Six Apart is finally doing something with its Blogs.com domain. It is creating, well, yet another blog directory. And I do mean that in the early-days-of-Yahoo sense: it will be edited by a small group of about five human editors, and will feature top-ten blog lists from the likes of Web celebs such as Marc Andreessen and Craig Newmark (Michael is still working on his).  

This is not a comprehensive blog directory like Technorati or even a meme tracker like Techmeme.  It will launch covering only 1,200 blogs. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden tells me that his goal is not to compete with other blog directories so much as to offer a service that will help blogs in general (because that helps Six Apart as a provider of blogging software).

How good is it?  We don’t know because we haven’t played with it yet. But judging from some screenshots that we did obtain, it looks like a fairly standard media hub.  It breaks up the blogosphere into business, entertainment, news & politics, life, technology (shouldn’t that be first?), student life (yawn), and top 10 lists.  On its homepage, it will highlights posts from each of the categories, as well as one big write-up focussed on the hot discussion topic of the day..  

Given that blogs.com generates a ton of natural traffic based on its URL alone, it should provide yet one more way to get a traffic boost for the blogs that are featured.  (Just don’t expect a massive Yahoo Buzz-type boost any time soon).

Here are the screenshots.  The home page:

The Entertainment Section:

And a top ten blog list:

The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST.

Facebook’s press release is here.

Live Coverage

In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is working on launching improved search, but they aren’t close to launching it yet.

2:49 PM: That’s it. The show is over.

2:48 PM: Great Apps can integrate with users just like native Facebook apps, and they get early access to features. The Great Apps program is in alpha stage and the first two partners are iLike and Causes. There will be a strong enforcement system with all apps, and they will disable apps that are a problem. Over the last year they’ve disabled apps for violation of privacy or other policies. They take this very seriously, he says.

2:47 PM: The second announcement is the Facebook Great Apps Program (Top Tier program). They embody all ten of the guiding principles, and they advance the mission of Facebook.
Read More

Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based on very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well.

As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing.

The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.

Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.

Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options.

Ads are sold on a CPM basis. They will not make revenue guarantees, says Jalichandra, but the split between parties is negotiable. He declined to state what rates have been negotiated with beta partners. This is similar to what Six Apart promises, which is also targeting the long tail of blogs.

Jalichandra also says Technorati is uniquely positioned to sell ads at premium rates, even through small blogs, because they will be able to use descriptive tags/keywords, along with their existing blog indexing technology, to better match ads with content.

Technorati’s has seven sales professionals, led by VP Sales Tony Pribyl, a new hire. They also hired a new marketing lead, Jennifer McLean, away from Glam recently.

For now Technorati is only working with larger blogs, although it will be open to all comers in 2-3 months.

Six Apart has introduced an iPhone version of their BlogIt software, which allows users to quickly post updates to their blogs, Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Facebook. The current version of BlogIt is a traditional iPhone web-based app, though we can expect a native version on the way (Six Apart announced a native version of TypePad at Apple’s WWDC conference earlier this week). You can reach the app by pointing your iPhone’s browser to http://blogit.typepad.com/.

The company originally released BlogIt as a Facebook app in April. Both versions currently support posting to Movable Type, TypePad, Vox, LiveJournal, Blogger and Wordpress, along with the social networks mentioned above.

The app works well enough, but the release so soon before the release of Apple’s App Store is curious – it will be outdated in a month.

Blogging infrastructure company Six Apart is launching a new free open source product this morning into beta called TypePad AntiSpam. While the product is new, the technology behind it has been used by Six Apart since May 2007 on millions of hosted TypePad blogs. Now they are offering it as a web service for other blogging platforms, too.

TypePad AntiSpam is clearly aimed at Akismet, a similar spam fighting tool offered by arch-rival Automattic. Like Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs. But TypePad’s product is free – Akismet charges $5/month for commercial blogs making more than $500/month in revenue, and has performance limitations on the free version.

TypePad AntiSpam is also open source, and anyone can download the source code and create their own spam tool based on it. Akismet isn’t open source, although they have an API that allows developers to, among other things, develop additional integration tools for blogging platforms.

We are long time users of Akismet on the TechCrunch blogs, and I’ve included it in my last two yearly lists of products I can’t live without (2007, 2008) along with Wordpress, Automattic’s blogging software. Akismet blocks over 15,000 spam comments per day on TechCrunch.

But last week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I’m pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.

The product classifies comments as “ham” (good), “spam” (bad) or unknown (moderation). So far I’ve seen no good comments hit the spam folder (false positives), something that happens regularly with Akismet. Only a handful of spam comments made it to the site (false negatives). It seems like the rate of false negatives is lower than Akismet, but the team reviews the site for these regularly and so it’s impossible to compare them statistically, I’m just making a guestimate.

Twice now a large group of spam comments hit the moderation queue, but Six Apart says it was their system thinking we were under a denial of service attack from the sheer flow of spam attempts and triggering everything to moderation. They’ve now adjusted for that, and we haven’t seen it again.

TypePad AntiSpam is available now via plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type. Akismet has a much longer list of supported platforms – Six Apart says they will add more over time and, like Akismet, will rely on the developer community to pitch in as well.

If you are a blogger and don’t use a service to manage spam, you’ll want to use Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam. I recommend either. For now, we’ll stick with TypePad, and continue to report on how its doing.

