All right, all right: Perhaps it was a tad bit mean-spirited to begrudge young parents their first vacation to Disneyland with a child. Six Apart president Mena Trott, who spent the weekend in the happiest place on earth with husband and CTO Ben Trott, is hilariously unapologetic about taking a vacation right after…
Six Apart, the San Francisco blog-software company which helped spark the blogging boom, just laid off 16 of its 200 employees. And its top executives took a 15 percent paycut. Such noble sacrifice! Except that those cutbacks have not crimped the holiday plans of cofounders Ben and Mena Trott. She surprised her…
The trolls will always be with us, because the Internet is full of insane sociopaths. Charming sociopaths, clever sociopaths, perhaps even magazine-profile-worthy sociopaths — but sociopaths all the same. Wired profiled a videogame-heavy set of Internet trolls in January. The New York Times Magazine hunted and…
In June, Six Apart's Mena Trott told a CBS reporter, on camera, that she thought her baby was ugly. "Babies that age are kind of meh," she said. "I mean, Penelope has always been cute in our eyes, but looking back at pictures we think 'this is cute?' Not throw-up ugly, but definitely not as cute as now." Her…
Six Apart cofounder Mena Trott turned 30 last September. But the new mom didn't become officially old until today. Welcome to adulthood, Mena. [Twitter]
Since acquiring LiveJournal in 2005, Six Apart has gotten little but grief from the blogging site. Now, at last, it's gotten some cash. The San Francisco-based blog-software company has sold LiveJournal to Sup, a Russian media concern. Ostensibly, the purchase of LiveJournal two years ago was meant to improve Six…
Who is Penelope Trott? According to a Twitter sent by Six Apart executive Anil Dash, a close confidante of Ben and Mena Trott, the founders of the blog-software company, she's made him "smile all day." We can only guess that Penelope is the name of the Trotts' long-expected offspring. If so, congratulations. We…
We just heard an outlandish rumor: That San Francisco-based blogging company Six Apart, whose software powers many of the world's most popular blogs, considered splitting in two earlier this year, under former CEO Barak Berkowitz. But the company recently upgraded its CEO, replacing Berkowitz with executive Chris…
It's a big year for Ben and Mena Trott, the husband-and-wife founders of Six Apart. The blog-software company was named after their six-days-apart birthdays; Mena just turned 30 yesterday, while Ben begins his fourth decade on Saturday. (Such a cradle-robber, that Mena.) Six Apart's board of directors just gave Mena…
Word is that Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal and chief architect of Six Apart, is leaving the troubled blog-software company. And the fact that you're hearing about from a gossip blog rather than the transparency-loving company is itself a sign of how deep the problems run. Fitzpatrick, who sold his…
I never intended for the blogger-baby story, which began with the birth of Ollie Kottke to A-list bloggers Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan, to become quite such a saga, but news has a way of happening. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are no longer expecting a baby — they have a daughter, Sonnet Beatrice…
Why make such a fuss over who's disclosing their pregnancies? I worked at Wired Ventures, then the publisher of Wired magazine, in 1996 and 1997, in the midst of the agony of its failed IPO attempt. One controversy at the time was the disclosure that cofounder Jane Metcalfe, the magazine's publisher, was pregnant…
Mena Trott, cofounder and president of Six Apart, the blog-software company, is pregnant. There, I said it — and now, so has she. Trott blames her superstitions as a first-time mother for keeping the pregnancy a secret for so long. The lack of disclosure, though, has been uncharacteristic for Trott who, as a…
Last week, the birth of a son (and future blogger) to Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan reminded us of another famous Web personality who triedhad a colleague try, bizarrely, to claim that the mom-to-be's pregnancy was "off the record." (Memo to other would-be secret-keepers: "Off the record" is always a matter of mutual…
Are you coming to this Thursday's Web Infinity Plus One SloshCon? Of course you are! It's free and there's an open bar!
No joke, we're holding a Web Infinity Plus One Conference at the House of Shields a week from today! The top room's reserved and the sponsors are ponying up for the bar tab. The deets:
Mena Trott loves bloggers. The Six Apart co-founder cares about her husband and business partner. She is a good and decent person.
