Party in Chicago!

 

Andy from the TypePad team (pictured with quality assurance cat, Astro) will be moderating a lunchtime discussion at the Word of Mouth Supergenius conference in Chicago this Wednesday. Here's the scoop:

You'll learn to be a fantastic word of mouth marketer with 12 how-to classes, 12 real-world case studies, and 6 brilliant authors - all in 1 day! You'll learn practical, hands-on techniques to get started, grow your program, and earn amazing word of mouth. With case studies from companies like Domino's Pizza, Starbucks, FreshBooks, Maker's Mark, Fiskar's, LEGO, Coca-Cola and Intuit.

We've also got a special discount code for you:

Use coupon code ANDYISMYHERO and get $101 off registration.

Full details here at http://gaspedal.com/supergenius/

A Thanksgiving Treat from Six Apart - TypePad Motion 1.1

At Six Apart we have a long history of developing leading class open source applications and supporting developers who contribute to the open source community. Our latest community microblogging application, TypePad Motion, has been extremely well received since its launch over a month ago. As these communities have grown around TypePad, so has their need for better community management and social integration. Our members have given great feedback on features and improvements they would like to see, and we've listened!

Today we are excited to release TypePad Motion 1.1, with all new moderation and syndication capabilities built right into the application - and that is on top of the awesome performance improvements. We strongly recommend all current TypePad Motion users to upgrade their application to the latest release.

New Features:

• Share with Facebook and Twitter: New posts on TypePad Motion community sites can be shared with your friends on Twitter and Facebook. If you  haven't already, add your account credentials to your "Elsewhere" accounts on your TypePad account page. Then click the check boxes for Facebook and Twitter under the compose window to share your post with your friends   
• Moderation: A moderation tool is now included with TypePad Motion. Administrators can select to review all posts before they are published, or enable selective moderation (by post type such as text, picture, audio, video or a combination thereof) and community policing.
• Flag a Post: Community members can now flag and identify inappropriate and offensive posts. This is a powerful mechanism to help keep our online communities free from spam, griefing and generally bad behavior.
• Performance Improvements: Taking advantage of the TypePad architecture, TypePad Motion now supports template and object caching, which means community sites are faster than ever, with improved page load and data access.
• Easy Upgrade. If you wish to take advantage of updates we make to Motion after you have installed it, you can use this command to bring your local installation up to date:

sudo easy_install -U typepad-motion

• Bug Fixes: We also fixed some minor issues on local profiles and registration.

Documentation:  Read the updated documentation to install and configure moderation, with additional  instructions for community managers using moderation tools.

Download: For our developer community and open source affictionados, here are links to the TypePad Motion download pages on Github, Pypi and our own TypePad Developer Resources.

Announcing TypePad Micro

As part of our ongoing rollout of the NEW TypePad we are pleased to announce new social blogging features and the launch of TypePad Micro: a completely free level of TypePad focused on easy sharing of text, photos, and videos.

A new form of blogging is emerging — somewhere between the status updates of Facebook and Twitter and the full-length posts of classic blogs — focused on being easy, fun, and connected. Think of this middle category as a bridge between blogs and social networks, tapping into the connectedness of networks with the freedom, control, and independence of blogs.

TypePad Micro is built for this growing form of blogging, making it easy for people to curate compelling content from the web — be it text, photos, or videos — and share it in real-time with people on their blog and to Facebook and Twitter. We very much see this form of blogging as a complement to, not a competitor of, these services. Many bloggers have friends and followers on these great networks but often want to post more than 140 characters, or share photos and videos, with their own narrative and their own design.

TypePad Micro comes with a beautiful new theme, Chroma, custom built for this streamlined form of blogging and a new feature: Reblog, which makes it easy for your blog’s readers to re-post items from your blog on a blog of their own (think of it as the blogging equivalent of the “retweet”).

Here are some examples of what Six Aparters have been doing with Chroma:

• Microdogging
• Cute Funny Sexy Awful
• Dollarshort
• Awesome

How TypePad Micro helps today’s TypePad bloggers
If you’re already a TypePad blogger, TypePad Micro is a great addition to the family. We remain steadfastly committed to being the premiere hosted blogging platform for bloggers with the greatest demands, but also realize that a healthy blogging ecosystem means supporting bloggers of all types.

