Six Apart turns blogs into full business Web sites

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Six Apart, a blogging software pioneer that is the top blog supplier to businesses, is looking to help organizations create full-featured Web sites, blurring the lines between blogs and business sites.

"Blogging is evolving," said Chris Alden, general manager of the professional business unit at Six Apart. "Maybe the era of pundit blogging is maturing: The adoption of blogging for personal business and productivity purposes is exploding."

The 150-employee San Francisco-based company is introducing an upgrade to its software for business blogging, known as Movable Type 4, that allow businesses to create and manage thousands of blogs inside or outside their organizations.

In addition, the company is expanding TypePad, its hosted blogging software used by professional bloggers and publishers, to allow users not just to update blogs, but also to add more traditional Web pages for storing static information.

TypePad is working with Microsoft's Windows Live Writer, its tool for publishing Web pages offline without an Internet connection. Once the user reconnects, the site is updated.

Blogs have given rise to a revolution in self-expression by providing simple tools for reading and writing on the Web.

They have caught on with office workers for publishing, marketing and internal communications, but have fallen short in meeting other organizational imperatives like security or integration with other commonly used business software tools.

This has led business users to mix blogs with competing Web publishing tools, including wikis for group database projects, collaboration suites from Microsoft or IBM and conventional content management systems.