The Big Move

On Oct. 8, 2001, Movable Type was born.

The brain child (and love child) of San Francisco dot-commers Mena and Ben Trott, who originally designed Movable Type for personal use, the Perl-based freeware blogging tool was an immediate hit, with more than a hundred downloads in its first hour of release. Within a year the Trotts had formed a company, Six Apart, based in their apartment's extra bedroom, and they were planning another launch: TypePad, a web hosting service.

Five years later, Six Apart has flourished – offices on three continents, partnerships with the likes of Nokia, Yahoo!, and Adobe, and acquisitions: popular blogging site LiveJournal; mobile photo blogging company SplashBlog; and Rojo Networks, an RSS feed aggregator. In July, Six Apart released Movable Type 3.3, along with Movable Type Enterprise, a business blogging tool the company claims can support thousands of users with simple administration.

Five years later there's a Six Apart product for virtually every blogger, from open-source geeks to knitters and foodies and corporate executives with companywide blog networks. But Mena Trott isn't satisfied yet. Six Apart's newest product, Vox, promises "blogging for the rest of us."

Trott spoke with the Chronicle about Vox, the new blog order, and the "little company from San Mateo" while prepping for a presentation at the Texas Conference of Women.

Austin Chronicle: Let me start by congratulating you on the fifth birthday of Movable Type. How does that feel?

Mena Trott: It feels good that we've been here for five years. I don't think we thought when we started that it would be around for five years. It went by really quickly and really slowly, like everything in life. You can't believe it was five years ago, but you can't believe it was only five years ago. The company's grown since then, obviously. It went from me and my husband in our bedroom to now about 150 people. We have offices in Tokyo and Paris.

AC: What have been some of the challenges of growing your company?

MT: The biggest challenge probably came during the third or fourth year, when we were in this awkward stage where we weren't a full-blown company yet. Ben and I really felt like we needed to take on so many more things than we should have. We weren't delegating. It was our baby! [From] that same analogy, it's like when you send your kid to school, and you don't think the teachers are going to take care of the kid as well as you can, but at the same time, you can't teach them what the teachers can. That happens because you're not ready to give up your company, but you can't do it all. We got into that stage and realized that we have the best skills to do what we were doing, but we hadn't let other people come in. That was actually fairly easy to do; it was just that one hand-off. And I think it's always hard starting a new product. We are going to be launching Vox at the end of the month, and that's amazing. We've worked on [Vox] for probably two years. It's been in development since day one because it's kind of the new generation of blogging. It's fun still, which is really important. That's the big thing after five years: that I still love blogging as much as I do.

AC: So Vox is "blogging for the rest of us." What does that mean? Aren't we blogging already?

MT: I've been trying to get my best friend from eighth grade to use Vox. And she's like, "I'm not going to use it. I'm not going to use it. I'm too busy." She just had her second baby, and she's not a blogger. She has no desire to blog. And I said, "Please just try," and I walked her through on the phone. She's actually posting photos now. And I said, "It's not about writing." All she knows is my blog [DollarShort.org], which is mostly writing. I said, "Just post photos every day. Or not every day – when you want them." They're private, so only I can see, my husband can see, and her mom will see, eventually, once we get her on. I feel like if we've been able to get my friend Monica on, we can get anybody on. But it's also something that I'm doing. I love my Vox blog. LiveJournal is a different kind of service for a different group. [Even] people who've been blogging for years are loving Vox because they feel like it's fun again. It's a beginner's tool, but it's still so much better than anything out there for people who are blogging.

AC: Even people already using a Six Apart product?

MT: Even people who are already blogging already on our other products can find a need for this. Take an example from another company's product, Flickr. People have blogs but they also have their Flickr accounts for a different purpose. So many of our users now are professional bloggers, people making somewhat of a living on their blogs, or else they're writing about passions that aren't specific to their lives. They still need a place to write that sort of stuff. [It's like] e-mail. You have an e-mail application, but that doesn't dictate what kind of content you have. Sometimes you write personal letters to your husband or wife, sometimes you write business e-mails to colleagues, sometimes you write to mailing lists or large groups. Blogging is just a way to communicate, and there are different tools for different types of communication. As far as people coming on, I think there are so many people out there with potential for Vox, as well as existing bloggers who may just want it for other things.