You get all the features of Micro in your TypePad Pro account, so you might consider starting an additional blog on your site just dedicated to quick sharing and easy cross posting to Twitter and Facebook (here’s how). Maybe you are a food blogger and want to have an easy way of sharing photos of your meals or snapshots from other blogs, but without disrupting the flow if your main blog. See what Stephanie Quilao of Noshtopia has done with her new Chroma blog. Or maybe you are a marketing visionary and want to quickly curate great posts, charts, and graphs from other professionals on your site and for your followers on Twitter and Facebook, but keep your main blog with your original content separate.

We also see TypePad Micro as a great way for you to engage your readers … and their readers. If you add Reblog links to your post footers, readers can quickly share your posts on their own TypePad blog, driving new readership and visitors to your blog.

Another step forward in social blogging
TypePad Micro is the result of a year of huge investment in TypePad, in which we’ve put in place many of the building blocks of social blogging, such as profiles, following, favoriting, a dashboard and activity stream, sign-in and cross posting to Facebook and Twitter, easy posting by email, and a snazzy new bookmarklet. We even released an entirely new open source application, TypePad Motion, for building custom microblog communities tapping into the power of TypePad.

And now with TypePad Micro we’re making it easy for anyone to get started with TypePad. No other blog platform combines these great microblogging capabilities — easy posting, profiles, following, an activity dashboard, etc. — with the full capabilities of a world-class, full-featured blogging platform. If you are just getting started and want an easy, fun blogging experience why not begin with a platform that can grow with you all the way?

We want to do all we can to support and draw out the fantastic TypePad community, one of the first and largest in blogging. With social blogging, community is a feature — and we’ve got a great one — so we’ve also launched a new TypePad Directory to help people find and follow great TypePad sites and join a growing staple of TypePad Motion communities.

If you are a current TypePad Pro blogger, please try out the new Chroma theme (perhaps start a new blog!) and let us know how you like it. If you are new to TypePad, give it a whirl and let us know what you think. We hope you enjoy TypePad Micro as much as we’ve enjoyed building it. Rest assured this is just a first step — we are just getting started!

UPDATED: Here’s some early coverage from these TypePad bloggers:

• TypePad Enters Short-form Blogging Fray with Chroma
  The Social Media Handyman — Paul Chaney

• Six Apart Launches TypePad Micro
  Build a Better Blog — Denise Wakeman

• microblogs and more
  All Things Girls Can Tell — Sara Selepouchin

• TypePad, Our Longtime Host, Launches Free Blogging Tools
  Dad Talk — Brett Levy

Social Media Optimization Checklist

We've added a bunch of features to TypePad to connect your blog to the social web to drive traffic and share your posts with your followers and friends.

Here's a checklist of settings to be sure you're taking full advantage of TypePad's social media optimization along with links to full tutorials on how to do them:

• Share your blogs to your TypePad profile and your followers will see your most recent updates.
• Add the follow module to your blog so your readers can easily follow your latest posts, comments and favorites.
• Enable Reblog so your readers can showcase your best posts on their own blogs.
• Add TweetThis to your post footers and your readers can quickly share your posts with their Twitter followers.
• Turn on Favorites so your readers can show off your best posts to their friends.
• Setup cross-posting to Twitter and Facebook so that your friends and followers will see your latest posts.
• Complete your TypePad profile with an avatar userpic and links to your other social networks.

And as always, if you need any help setting these features up, please let us know by opening a help ticket with support or leaving a comment below.

Happy Halloween from your Community Manager. <3

It's Friday. It's almost Halloween. Let's blog about fun stuff, shall we? How about our latest TypePad Motion site: mmmeow?

 
Join today to share your love for cuteness. And we're platform-agnostic when it comes to cute. Our favorite micro-dog has her own Microblog!

