Well, the hardest thing about blogging is not having things to say, but finding the time to write them down. And oddly, when I do find the time to write them down, I have very little to say. This is no exception…
There’s a blogger out there named Anil Dash, who I first stumbled across at the Gathering by the River over there in Yarmony Creek territory. His bio is on the site, but he worked for Six Apart, a company that made some of the first mass-used blogging software. Their main platform is/was called Movable Type. Moveable Type powers Daring Fireball, I believe, and has mostly had it’s lunch eaten by Wordpress. Six Apart has recently been bought by some larger company, and that’s not what this post is about so I’ll skip the details.
Six Apart was one of the few venture capital funded software companies to have been birthed in the wake of the Clinton era technology bubble (or the bursting of said bubble, to be more accurate). The founding of the company is profiled in the excellent book Founders at Work, one of the few cover-to-cover-interesting business books I’ve ever read, and the only one on the Apress imprint. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in how some of these more modern web startups got their start, as well as some interesting backstory on Apple, Adobe, and a bunch more early 80’s innovators that you’ve probably never heard of. There’s a section on Evan Williams, one of the really smart founders of Twitter, only the profile was written about three years ago, when he was known as one of the really smart founders of Blogger. Rather amazing.
And cue the crying baby.
Anyway, my point was that Anil’s blog has seen a lot more interesting action lately, which is cool because he’s got some really interesting takes on some of the business out there and the culture that goes with it. Enjoy.
jg