Six Apart has a clever “program” up to get recently laid off journalists to start blogging. They’re calling it the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Basically, it gives journalists these things for free:

• A TypePad Pro account for free. Usually costs $14,95/month.
• Enrollment in the Six Apart Media advertising program, to get the ad dollars rolling.
• An extra push on blogs.com.

They also offer support and whatnot, all for free. The only thing the journos need to do is send a link to their last piece for a newspaper or similar. And according to the post, there’s been an overwhelming interest in this, so they’re lagging a bit behind on setting the accounts up, but no word on closing the program. read more

Six Apart has reported some downtime to their TypePad service, including the TypeKey, and also to the Vox blogging service. The downtime was reported at 11:28 PM PDT, and all the services seems to be back up at 12:08 AM PDT. The status page reports:

Midnight: A bad power supply in one of our core routers is preventing some TypePad blogs from displaying. We are onsite working to resolve the problem.

Everything should be working now. Did the outage affect you?

Coollittlethings Studio has added its own software to the mix of blogging applications for the iPhone in the shape of Blog Press (iTunes Store link).

Unlike some other general blogging tools for the iPhone which have missed out one or more key blog platforms, the developers claim it works happily with all the major players — that’s Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, Movable Type, and TypePad.

It supports photo uploading from a Picasa Web Album or Blog Press Public Album (both of which would need to be set up first, naturally). It’s not clear whether you can also grab photos from the iPhone’s albums, as you would with most other applications. read more

The Martha Blog, the official blog of Martha Stewart, has announced a blog upgrade.. and they’re moving to WordPress!

The new blog, now live, is hosted at The Martha Blog - at www.themarthablog.com.

Martha writes:

In order to have a blog, you need to enlist a blogging platform, which supplies all the necessary tools for getting your photos and text onto the Internet. As my blog has grown in popularity, we realized we were ready to switch to a platform offering more programming options. After careful research, that new platform will be WordPress, which we hope to launch tomorrow with an exciting photo gallery from my most recent trip to Mexico. With this new program, you will notice additions, such as a search engine within my blog and more robust photo galleries.

Prior to this change, Martha Stewart was using Typepad.

Hate! Loathe! Whine! Spit!

That’s the first impression I received after browsing through the reviews of Six Apart’s iPhone App on iTunes.

While many were upset that a TypePad account would cost them 495 pennies a month, others seemed upset that this app would not work on Movable Type (or even Vox) despite the obvious indication that this is a TypePad only app. read more

Six Apart has announced that it’s making the technology behind TypePad’s blog comment spam system freely available to bloggers using Movable Type 3/4, WordPress 2.5, or “any other platform which supports spam plugins”. The system is already built in to TypePad.

The beta version of TypePad AntiSpam is now available to both personal and commercial users, regardless of how many comments their blogs receive. It’s a self-learning system, meaning that whenever a user reports a comment as spam, the system should learn from that, and improve its spam filters.

As a potential rival to Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam is also fully compatible with its API.

As for concerns that open sourcing the system will simply aid spammers wishing to circumvent the system, the FAQ explains: “We aren’t sharing all of the rules and logic that we run with our implementation of the TypePad AntiSpam engine. We are open sourcing the core engine, allowing others to build on top of our system allowing them to build and operate their own spam service.”

An enterprise-class service may be offered in the future, along with a customised service for users with specific requirements.

TypePad AntiSpam

TypePad, the paid blogging system from Six Apart (makers of our favourite blogging tool Movable Type),will launch in preview release Tuesday (Monday 11:59pm US Eastern Time- 11:59am Tuesday Western (Australian) Standard Time) with some excellent features and competitive pricing structure which will provide some much needed competition to the Google controlled giant Blogger.
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