AC: Do you see a world where we have, say, grandmothers blogging alongside indie kids or tattooed freaks or open-source geeks? What's that going to be like?

MT: Yeah. That's the world I'm actually really looking forward to. I grew up with my grandparents and my parents all in the same house, so family's always been there. And [since then] we haven't been able to communicate. My family moved to North Carolina a couple of years ago, and I'm in California, so we're not together. They're not going to blog, necessarily – my mom may blog, if she actually starts blogging – but they're going to read. My mom and dad will read my blog every day. They print out my blog for my grandparents to read – [but] they wouldn't be able to see pictures of what I'm doing if it wasn't for [Vox]. I'm not going to take photos and mail them because people don't develop photos anymore. Our goal of getting everybody blogging isn't getting everybody to write. It's to get them reading and communicating. And I see blogs from my friends and family at work. You'll see a private post, which I have access to because I'm a friend, but then a family member will come on, like the grandma, and will say, "Oh, I love seeing this picture of my grandchild." That's the best thing. I love the other blogging because it's given so many people different types of voices, but to be able to know that they're connecting with someone they wouldn't necessarily see is so huge.

AC: What do you think the impact of that will be, culturally?

MT: I think the fear is, "Oh we have this, so we're not going to communicate face-to-face." But the thing is, we're not communicating face-to-face as much as we used to. For example, my mom's in North Carolina, and I see her once or twice a year [as opposed to] me seeing her my whole life every day. Not seeing my mom that much isn't great for our relationship, and we do talk on the phone all the time, but there's so much more. I was in Utah last week, hiking and doing all that kind of stuff. I posted a wrap-up every day about it, and it was all family because I knew I was writing about things even my friends would be bored with. And she was able to catch up with me and know what I'd been doing, and when we talked on the phone, it was a jump-start. "Oh, my gosh, that hike looked so scary or hard to do" versus me saying, "Oh, I'm in Utah, and I took a hike." It's the next way to help people communicate.

AC: I think it has the potential to give different kinds of people access to one another's lives in ways that didn't exist before.

MT: I have friends who live in Europe, and 10 years ago there was no way I'd be able to know them. Some of the people I consider my closest friends, people who work at the company, I met through their blogs. And that's remarkable. All the fear you see about online communication, how scary it is, and all the threats – that's a minor thing. What we want to do is encourage people to be more private with their blogging and to realize that some things should be public, and some things should be private, just for your own well-being. Not because you're going to get killed by anybody, but not everything is something everybody needs to know. If you write about this great dinner you planned, and one troll comes in and says something like, "That looks like a stupid restaurant," it rains on your parade. Even if it's a minor comment, it really affects you. It's the little things that work people's nerves. So just having the ability to say, "I really want to write this, I know 30 people care about it, and five will follow up with a comment." That's so much better to a lot of people than writing to the public.

AC: There's a lot of validity to that kind of person-to-person blogging.

MT: Right now it isn't viewed as an acceptable thing by the bloggers who are on the [Technorati] top ten. I have fights – no, not really fights, but disagreements – with some of those bloggers when they say, "If it's not public, it's not a blog." Or "If it's not about a topic that's considered one of the high arts of blogging, it's not a blog." No. That's what people are going to be blogging about, and your stuff is going to be marginalized.

AC: Do you think there's a gender divide along those lines?

MT: Yeah. The men will say that more than the women. I can think of a bunch of tech bloggers who are males [who say that]. But this isn't anything new. I was an art major and an English major, and I took courses about women's arts. There's a reason why we look at paintings [as art], and we don't look at textiles – all the things that were as hard to do. There has been gender bias. I think what we need to do is not focus on it, but just do our own thing and realize that we're happy doing it, and it will be very dominant in blogging. Passion matters more than recognition.

For more coverage of the Texas Conference of Women, see "On House-Arrest Soirees and Fabulous Thighs: Martha Speaks!"