 

While I'm telling stories and talking community:

Once upon a time about a month ago, we had a bug. The bug was not fun. The bug happened as a holiday weekend began. The bug caused a group of Angry Knitting Bloggers™ to take to the virtual streets and let us know in no uncertain terms that they were unhappy about it. As your intrepid community manager, I rolled up my sleeves, shooed my dinner guests from my laptop, and started talking, typing, commenting, blogging: everything I could do to listen, react, and change the situation for the better. It took a while. Sometimes, being front and center in front of people? It's a challenge, no doubt.

Once everyone was mostly happy again, I thought to ask one community member, Cookie, of Shut Up and Knit, if she had any ideas for something durable-yet-adorable that I could wear over my bike gloves for "lady-biking" through the city. SF has lots of microclimates (hot one moment, cold the next) and bike gloves can have a lot of ugly.

Lo and behold, I had a package on my desk with the PERFECT pair of pink hand-knit bike gloves.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I blogged about using social media to create social change. I saw the kitty-cat hat from blogger Soper of Uterine Wars and couldn't get it out of my head. So I bought it for her fundraiser, but also because HELLO? HALLOWEEN IS CATURDAY!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the blogger-powered outfit I biked to work in today (while making Tuff Bike Face the whole time, of course):

Seriously, you guys in the TypePad community are the best. Thanks for making my job, my day, and my outfit. Rock out!

Today is Blog Action Day! Blog for Climate Change.

Blog Action Day is every October 15th, when blogger are asked to post something about a single issue to show our strength and conviction as an online community. It's a great way to feel connected to the greater good, and the participation of so many bloggers to support the world's leading non-profit organizations is something you can do to help, right now. By blogging today, you're supporting some of the world's leading non-profits and sharing your voice for change.

This year's topic is climate change, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the topic. If you participate, leave us a link to your post in the comments, and we'll do a roundup of all the posts here on Everything TypePad.

Go to www.blogactionday.org to learn more, get a badge for your blog showing your participation, and see some ideas for your post on climate change.

Crushing It with Gary Vaynerchuk

If you’re not familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and the upcoming book Crush It!, you’re missing out on one of the most energetic, inspirational and entertaining bloggers and social media experts.

A couple of weeks ago some of the TypePad team caught up with Gary and talked about his upcoming book, TypePad bloggers and the TypePad Motion announcement. In true Gary fashion, he did a great video post to the TypePad community and to bloggers everywhere.

Gary is a perfect example of someone who dedicated himself to his passion and put the tools available to him – a blog, a video camera, his expertise, and his enthusiasm – to create a unique and successful brand. As a blogger, you have the same tools available to you to build your own compelling personal and professional brand.

And now Gary has a new mission: encourage people to follow their passion and to effectively use social media and blogs (and everything else!) to connect with an audience that shares their interests, whether it is food, football, scrapbooking, marketing, parenting, Star Trek collectibles, or anything in between. His book is a wake up call for everyone to realize their potential and take hold of the opportunity of the new digital world. 

If you want to see Gary in person, check out his upcoming book tour. Learn more about his new book, Crush It!, at crushitbook.com.

Check out the video and if you have questions for Gary, leave them in the comments below.

Announcing the TypePad Developer Program and TypePad Motion

Since our launch in 2001, Six Apart has created a rich array of social publishing applications like Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. Along the way, we have also developed and contributed to a number of open source technologies that are commonly used around the web today, including Memcached, Perlbal and OpenID.  Now we are taking another step forward opening the TypePad platform to developers.

We are very excited to introduce the new TypePad Developer Program - your gateway to the TypePad Cloud Platform – and the launch of TypePad Motion, a micro-blogging community application built in Python using the Django web-development framework.

TypePad Developer Program

We all know TypePad as an online blogging service reaching millions of people around the world. But over the past year, every aspect of TypePad has been revamped to improve the service from top to bottom. We’ve expanded TypePad to offer all of the social network features like profiles, friends, and status updates. At the same time we’ve done a lot of work under the hood to make it a platform on which to build social applications, in much the same way that SalesForce has opened its platform for the development of business applications.

