people, and at a moderate level with about 150 people.”

The most popular community on LJ is “Oh No They Didn’t” … a community of about 250,000 celebrity gossipwatchers. Most of those people watch this information on their “friends” page — they intersperse this information with information from their friends and family news.

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

Six Apart, whose software is used by corporate names like Amazon, Cisco, eBay, Wal-Mart, the Washington Post, and Yahoo!, announced last week the introduction of TypePad Business Class, a blogging platform intended to make it easier to create internal and external company blogs.

Thanks to a couple of astute blogospheric observers and some email confirmations, it now appears the new TypePad product wasn’t the only iron in the fire.

“I got an email earlier today via Plaxo telling me that John Chaffe from SplashData, makers of Splash Blog, was the new director of mobile at Six Apart,” writes Derrick Oien, president and co-founder of Intercasting Corp.

SplashBlog, which specializes in developing user-friendly software for mobile photoblogging, has been featured recently as a new service for the Treo and other Palm devices, as well as for Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms, according to PalmInfocenter’s Ryan Kairer.

A SplashBlog acquisition fits in with the Six Apart’s goal of simplifying the hosted blogging process. TypePad Business Class is one such streamlined hosted service geared toward companies with high-traffic sites who want to create and manage multiple blogs.

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