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Six Apart announced last night that it has sold off its free blogging service LiveJournal to Russian Internet company Vox, the blog publishing platform TypePad, and the professional-level blog software product Movable Type. LiveJournal was brought into Six Apart through an acquisition in 2005.

LiveJournal will be run by a new company, LiveJournal Inc., out of San Francisco, but owned by SUP. LiveJournal's seven employees (transfers from Six Apart) are currently working in the Movable Type offices.

What can we expect from the remaining three products at Six Apart? Alden wants his company to focus on building "community and content management systems," not just publishing platforms. This transition is already evident in Movable Type, which has a new (and expensive) add-on called Movable Type Community Services (see story: Six Apart is fixing forums). Among other features, the product lets end users mark other people as friends and track what they're doing. Just like a social network.

The free blogging tool Vox also offers interesting community features, like the capability to define who's in your blog "neighborhood," to make keeping track of your Vox friends easier. It also has a good system for restricting who can see your personal posts.

That leaves TypePad, the paid blogging service that, while capable, isn't currently a shining star of ad-hoc community, the way a contemporary general-purpose social site like Ning is. Alden confirmed to me that in 2008 TypePad will get Movable Type Community Service features like user recommendations on items, voting, and group membership. Vox will get these tools as well. Alden also said that the Six Apart's goal is not just to give bloggers tools to manage communities that spring up around their sites, but to link these communities together.

Moving into community management is a good direction for Six Apart. Communities--not individual bloggers--are the power brokers on today's Web. It's readers, en masse, who move markets. Six Apart's goal to empower bloggers with tools that turn readers into active community participants could leverage this power shift.

I'd like to see Six Apart partner with Ning to extend this vision. I don't think this will happen, though. It looks more like Six Apart is trying to clean up its business to make the company an easier acquisition target.

Disclosure: I worked with Chris Alden at Red Herring, the magazine he co-founded, from 1998 to 2001.

LiveJournal, the popular blogging platform/social network from Six Apart, has been acquired by Russian media company SUP. While financial details about the acquisition have not been disclosed, in today's press announcement Chris Alden, CEO and Chairman of Six Apart said the move "...is a great milestone for LiveJournal and also lets us to focus on the core products invented at Six Apart: Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox."

LiveJournal is the first English site in SUP's portfolio, which has a sports news service and two different Internet marketing agencies for audiences in Russia. The two companies partnered in late 2006 to provide better language support and localization for Russian users of LiveJournal (the service's second biggest userbase), and today's acquisition is the second change of hands for LiveJournal after Six Apart acquired it from founder Brad Fitzpatric in early 2005.

Current LiveJournal users shouldn't be too scared about the transition. According to this news post from the company, all of the Six Apart employees who were working specifically on the LiveJournal property are now a part of LiveJournal Inc. The company is also using now as a chance for users to revamp the site policies, along with the feature roadmap.

Six Apart announced some time ago that it would be open sourcing its excellent blogging platform, MovableType. However, it has moved dates around a few times, and originally intended to do a semiproprietary model with the software.

No more. As noted here, MovableType will be 100 percent open source, and will be released in December:

This is really good for open source community, but it raises questions for commercial users--what will be the benefit of purchased commercial version (apart from professional support)? Now it looks like new idea is not to remove anything from open source, but instead add something to commercial version!.

Exactly. That is the open-source model: to give more, rather than to remove more. It's all about finding and delivering additional "analog" value to add to an easily reproduced good (software). Give the digital away and charge for the analog.

Earlier this week, we reported that LiveJournal set off a new round of criticism from its tightly knit user base after it permanently suspended two accounts housing fan art of Harry Potter and friends in sexual situations.

After days of silence, the site's staffers on Tuesday evening published an entry on their business journal in an attempt to clarify the online-journaling server's policy on "illegal and harmful content."

In short, the staffers said they don't review content unless it is reported to them, and when policy violations aren't "clear," they congregate members of the site's Abuse Prevention Team members, LiveJournal staff and parent company Six Apart's management to make a decision.

In an effort to comply with federal and California child pornography laws, the staffers said they have opted to treat any "graphic visual depiction of a minor...engaged in sexually explicit conduct," apparently fictional or not, as a policy violation. "Any stated age of the individuals present, the apparent age of the people or characters present in an image, and outside knowledge of the person or character's age are all taken into consideration," the staffers wrote.

