LiveJournal + Six Apart = ?

This Salon.com article does a great job of explaining what the individual companies represent and why this purchase shook up so many people.

...[O]ne of the things that makes LiveJournal special is that it is not just a set of software applications. There is also an extensive network of emotional support, both formally and informally...

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Six Apart consistently provides excellent tools for those who want to be bloggers, but they started by building tools, not by building community. Whether LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick intended to or not, he created a community that exists far beyond his tools.

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There is no doubt that Six Apart recognizes and values LiveJournal and the community that is embedded in it. At BlogTalk in Vienna, Austria, Mena Trott (the president of Six Apart) began her speech by stating that "I feel strongly -- and have always -- that personal weblogs are often marginalized because of their presumed triviality." She chastised self-identified bloggers for dismissing practices that appeared different from their own. But Trott also recognized cultural differences, noting that her original conception of bloggers reflected those who valued punditry and sought very large audiences to challenge journalism and politics. But through her work on TypePad -- a blogging service hosted by Six Apart -- she realized that there was an extensive population of bloggers who did not have these goals in mind -- they wanted to post only for their friends and family.

 It is the intimacy of friends, family and people-like-me that LiveJournal has fostered. When Six Apart bought LiveJournal, it did not simply purchase a tool -- it bought a culture. LJ challenges a lot of assumptions about blogging, and its users have different needs. They typically value communication and identity development over publishing and reaching mass audiences. The culture is a vast array of intimate groups, many of whom want that intimacy preserved. LiveJournal is not a lowbrow version of blogging; it is a practice with different values and needs, focused far more on social solidarity, cultural work and support than the typical blog... My hope is that Six Apart will learn from LiveJournal and treat LJers with nonpatronizing respect. In essence, the company must first value the social contract and culture that are LiveJournal and then let LiveJournal teach it how to make those better.

Mena Trott is no Bill Gates. I hope the LiveJournal and MovableType software are only improved by this merger... and that TypePad and LiveJournal get to continue to serve their very different user bases.

Edited to add: if you can't get to the Salon.com article (or don't want to view ads to get a free day pass), you should at least read Mena's latest post/speech on the subject of blogs. She gets it, or is trying to...