Feel like sharing? Two ex-Ebay/Skype execs have created Tokoni, a social story sharing site that they hope will become the web’s virtual “front porch”. The site, which quietly launched last December, hopes to foster a warmer and better connected sharing environment than other similar communities on the web.

Tokoni is essentially a community of connected blogs with a social networking slant. After creating a personal profile, members can write an unlimited number of stories. Each story (which is basically a blog post) can be tagged with keywords and placed in ‘Hubs’, which are essentially groups of related stories. Stories can include embedded images or YouTube videos, and other members are encouraged to leave comments and participate in a discussion at the bottom of each story.

At first glance, Tokoni seems like a pretty half-baked idea. People have been sharing personal stories online since the dawn of Usenet, and allowing members to group stories by topic isn’t exactly a novel feature. Why not use a blog?

Then again, painfully simple ideas have been known to work in the past (YouTube and photobucket come to mind). It’s possible that Tokoni will fill a niche for users that just want to sit down and write without having to deal with blogging software or forums. And the community aspect helps differentiate the site from a blog by allowing writers to quickly find and link to stories posted by others without having to sift through the blogosphere.

Tokoni’s most encouraging assets are its founders. Mary Lou Song was eBay’s third employee, and her husband Alex Kazim has held a laundry list of top positions: Director of Engineering at eBay, President of Skype, SVP of eBay New Ventures, and VP Marketing at PayPal. The site also features a strong list of investors, including eBay Inc and a number of current eBay execs.

Tokoni isn’t the only player in this space. In fact, there are literally thousands (if not more) of sites that are dedicated to story sharing, though many of them revolve around a specific topic or community. Six Apart also offers Vox, a simple blogging service that offers some of the same tagging and group features. Tokoni has an impressive set of credentials, but unless it can find a better way to differentiate itself, its stories will fall on deaf ears.

Six Apart, creator of the blogging platform Movable Type, has partnered with LightPole, a mobile application provider. The two companies have co-developed a plugin for Movable Type that will allow bloggers to geo-tag their posts, create geo-located Points of Interest, and publish content through LightPole channels to mobile phones.

The plugin brings Movable Type to two distinct (and important) markets: Geo-enabled websites and location-based phone services. These features could be a boon to bloggers, especially those that write about real-world locales, such as restaurants or landmarks. They may also help writers reach a much larger audience through mobile phones.

The news comes soon after LightPole’s implementation of Yahoo’s geo-information platform FireEagle last month.

Six apart is launching an advertising network for blogs and will begin offering professional services (design, implementation, development, optimization) after acquiring New York based creative agency Apperceptive (this was correctly guessed by Cameron Barret in a Friday post (see comment 156) asking for readers to tell us who they thought Six Apart acquired).

Advertising Network – Six Apart Media

The company is now competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, the upcoming Technorati ad network and a number of others to get bloggers to join their network.

Six Apart has long sold advertising for itself on its network of free blogs on LiveJournal (before it was sold) and Vox. CEO Chris Alden says they have significant experience in grouping like-blogs and selling to large advertisers. The only difference now is that they will partner with the blog publisher and share revenue. They are partnering with Adify to provide back end admin infrastructure for publishers (accounts, payouts, etc.).

Six Apart says they’ve been able to group blogs and sell advertising to big brands (HP, MSN, Universal, among others), something that is hard to do without big name publishers. They think they can create a high value ad network for the masses. Currently, sites like FM and Glam provide high value advertisers but only to top sites. If Six Apart can deliver those kinds of advertisers, and the rates they pay, to millions of small blogs, they may have a hit on their hands.

There is no requirement that the blogs be using a Six Apart blogging platform. If you can add advertisements to your blog, you can join the network. Six Apart Media is led by David Tokheim.

Blog Services – Six Apart Services

Six Apart will also begin selling services to blogs for a fee. The core services will be offered by the Apperceptive team in New York, and include site design, back end development, search engine optimization and other services. These services are aimed at larger publishers that can pay, and will also be provided free or at a discount to members of the advertising network. The site isn’t neglecting their smaller customers though, and is also launching consulting services that are designed to help all bloggers maximize their marketing impact.

Six Apart Services is led by Marissa Levinson and David Jacobs.

San Francisco-based blogging startup Six Apart has made a significant acquisition, we heard today from someone with knowledge of the deal. “Significant” in the sense of a possible strategic shift for the company, if not in terms of deal size. It will be announced in the next few days.

Who did they acquire? Put your best guess in the comments. First comment that is correct gets a 2 GB iPod shuffle with “I Love TechCrunch” engraved on the back.

Six Apart just made designing a blog layout so easy that even a dummy like me can do it. On its TypePad service, it added a few more themes to bring the total up to: “100 themes, over 1000 professional designs, and an infinite number of customization possibilities.”

You can try it out here on TypePad’s new Design Assistant, which recently made its debut on Six Apart’s Movable Type. Pick a theme like “Camo Khaki.” Choose a Layout. Add your own custom CSS code if you don’t like the options TypePad gives you. And see how it will look on your blog. This beats the back-and-forth of having to pick out a theme and layout, apply it to your blog, see how it looks, and then go back to tweak.

Bringing Web design to the masses is something TypePad does particularly well. Wordpress has its own pretty templates too, of course. But blogs on Blogger seem to have the least variation. Which blogging service does the best job of making Web design both drop-dead simple and drop-dead gorgeous?