Michael Sippey

Michael Sippey, formerly a general manager at email marketing services firm Quris, announced last week that he is joining the staff of Six Apart, makers of blog publishing tools Movable Type and TypePad, in the role of VP of product.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Michael for about four years or so, the amount of time I’ve been working with Quris as my client for market research. I hadn’t even heard th word “blog” back then, but Michael had. At his site Stating the Obvious, he began blogging back in 1995. Indeed, he’s one of the original bloggers. (More recently, he blogs at Sippy.com.) He’s also an MBA from the Haas School of Business with more than a decade’s experience as a strategic marketing consultant; having worked with him, I know he’s one smart cookie.

I’m very pleased for Michael and also for Six Apart. Yes — disclosure — I use Six Apart products, including TypePad for this blog, and I am friendly acquaintances with a couple of their other staff members (Mena and Anil), but I can say objectively I’m quite impressed with the management team they’ve put together in recent months: Anil Dash, an A-List blogger and formerly a top web tech guy at the Village Voice, Andrew Anker, an investment and business management expert who co-founded and served as CEO of Wired Digital, and 6A’s new CEO Barak Berkowitz, who’s long history of executive positions included EVP at Disney’s Go Network.

What was once a scrappy garage-based maker of software for a dubious new Web trend as actually starting to look like a serious company. Frankly, I take the fast maturation of this company as much as anything is a sign of the bright future of blogging.

Anyway, congrats Michael. Keep me in mind if Six Apart feels like spending money on market research.