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Mena Trott, founder and president of Six Apart has announced their purchase of Live Journal right on the heels of Brad Fitzpatrick, owner and founder of LiveJournal, confirming it from their end. After reading both their posts, I find that I'm very optimistic about this deal despite my previous misgivings.

Mena's post does many of the same things as Brad's - explaining why this deal was struck and what this means for users of LiveJournal and Six Apart products. Once again she assures everyone that things are mostly going to stay the same with some positive changes coming about from both parties working together.

What really impresses me about this whole situation is the honest and down-to-earth tone the announcements by both companies officials have been. To me, this is why this new form of personal publishing and communication is so great and revolutionary. Heads of companies announce a business deal directly to their users and reaction to it from their userbase is almost instant. As Mena says at the end of her post, "I think it's just starting to get interesting."

The highly discussed rumor that Six Apart was to buy LiveJournal has been confirmed by Brad Fitzpatrick, the current owner and founder of LiveJournal. In his post he answers many of the questions I had by essentially saying that LiveJournal will stay the same and seperate from other Six Apart products besides improvements in areas such as user interface. He also assures the LiveJournal users that he has throughouly evaluated the people at Six Apart for evilness and feels that this is a positive move for both parties.

I tend to agree. However, there are of course people who disagree as witnessed in the comments on his announcement. (Including such articulate gems as one user noting that he has slit his throat because of this.) I totally understand the fear that Live Journal has sold out and will as a result lose some of what made it good in many people's eyes. Yet, Brad reassures everyone pretty well that the things people like about Live Journal are going to remain intact, and the current Six Apart products will not get too meddled with LiveJournal. In addition, if LiveJournal was to be bought by any company, I think Six Apart is the best fit as they truly understand blogging.

A rumor has popped up that Six Apart, the makers of the popular MovableType software (that powers this site) and TypePad, are soon to acquire LiveJournal, creating a weblogging company with close to 6.5 million users.

I have not been a big fan of LiveJournal in the past due to the kinds of content it tends to attract. It is characterized by angst ridden teen journals which feature an utter disregard for spelling and grammar. However, I will not hold this against the community as a whole and I won't be like silly Slashdotters and associate this kind of content with weblogs or, in this case, LiveJournal in general. In fact, I enjoy reading a few LiveJournals of friends. I will even go so far as to say that although I may not enjoy teen angst it can be justified if the writers are simply writing for themselves.

As such, while I'm not a fan of the teen angst content on LiveJournal I think it would be an interesting and likely beneficial move for SixApart to branch out and expand their position in the weblog space.

However, there are two big questions I see arising in such a deal. Firstly, will LiveJournal accounts be converted over to a form of Six Apart software? Six Apart runs the hosted TypePad service for a fee. What kind of features and back-end would a Six Apart owned LiveJournal have? Depending on how extensive this is, would this cannibalize the TypePad? I am of course, running under the assumption that Six Apart will do the "good thing" and keep all LiveJournal accounts running at the same or greater functionality as they do now for no extra cost.

Secondly, what will happen to the LiveJournal Open Source community when merged with Six Apart as a corporate entity and what becomes of the current LiveJournal software?

Needless to say, this will be an interesting development if it is true.

Six Apart needs to learn a few things about secrets and surprises from Blogger. If you have a good surprise like the new Blogger release, it's good to spring it out unexpected. That kind of thing creates excitement. However, if you have a bad surprise like they had today, it's best to prepare your users for it.

All they've done is create resentment amoung those who supposed to give them large sums of money. This announcement of the lackluster features and pricing scheme is like someone telling you about a death. Not only have you lost them, but you also have to pay for their funeral.

This is the end,
Beautiful friend
This is the end,
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes... again
Can you picture what will be, So limitless and free
Desperately in need... of some...stranger's hand
In a... desperate land

- The End by The Doors

Yesterday Blogger, now owned by Google, relaunced their service with many new great improvements. They now have a beautiful and easy-to-use new design and interface courtesy of Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path. Bowman along with a few other high-profile designers have also created a slew of new standards compliant CSS based templates which are top notch. The last main new feature is comments which has been missing from Blogger for a while. This is somewhat Typepadish in that you can choose to only let registered Blogger users comment, or you can let anyone do so.

Lots of bloggers are talking about the launch:

• Doug Bowman has an excellent account of the design process.
• Steven Garrity evaluates the new templates.
• Phil Ringnalda raves.
• Dan Cederholm adds his two cents on his design.
• And Dave Winer complains about Google as usual, yet also gives some somewhat interesting ideas.

Whew, that was a lot of links. Now I'll go play around with it. It's good that Blogger is getting back into the game. They had been lagging behind for quite some time. And although they still have a ways to go before catching up with MovableType or Typepad, they offer a pretty good service for free.

The people complaining about blogs getting inflated page ranks on Google seem to be the professional journalists who just provide bland impersonal writing without any substance. There is value to that, but why shouldn't blogs get good ranking on a search engine.

The Internet is about two-way communication and blogs help that and have made the initial effort and costs of publishing to go way down. They have brought a large amount of *good* content to a world of media where you get fed the same thing everyday from a faceless broadcasting monolith.

Blogs are valuable resources and will only get bigger. There is nothing inherently different about a blog besides it being an easy way for an individual or group to publish their own content. The Internet was initially created as a two-way medium, and only now is that trend starting to become visible. We should not hinder it.

I helped set up a friend of mine with a Blogger weblog tonight. His name is Dave and his weblog is titled Dave In Toronto. This name comes from his frequent calls into a radio show on after Leaf Games called "Leaf Talk" on Mojo Radio. It's always great to introduce people to blogging.

Mike has launched a new weblog titled The "New" Normal. I'm glad to see some more blogging content from Mike, and it seems that he's already started out with some good posts.

Welcome back to the world of weblogs Mike!