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.

Blog for blog publishing platform WordPress. Strange that the blog’s archive starts only this month.

Ugh. I’m working so hard on various paid research proejects at the moment, that I’m giving this poor blog short shrift. I’m relying a bit to heavily, therefore, on you, my wonderful readers, to do all my fact-checking for me. Poor blogging habits, I know, but there you are; my theory being bad blogging is better than no blogging at all.

Anyway, I got this wrong, as commenters have pointed out. This blog is unaffiliated with the business, just a volunteer blog. Therefore, it doesn’t really count as a business blog, does it?

Sorry! I’ll try harder next time, I promise. <fingers crossed>

WordLog

Exhibit A
(Click to enlarge)

Odd. I was reading through my server logs this morning, when I saw that I had traffic coming from a page on The Big Blog Company. The Big Blog Company’s home page has a lot going on, so it’s a bit hard to figure out at a glance what they do, but partway down the page it explains:

The Big Blog Company is a one-stop shop for company blogs, a new tool for on-line communication for companies that want to strengthen their relationship with customers and their presence in the marketplace.

Ah, yes, another blog consulting company. (From my experience so far, good luck, guys.) Anyway, the page in question that was driving me traffic appears to be some page behind password protection. See Exhibit A.

There didn’t appear to be any way to register for the password-protected section that I could see. Looking around the page, however, I noticed in the upper-left corner there was a link for “Big Blog Company,” which I presumed would take me to the homepage, so I clicked it.

Exhibit B
(Same to you, buddy)

In fact, it flashed a temporary page that then just redirected me back to the log-in page. Imagine my surprise, however, when I clicked again and looked more carefully at the message up in the corner of this temporary refresh page: “Yeah, fuck you. Log in.” I beg your pardon? I’m trying to log in, but it’s not exactly clear how, gentleman. Doesn’t seem like very businesslike language for a consulting company.

Meanwhile, I’m also getting a lot of traffic today from this post on a site called GoFuckYourself.com, but that would appear to be an unrelated coincidence. Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed in the morning.

UPDATE:
Big Blog Consulting Company perpetuate the British stereotype that Yanks have no sense of humor and assume I’m a moron. At least I get to use trackbacks now. Whoopie!

New features in blogger, notably a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWIG) editing interface.

Evhead: Now in Blogger, WYSIWYG

Mena Trott’s emotionally charged post about handing over her title as CEO of Six Apart, publisher of the popular blog publishing platforms TypePad and Movable Type, to board member Barak Berkowitz says so much about what kind of company Six Apart is and, for that matter, about the whole blog phenomenon. I mean, in what other kind of business could one executive so openly mock another during the ceremonial passing of the torch, even while at the same time making it clear the love and respect is so heartfelt. It’s really a beautiful tribute to the kind of businesses blogs can help foster.

Meanwhile, Mena, who will retain her title as president of the company she co-founded with her likewise twentysomething husband, announced that Six Apart has acquired its French reseller, Ublog, and it has also hired Web VC veteran Andrew Anker.

In short, lots of good news for this terrific company that is really growing into something with potential that several industry big-shots are banking on. (Disclosure or whatever: this site is produced using TypePad, and I’ve met Mena, and she’s very nice.)