Today, the company has announced TypePad Developer Program, a resource that will give developers access to the TypePad API and back end while running their sites on their own web servers. Six Apart is simultaneously launching TypePad Motion, a microblogging service built from the Pownce code base. Six Apart acquired Pownce from founders Kevin Rose (also founder of Digg), Leah Culver, and Daniel Burka in December 2008.

As the inaugural open-source app built for the TypePad platform, Motion is written in Python using the Django framework and is intended to help site owners build their communities quickly and simply. You can see the app in action on actor Zachary Quinto's site.

The functions and form are reminiscent of Yahoo! Meme or Tumblr, and content can be cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. Site owners will have to contact Six Apart directly to integrate Motion into their sites.

In a post on the Six Apart blog, CEO Chris Alden wrote, "Our platform enables developers to use structured objects, like blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups, and tags, to quickly and inexpensively build next generation social applications on a reliable, secure, and scalable platform.

"We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube."

At press time we have not had a chance to try out Six Apart's new free, open source plugins but Wordpress users can read more about them and try them out here.

Microblogging

With Motion's microblogging feature, blogs can create either a private or public microblog or both. A private microblog could be used for internal employee or team collaboration, for example, whereas a public microblog would let you share with your online community. Arising from the ashes of Pownce, the company acquired by Movable Type back in December, this feature has some resemblance to that service as it also includes richer microblogging features that the former Pownce competitor Twitter does. In fact, Motion's microblogging service is more like FriendFeed as it allows you to post links, images, audio, and video in addition to text.

Activity Streams

Also like FriendFeed, Motion includes an activity streams feature which they call "Action Streams." These streams are created by members collecting and sharing information from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart's Action Streams service that launched in January 2009. The difference between Action Streams, which are implemented using a special blog plugin, and similar social networking services like FriendFeed or Plaxo is control. Site owners can selectively choose to show or hide individual actions in this decentralized framework. Also, Action Streams are published using Atom and the Microformat hAtom standard so they are not trapped in any one service.

Authentication Tools

Another aspect to Motion is its authentication tools which let users sign in with any existing account from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or any OpenID provider. According to Movable Type, this opens up your community to over half a billion web users who can now comment or vote on your content without having to create a new account. However, members who wish to participate in the microblog as opposed to just the blog itself are still encouraged to register with the site. Movable Type believes this strikes a good balance between allowing for participation while also providing a compelling reason to register with an online community.

Profiles

Finally, Motion users are provided with online profiles which show their actions from around the web. Site members can follow each other and upload profile pictures just as they would on any other social network. As with the company's other blogging products like TypePad and Vox, members' profiles can also list their other accounts from around the web. These are imported by using Microformats to link to those sites.

Getting Started

If you're curious about what Motion looks like in action, you can check it out on BikeHugger (click on "Latest Activity" to see Action Streams) or visit the microblogging community on Real Estate Channel. You can also sign up for a demo for more information.

Current Movable Type Pro users can go here to download the plugin.

The program launched over the weekend through via this lighthearted post over on TypePad.com which reminds you that "Tumblr...will not pay your bills." According to the company, they've already seen hundreds of journalists signing up to participate.

As detailed in the TypePad blog post, the bailout program includes the following, a dollar value of at least $150 per year (the price of the TypePad service alone), if not more :

A free TypePad Pro blog account, the same service that powers many big-name media blogs. It includes professional support so Six Apart will answer any questions you have.

The blog is enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are display ads that pay a more than Google text ads, and bloggers get to keep the revenue.

Six Apart will promote the new site on Blogs.com, a directory of the best in blogs. Blogs.com will be a way for all of the bloggers peers in the Journalist Bailout Program to cross-promote and share traffic for their independent sites.

Lots more. Six Apart can also introduce you to their VIP program to help drive traffic to the site, help connect blogs to LinkedIn profiles, make it easy to manage your comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically promote posts to your Facebook friends

There are no rules on how the blog must be used. Journalists can use the blog showcase their best work, launch something new, or hang onto the site, you know, "just in case."

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

We're in the midst of a great upheaval. The internet is impacting the business models of so many established ventures. Newspapers and magazines aren't the only industries affected by any means. The internet has left nothing untouched, whether music, video, news, sports, communication, marketing, advertsing and more, those wishing to stave off its force of change are simply trying to outswim a tidal wave.

What's better for those being impacted is to be prepared and thinking ahead for the future - what is Plan B? As we mentioned earlier this week, not everyone sees the death of the journalism ahead - media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for example, sees opportunity.