This is a better way of building social web sites. In the same way that Six Apart made social publishing accessible to millions with our powerful blogging tools, commodity cloud services have helped lower the barrier of innovation in web services. We are building on that concept to make it easier to develop and scale the next generation of social applications.

The TypePad Developer Program will enable developers to build rich and flexible applications which interact with existing social networks and standalone sites. It provides access to open source libraries and sample code that we have developed to improve performance and scalability of web-based services. In addition, TypePad content (posts, comments, status updates, images, video, audio, links, etc) and social graph objects (users, profiles, groups, friends, following, etc) will be accessible through REST-ful APIs that connect applications to the TypePad Platform for infrastructure and data storage services.

TypePad Motion

We developed a new application powered by the TypePad platform that demonstrates the power of the TypePad APIs. TypePad Motion  is a micro-blogging community application for fostering on-line communities and is based on a lot of the ideas from Pownce, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2008.

TypePad Motion is written in Python using the Django web-development framework,making it extremely easy to build and customize. It’s a great example how developers can use TypePad on the back-end to do much of the heavy lifting but use an entirely separate presentation layer, like Django, to generate the front end templates and pages.

TypePad Motion enables you to:

• Create your own social network where members can form meaningful connections
• Grow rich and vibrant social communities and share notes, links, photos, videos and audio clips
• Get everyone to quickly join the conversation with support for sign-in credentials from TypePad, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo!
• Build and control your brand by turning your site into a social media hub
• Increase traffic and virality when members cross-post content directly to Twitter and Facebook

We have setup a TypePad Motion demonstration site where developers can check out the latest features and interactive elements offered by TypePad Motion.  In addition, here are some recent Six Apart clients who have installed TypePad Motion:

• Zachary Quinto - Our favorite new Spock and Heroes action star Zachary Quinto recently augmented his existing web site built on Movable Type with the new TypePad Motion community application. Now his fans have a place to interact and exchange ideas, pictures, music and videos about their favorite action hero.
• Metric - An indie rock band originally hailing from Toronto, Metric integrated TypePad Motion into their existing site so they could stay in touch with their fans and aggregate their social activity across the web back onto their site.
• Ryan Star - Singer-songwriter and musician, Ryan Star's Motion Community keeps him in touch with his fans, and his fans with each other as they follow Ryan's many performances across the country.

If you’re not a developer but would still like to setup and integrate your own TypePad Motion community, contact our Sales Team and we’ll be happy to get you set up quickly. For more information, please visit the TypePad Motion page.

If you are a Developer, get started today!

We are very excited about the new TypePad Developer Program, the launch of TypePad Motion and opening the TypePad Cloud Platform to all developers. The TypePad Developer Program is currently in Beta, so not all the features and functionality of TypePad are exposed or accessible yet. However, it was important for us to connect early and often with our developer community so that we could get feedback on how to improve TypePad, TypePad Motion and the TypePad platform. When you’re ready:

1. Download Motion
2. Get an API key
3. Learn about the TypePad APIs

And start your own social app!

Social Media Optimization for TypePad

When we built the All New TypePad, one area we focused was helping you build an audience. When it comes to finding an audience for your blog, the best places are:

1. People you know
2. People who are interested in what you are saying.

We’ve built the new TypePad to help you reach both of these groups. As the saying goes, the best place to fish is where the fish are.

Hey friends, look over here!

Social networks like Facebook, Friendster, and Twitter have helped millions of people get online. And your social network is a great place to connect your blog with a new audience.

As a blogger, you are a leader in the online community, sharing your thoughts, ideas, and creations. Many of you also have friend and follow networks on Twitter and Facebook. With the TypePad integration with Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed, you can now update your readers as soon as you post, encouraging your friends and followers to visit your blog. 

If you have 100 followers on Twitter and 100 friends on Facebook, you can instantly reach a potential audience of 200 visitors to your blog.

We’ve noticed a significant increase in visitors to TypePad blogs that have integrated Twitter and Facebook cross-posting, so give it a try and see what happens.