They also said that besides a "limited number of exceptions," they're sticking to a line in their Terms of Service that stipulates that paid LiveJournal accounts aren't refundable. And as for some user gripes that the offending account holders weren't warned to remove the violating content before their accounts were suspended, LiveJournal said it cannot continue to host content that would likely violate child pornography laws but said users can appeal their suspensions.

The post quickly sparked thousands of new comments and questions, ranging from "I believe that your stance on how to tell if characters are of a certain age is still rather vague" to "Thank you. Hopefully this will silence Generation Whine a bit more."

Today blogging-tools company Six Apart is upgrading its business-focused products, TypePad and Movable Type.

In the blog echo chamber, Automattic's WordPress gets a lot of the buzz, since it's open source, free, and led by the charismatic and young Matt Mullenweg (interview part 1 and part 2). WordPress' blogging software is well liked by its users, and there are a lot of people who know how to maintain WordPress installations. Automattic also runs WordPress.com, a hosted blogging service. TechCrunch and GigaOm run on WordPress.

Meanwhile, Six Apart sells Movable Type, a competing product to WordPress. It's a very successful product as well, and has as its customers several large blogs and many corporations that use it for both internal blogs and external sites. Six Apart's hosted blogging service (its counterpart to WordPress.com) is TypePad. BoingBoing and Wired's blogs run on Movable Type. My personal blog (no longer being updated) is on TypePad.

TypePad upgrades

TypePad, Six Apart's hosted blog platform, gets new features that make it more capable as a full Web site publishing platform, as opposed to just a blog: The service will get features that make it easier to create static, or nonblog, pages on a site. Usually static pages are used for reference pages, like About pages, but they're also good for longer or more intricately designed pages. (For example, the Webware 100 voting pages are static pages) .

TypePad also launched a new service level, Premium, at $300 a year. It includes more storage and bandwidth than the Pro level ($150 a year), as well as access to a closed community of Premium-level users and invitations to "TypePad Insider Web events."

Movable Type 4

The latest version of the blogging software Movable Type also received some interesting upgrades. The platform, which is designed to host multiple blogs and support a large number of authors, now has community features that let site managers promote readers and commenters to blog authors. There's also a new authoring interface and several management features.

Most interestingly, Movable Type is finally going open source. The company plans to release a freely available, open-source version of its new blogging platform, Movable Type 4, in the third quarter under the General Public License (GPL). Six Apart will continue to license its own version of Movable Type for corporations that would rather have support, and it will also make new feature packs available on its paid product, but now people who want to run, and perhaps enhance, their own special version of Movable Type will be able to do so.

A beta of Movable Type 4 is available now. The open-source version will follow in the third quarter this year.

Disclosure: I was briefed by Chris Alden, an executive vice president at Six Apart. I worked for Alden when we were both at Red Herring, from 1998 to 2001.

Blogging platform Six Apart wants the rest of the Web to know that while it was indeed hit with an information leak that exposed the personal data of several of its executives and investors, it wasn't quite as scandalous as tech gossip blog Valleywag initially reported it.

In a post late Tuesday afternoon, the Gawker Media-owned Valleywag claimed that Six Apart, parent company of TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal, and Vox, had been hit by an information leak of several executives' and investors' personal information.

According to the original Valleywag post, a "disgruntled insider" had posted sensitive information for several top Six Apart executives like co-founders Ben and Mena Trott, and investors David Marquardt and David Hornik of August Capital--including their addresses and Social Security numbers--to a Usenet group. The Valleywag blogger also claimed that Six Apart executives were "locked in an unscheduled board meeting."

A Six Apart representative, however, told CNET News.com that Valleywag's original story was peppered with inaccuracies: there was no "disgruntled insider" in the sense that Valleywag intended it, and that the board meeting in question was not an unscheduled one. In fact, it had been on the books for months, according to Six Apart.

Six Apart's chief evangelist, Anil Dash, further elaborated: "There was private information posted on Usenet," he said, but it had nothing to do with any former employees of the company. The personal information was released by hackers or "griefers" who were simply out to harass. "They do this for Bill Gates, and they do this for Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin), and it unfortunately comes with the territory."

The Valleywag post, Dash added, had "done a little bit of adventuring" with the details. "Everybody that's ever left the company, we're still on really good terms with," he said.

Dash confirmed that Six Apart has submitted a request for corrections to the story to Valleywag, but was not able to provide further updates on the status of those corrections.