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

Mena Trott Mena Grabowski Trott (born Philomena Frances Grabowski on 16 September 1977, now Mena Grabowski Lazar) is a co-founder of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad. Career Trott was president of Six Apart. The company name originates from ...

) 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 ...

, 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 Sort (typesetting), components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual alphanumeric charac ...

and TypePad. 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 software repository of over 220,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 45,500 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 14,500 contributors. ''CPAN'' can de ...

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

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

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

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

Technology Review TR100 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

, his wife, with her

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

, 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 web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

later in the decade. In 2003, Six Apart launched TypePad, 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 (), 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, as a way of keeping his high school ...

, 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 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