Short, Sweet, and Full of Insight
We have also partnered with bit.ly. Bit.ly automatically shortens your URLs to a Twitter friendly length. We automatically shorten your URL when you use the sharing feature on TypePad.

Our integration also provides you with one-click access to real time stats about how many people are visiting your site from the posts you have shared to Twitter and Facebook. The benefit to you: a short, shareable URL that can provide extra insight about your visitors.

Social Media Opti…What?

You’ll notice the Bit.ly stats are included right on your blog Overview under “Social Media Optimization.” Social media optimization is what we refer to as all of the social web services that help you reach and connect with your audience: social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), social bookmarks (Digg, Delicio.us, Reddit), social search (Technorati), and social publishing like TypePad.

The concept of social media optimization (SMO) was created and evangelized by author, PR, media superstar, and TypePad member Rohit Bhargava way back in 2006 in his post, 5 Rules of Social Media.

Inspired by Rohit’s ideas and the evolution of the social web, we built in the most valuable SMO tools in TypePad. Now you can focus on the other half of social media -- commenting on blogs, sharing pictures, discussing new ideas, blogging, and building relationships with people who share your passion.

Now, more than ever, your blog is the hub of your social media activity and an anchor for your online reputation.

Follow Your Favorites, Traffic Follows

TypePad Follow feature is not another social network; it is a new way to find and follow the best bloggers and conversations on the web. We call it an In-The-Know network, the place where you can follow your passion -- whether it is sports, food, business, politics, fiction, family, religion, animals or anything else -- and connects you with people that share your passion.

The first step for you to take advantage of this network is the TypePad Profile module, launched last week, so your blog readers and TypePad members can find and follow you. Anyone who follows you will automatically be notified when you update your blog, encouraging new visitors to stop by and see your post.

But there is another benefit, a social media optimization concept that extends beyond the circle of friends that follow you. When a reader who is following you comments on your blog, her comment will now extend out to her TypePad network, driving additional readers to your blog. By allowing other people – your TypePad readers – to spread the word about your blog, you are taking advantage of your TypePad network and optimizing your site for the social web.

Now it’s your turn: you can turn your readers into members of your blog by encouraging to Follow your TypePad profile.

Putting it all together
Stay tuned over the next few days as we discuss how you can get the most out of your social media optimization (SMO).  And don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about search engine optimization (SEO). We’ll also give you some SEO tips for the new Typepad.

Questions? Opinions? Social media optimization suggestions for other TypePad bloggers? Let me know in the comments below.

Twitter, Improved Categories, Bookmarklet, and more

Blog it!
The "Blog It" bookmarklet is one of my favorite features on the new TypePad. Quickly make a new post, including photos, video, or text without ever having to toggle back into TypePad. Thanks to your feedback, we made some improvements to the feature. Now, you can finish editing a post in TypePad, tweak the design (including changing the order of clippings/commentary), categorize the post, save as draft for later, schedule for future date, and so on. It's slick!

Comment With Twitter (Twitter OAuth support)
Twitter's a lot of fun, and now your blog's readers can use their Twitter login to leave a comment, along with their Twitter avatar, too.


Just click the dropdown, and your comments are already there.

If you're using Twitter, your TypePad account is automagically set up now to share your posts, if you like. (There's a known issue where you'll manually have to update draft and scheduled posts to share them with Twitter, we're fixing that ASAP.)

Bit.ly integration
If you're on our beta team, you'll see that we've added bit.ly to automagically shorten your posts when you share them with Twitter, and then you can also see your bit.ly stats, right from your TypePad dashboard.

More Bug Fixes and Features of Note:
Comments: We did a ton of work around comments, including a ton of backend stuff you wouldn't be able to see. For people who are blogging with the new TypePad, you can edit, search, and view all comments on a post - all things you've been asking for. We're posting more about this next week in more detail.

• Made OpenID existing and new accounts show under "Other Accounts"
• Improved "Forgot Password" flow for OpenID accounts
• Made categories module expandable - this is a really cool one for those of us with lots of comments: just click the button in the top corner of your categories for an expanded view. 

Have you tried the new TypePad yet? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.