And if you think successful journalism can only come on the platform of old media, you're wrong. Look around. So many journalists are now getting into blogging, but one of our newest favs that proves the potential success of the model is TechFlash, home to John Cook and Todd Bishop, both of whom left their respected papers and struck out on their own to deliver quality tech news in readable format without all the bias, backstabbing, and petty quarrels the tech "blogosphere" seems to get itself involved in from time to time.

Journalists may also want to keep in mind Arianna Huffington's recent, but vague, promise to begin funding investigative journalism through her incredibly successful The Huffington Post site, one of the most recognizable and read blogs out there.

So journalists, get your platforms ready...there's no better time than now and no better price than free.

Note: Six Apart's Movable Type weblogging platform is what powers our blog here at ReadWriteWeb.

With the latest release of Movable Type 4.2, publishers can easily add forums, community blogs, and group blogs to their site. Site members can establish customizable profiles with avatars and can follow their friends. Given the correct permissions, community members can submit content for publishing on the site for the admin to approve. Those submissions will then display next to the comments on the submitter's user profile. Site members can also vote on content they like, too, a feature MT is calling "Digg in a box."

In addition to the changes in MT, Six Apart has also introduced a new plugin called "Action Streams." This plugin is very much inspired by FriendFeed, as it lets you aggregate and share your content from around the social web. In other words, Movable Type has just introduced their own self-hosted lifestream. (We had a feeling this was coming).

An Action Stream

BuddyPress

So where is WordPress's social network? It's still under development. Unlike MT, social networking with not be a feature of WordPress - instead, the WordPress MU core is being used to build out a next-gen publishing platform called BuddyPress . Essentially, BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each adding a new feature. When complete, BuddyPress will offer extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, friends, status updates, albums, as well as something called "the wire," which sounds a lot like Twitter.

Goodbye Blogging, Hello Social Web?

With both of the big players extending their traditional blogging platforms to offer social networking features, you have to wonder if traditional blogging is on its way out. For many years, web pundits have been saying that social networking would gain in popularity to such an extent that it would become a feature, not a destination in and of itself. These latest designs from MT and WordPress seem to prove that point.

In fact, even on today's blogs, publishers have already been adding social networking features to their sites through the use of blog plugins that offer things like FriendFeed integration, for example. (Case in point: RWW has integrated with FriendFeed). Also, by adding Disqus as a site's blog commenting system, bloggers were including a social network of sorts, as well. Like with MT 4.2, Disqus users can establish profiles, follow users, and track their comments across sites from one page.

More Profiles To Maintain

The only problem with MT and WordPress going the social networking route is that they are adding yet two more social networks where you will have to establish a profile, find and add friends, etc. Where's Facebook Friend Connect? Where's Google Friend Connect? Where's your portable social graph in all this?

These new publishing platforms will power the social web of the future, but without tools to make all these disparate social graphs meld together, the people who are actually participating will become even more frustrated than they are today. The need for data portability is even stronger than ever, but we need there to be a clear winner in the game before our lives can improve.

Further embracing open standards, actions are published via the plugin using the Atom format and the Microformat hAtom, which Six Apart hopes will make it easier for people to move their activity streams around and use them however they like.

On some level, this development at Six Apart somewhat mirrors the direction that chief rival Automattic is taking with Wordpress: microblogging. A couple of days ago, Automattic introduced a new theme for Wordpress.com called Prologue, which adds Twitter-like functionality to Wordpress. Six Apart's plugin, meanwhile, basically allows users to create a tumblelog of content aggregated from the places they already post it (thoughts from Twitter, images from Flickr, etc.). Activity Streams and Tumblr are not perfectly analogous, the same way Prologue and Twitter are not, but they do all fit in the same category of tools.

To me these announcements points to a couple of key trends:

• A trend toward microblogging -- always on updates distilled to their most base form are becoming a more visible and important part of blogging.
• A trend toward open formats and data portability -- take your data with you and display it however and wherever you want.

So how long until Wordpress follows Six Apart's lead with Activity Streams? My guess is that the always strong Wordpress developer community won't take very long at all to kick something unofficial out. In fact, my friend Dan Grossman has been using a plugin he developed for his own Wordpress-powered blog to do more or less the same thing for months now (see it in action here). He hasn't released the source yet because others haven't expressed much interest to him. Perhaps that's about to change.

As more sites join DataPortability.org and we begin to hopefully see the fruits of their labor, things like distributed activity streams should become easier and more common.