Mark Evans

Cash for Six Apart; Woes for Wordpress

There's lot of chatter about Six Apart raising $12-million with lots of VCs salivating over the deal. Is this bubble-like activity? Maybe but at least Six Apart has a service, plenty of users, and a well-known brand. In other words, it's a real business as opposed to an ideas being chased by VCs worried about missing out of the Web 2.0 bonanza. Om Malik wonders about the exit strategy. While IPOs are rare these days, I think he makes a mistake in dismissing Yahoo because Six Apart had a pre-deal valuation of $80-million. Companies like Six Apart, Technorati, deli.icio.us and Memeorandum are being viewed as strategic assets, which means their “value” tends to as much as about brand, users and the role within a portfolio as it does about dollars and cents. In an ideal world, it would interesting to see a merger between Six Apart (the leading blogging platform), Technorati (the leading blog search engine) and FeedBurner (the leading blog-vertising player). It's probably unlikely but a nice thought. In terms of other blog platforms, I wonder how long Wordpress will carry on with getting an injection of cash. As much as Wordpress has cache, it likely needs money to support its growth. I've got a couple Wordpress blogs and one of them All Nortel, All the Time (a hosted version) crapped out this morning. Not good. Not happy.