All the complaints here are justified. But why are you wasting your time making them. I've been reading comments on all the announcements from On High after The Great Takeover. And it's the same sorry. They're talking the talk, but not walking the walk. Don't you people get it. Instead of arguing with these suit-types who haven't a clue about what made Typepad great, spend your time...finding a new home. %%robert

I want to address MELANIE and COLLEEN in particular. I think all of us appreciate the time and thought you've put in on this thread. You probably feel like...the little Dutch boy and the dike! But that said, I think Dave Tutin (a few posts up) has really hit the proverbial on the head. That is, the now notorious quote: ""Say Media expects to lose some subscribers to the Six Apart blogging platform. Its main focus, Young said, is in those that hope to build media businesses, rather than regular people who write a blog for fun." remains unanswered. Melanie -- I saw you addressed it qua "out of context" and you "couldn't imagine..." And I really appreciate your going out on a limb. And I would bet the family china that you believe what you're saying. BUT... I've been in your position, qua doing support for a major software company. A very major one...everyone here would recognize the name immediately (no, it's no Microsoft ). On more than one occasion we had circumstances like this. We went out on limbs too. And then the gang from the Executive Suite cut us off at the knees. We looked dumb. We felt dumb. What it's going to take to keep me, and a fair number I know here is: Let the author of the quote, HIMSELF, appear on this site. Let HIM give the context. Let HIM tell us why it doesn't mean we non-$$$ bloggers shouldn't be heading for the hills. Until he does so, his silence is deafening, and drowns out all your good efforts. His silence undercuts all the reassuring things you've said. OR, if he really means the quote and is just using you two to keep things calm, let HIM have the sand and decency to appear here and own up and say "It's true. I really don't care about you non-$$$ bloggers. 23 skiddoo, small change." The devil you know is better than the devil you don 't know. C'mon, man. Level with us! %%robert

Quite a thread. I've got a somewhat different take on it. From long experience, I've found that whenever someone running something (a business, a university department, a non-profit, an online business) says "we're excited about Thing X happening" it really means: "We're going to make this change. It's a done deal. Period Don't like it? Did we say 'that's the way it is'?." I've worked in all those areas, and I've been on the web since before it was the web: arpanet and bitnet. I'm sure there are exception. It would be nice to think Typepad will be one of them. But as a poker player (REAL poker like Five Card dDaw, not that quasi-gin-rummy thing called Texas Hold'Em), I bet with the cards I've got. Looks like "one of a kind" to me. Reference was made above to movabletype.com -- the post now up there says even less than what's been published here. There's a lot to like about MT -- but I got the very strong impression it was just sitting on the vine. Very little updated of any significanceSooner or later to drop off. So much as I wanted to take it seriously, I went to other high-end CMS solutions. Same thing here. When was the last time a new theme/template went up? That there was something which made users think "wow, I want to tell the world about TypePad"? Places like Squarespace and Posterous and even, gasp, Blogspot, are nipping at your heels. Like a lot of others have already said, I've nothing against monetization. But increasingly, and not just here, there's the really nasty development of groupthink, that the only web presence to be taken seriously is a monetized one. People who do it for love, or refusing to take freebies and have their credibility compromised -- we just don't seem to count. No amount of saying "we're excited" is going to change this. Actions speak louder than words. SixApart has been doing plenty of actions, and none of them recently show that SixApart is excited about having us non-monetizing types. %%robert