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Six Apart is announcing Tuesday night the launch of Movable Type 4.2 (download from CNET) and Movable Type Pro. The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro.

Movable Type Pro will enable "social publishing," which is a fancy way of saying readers of MT blogs will now be able to do much more than just reply to posts in the comments. Readers will get profiles pages with "walls," and the capability to rate other … Read more

Google announced on Friday the release of a number of updates to its Blogger publishing platform--well, sort of. The updates have gone into Blogger in Draft, the service's beta platform, with the expectation that they'll eventually become full features.

The updates will seem a bit humdrum for people who don't use Blogger, but for those who do, it's a set of important baby steps toward shaping the service to fit customer feedback. That's especially important for Google, as this is one niche of the Web where Mountain View doesn't have a huge lead: there … Read more

LiveJournal, the blogging platform that was a few years ahead of its time, announced Thursday that it has appointed Matthew Berardo, most recently the senior director of international business and product management at Yahoo, as its vice president and general manager.

Berardo had been at Yahoo for years, seven of which were spent in its London office at Yahoo Europe. A new senior management team has been brought on board along with him, which includes former employees of Expedia, virtual worlds developer Millions Of Us, and telephony start-up Jangl. Berardo will report directly to SUP CEO Andrew Paulson.

Founded in … Read more

This morning, Six Apart unveiled its newest iPhone creation, a very svelte-looking port of Blog It, which the company introduced back in April. The simple tool lets you write and cross-blog a post or status update to several services at once. The company is hoping people will use it as a home base to manage all their updates. It's also a somewhat early look at some of the features users will be getting in the upcoming native blogging application announced on Monday.

The tool started out as a Facebook app and has since pulled in about 10,000 users. … Read more

Next month, among the slew of third-party apps hitting the iPhone's App Store, blogging tool TypePad will be giving its users a new way to blog on the go. The native application was just announced at Apple's WWDC Monday morning, but I got a sneak peek at it last week. I think it's going to be a lifesaver for bloggers who want to monitor and administrate their blogs while away from a laptop or home PC.

The app will let you write and edit posts on your phone and save them for later, helping people avoid that … Read more

Six Apart is launching a free, semi-open-source filter for blog comment spam.

TypePad AntiSpam is the same antispam technology that's currently built into TypePad, but the company is making it available to all who want it, with no charge and no usage restrictions. The service is in semi-beta: "The code is not beta but the (open source framework around it) is," Six Apart CEO Chris Alden also said.

There will be TypePad AntiSpam plug-ins available for Six Apart's blog platforms, TypePad and Movable Type, as well as for Wordpress blogs.

The TypePad AntiSpam framework is open … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith had quite an opportunity on his hands. He was moderating a panel called "Comparing Social Platforms," featuring five representatives of some of the biggest players on the social Web: Dave Morin of Facebook, Allen Hurff of MySpace, Jessica Alter of Bebo, Patrick Chanezon of Google, and David Recordon of Six Apart. Smith had the chance to be a digital devil's advocate and get a lively debate going.

Why won't Facebook sign on to the OpenSocial standard that Google kick-started? Why hasn't MySpace's developer platform caught on as … Read more

Blogging software company Six Apart has announced a new "social media services" strategy that involves a new satellite office in New York, the acquisition of social-media consulting and development firm Apperceptive, and a new initiative to "provide new advertising, design, implementation, development and site optimization services to bloggers and companies of all sizes."

In other words, the company is moving beyond simply providing software, entering the lucrative business of bringing clients into gear with that whole "Web 2.0" thing that all the cool kids are talking about.

Six Apart, which operates blogging platforms … Read more

Software maker Six Apart has made a "significant" acquisition, according to sources cited by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.

While the purchase may not be large in size, it possibly will mark a strategic shift for the company behind popular blogging platforms TypePad, Movable Type, and Vox, Arrington said, adding that an official announcement about the buy is due in the next few days.

It's anyone's guess which company Six Apart, which recently sold its LiveJournal unit and launched a Facebook application, may have picked up. Arrington's iPod Shuffle bait (that's the prize he says … Read more