By Erica Lee
We took a few minutes to speak with Chris Alden CEO of Six Apart to discuss the future of blogging, what we can expect to see from his company in 2008 and what Silicon Valley can learn from Le Web 3. We kicked off the conversation asking why it is important to be at Le Web 3. “People are now taking Web 2.0 seriously and we have gone from experimentation and evolved into strategies. At this show we have an interesting mix of independent bloggers, large media publishers and big corporations all trying to figure out how they participate in this landscape.” Alden went on to discuss how blogging is growing up right now an that companies from Boeing to Intel are using their platforms to create community conversations. “Blogging is at the cornerstone of a company’s communications strategy and while we certainly have a large base of consumer adopters, we have recently seen a large number of media and corporations using [Six Apart] to communicate and engage their audiences in a more conversational manner.”
We went on to discuss what we can expect from Six Apart in 2008. “You are going to see us grow and invest Moveable Type, TypePad and Vox. We see ourselves as one of the icons of the new internet and we want to continue to innovate. You are also going to see blogging grow in a number of areas. One area is what I call ‘productivity blogging’ or using blogs to form a digital conversation which now is in groupware and email. With blogs you have persistence [through] archives and you can search. It becomes very useful for internal communications and we see companies today replacing their Intranets with blogs.” Alden also discussed Moveable Type and TypePad becoming the new CMS or what he calls community content management systems.
We moved on to talking about what comes after the blog. “Someone asked me what is Web3.0? I said maybe it is when the masses begin using Web 2.0. Silicon valley has a very short attention span and has blog fatigue. But everywhere else blogging is growing and this is a fun time to watch. Blogging is in its adoption cycle now and really coming into its own. We are seeing a mushrooming of how blogs are being used.”
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