Interview: Six Apart's degree of Weblog integration

Dash: Right now, it's very informal. They're taking a wait-and-see attitude. Their engineering requirements to integrate things are a lot higher than ours are to extend the HTML interface. Probably by the end of this year you'll see that there will be native support for things like RSS and syndication formats in the mail clients. I think the next significant revisions of all these [e-mail] applications will probably have some level of support for these technologies.

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InfoWorld: What security implications do you think will surface as a result of this integration, particularly when it comes to Outlook integration?

Dash: That's one of the reasons why we're taking our time to get it right and focusing on the Web interface now, because that's a known quantity, people know how to lock that down.  Most users that are using Weblogs in the enterprise are just keeping them behind the firewall and they really are safe in saying "This isn't something that needs to be outside, so we'll keep it in the organization." Weblogs also make them refocus on the idea that there is no such thing as a firewall and there’s no such thing as behind it or in front of it. Role-based security is essential throughout an organization.

InfoWorld: How will the Weblog business model evolve, given that selling Weblog clients doesn't appear to be a hugely profitable market and the opportunities appear to be more on the services side?

Dash: We're already seeing a strong market for the integration services. I think that our goal is to have a very, very inexpensive tool and people can sell services around it. We're going to be working on developing a pretty robust developer's network and partner network. I think that's going to be the market for it. I think services is absolutely it. I don’t ever foresee the shift being [toward] huge, monolithic, expensive software. There are people that are trying to do that, and I don't think that's going to be successful for them. To have a $50,000 Weblog system doesn’t make any sense. It really contradicts the nature of what it is.

InfoWorld: What's your long-term value proposition that will hold the company up in the marketplace?

Dash: There are a couple of pieces. One is that we do have a very, very strong consumer story. We've got a service called TypePad, which is having an extraordinarily warm response in the consumer market right now. We have tools that are consistent across the consumer and the enterprise market, where third-party plug-ins and extensions work on both of those toolsets. That’s something that I think gives people a little more security in their investment in the platform and also that's a strong base to augment the revenue side for us.

InfoWorld: Do you have any thoughts about how blogging intersects with journalism?

Dash: We've put a lot of thought into it. Before I joined Six Apart I was at the Village Voice, so I come from a journalism background in terms of technology. A lot of the current conventional wisdom is playing up a tension between journalism and Weblogs [but] I think these are natural complements. The distinction is one idea at a time, and that’s what the press is going to jump on -- the idea of instead of covering every aspect of a story, let me get the part that we know a lot about. Then we'll rely on our traditional channels to flush out the rest of the rest of the story.

InfoWorld: What's your perspective on part of the Weblog evolution that is driven by distrust of content editors?

Dash: Any time you have a new medium or a new technology, it's defined by being against something. It's [like] rock-n-roll -- you always have to rebel against something. And I think editors are the authority figures. I think that's honestly a large part of it. But I don’t know anybody that doesn’t, at some level, edit their Weblog posts, either inside their head or for minor content or things that you don’t want to include. There's always editing. It's a question of how much editing there is and who’s doing it.