WebProNews

Many know Six Apart for its blogging tools like Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox, as well as the LiveJournal service it created and sold. Alden told us Six Apart is fully funded, giving them the groundwork to create an integrated ad platform for blogging.

Part of that groundwork merited a couple of moves. Six Apart will partner with Adify to handle the back-end accounting work on the platform. Fredin said their experience handling services for companies in media and technology looking to build communities of web properties has them ready to back this platform.

Control of the platform makes money in social media, as Alden noted. "It should be able to do the same with blogging," he said.

Six Apart also made an acquisition to support their moves toward becoming this platform. Few outside the web development community may have heard of Apperceptive, a New York-based design house; their client list includes big names like the Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and Condé Nast.

As the partners build the platform and expand the ads selling Six Apart has been doing for a select group of VIP bloggers for the past couple of years, they could become an essential building block for bloggers. Apperceptive's value will be seen in its design, but we're particularly impressed with Adify's abilities.

It takes a certain kind of forward-thinking to look past the content to the actual management of what one hopes to accomplish with blog advertising. Smaller sites may be content with the tools provided by one or more particular vendors, but a bigger network will want more services.

Six Apart hopes to cater to the most influential of those VIP blogging types, those who have formed the proverbial big head which the long tail follows. The pieces look good, and Alden sees opportunities in the bigger blogging spaces like parenting, entertainment, and technology for their platform to thrive.