Benjamin Trott (born September 22, 1977) is a co-founder (with ex-wife Mena Trott) of

Six Apart Six Apart Ltd., sometimes abbreviated 6A, is a software company known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting service, and Vox (the blogging platform). The company also is the former owner of LiveJournal. Six Apart is he ...

, creator of

Movable Type Movable type (US English; moveable type in British English) is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual alphanumeric characters or punctuation m ...

and

TypePad Typepad is a blogging service owned by Endurance International Group, previously owned by SAY Media (from the merger of Six Apart Ltd and VideoEgg). Originally launched in October 2003, Typepad is based on Six Apart's Movable Type platform, and ...

. In November 2010, he became Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of SAY Media, a new online advertising and software company formed by a merger of ad network VideoEgg with Six Apart. Before joining SAY Media, Trott was also CTO of Six Apart. He is a regular contributor to

CPAN The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. ''CPAN'' can denote eit ...

(the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), and has written for

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

.com and contributed to ''Essential Blogging''. In 2004, he was named to the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

TR100 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at ''Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Influence of Six Apart

Trott originally developed Movable Type in 2001 during a period of unemployment to help Mena Trott, his wife, with her

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

, but the commercial potential was shown by over 100 downloads during the first hour it was made public. It became the dominant self-hosted blogging software platform for several years, until surpassed by

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

later in the decade. In 2003, Six Apart launched

, a popular hosted weblog service. Both came under heavy criticism in 2004 after moves to charge users to use the popular Movable Type system, even though there remained a free non-commercial version. In January 2005, Six Apart purchased

LiveJournal LiveJournal (russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, a ...

, another pioneer in blogging, later selling it at a profit. The company also started a fourth blogging solution, Vox, which it shut down shortly before the

SAY Media Say Media (formerly VideoEgg) is a technology and advertising firm. The company provides a publishing platform (Tempest) to professional publishers and sells advertising across that platform and extended network of sites. Say Media has offices ...

acquisition in late 2010. Say Media later sold TypePad to Endurance International Group.

References

External links

SAY Media

About Six Apart

stupidfool.org, Ben Trott's personal blog
American bloggers People from Sonoma County, California 1977 births Living people American computer programmers 21st-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1970s-stub