A Life in Blogging | Big Think

A Life in Blogging

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Blogger Anil Dash details his role in establishing his medium as the Internet’s primary form of communication—and explains why he’ll never write a book about it.

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Anil Dash:

Anil Dash (born 1975) is a blogger, entrepreneur and technologist. He is currently the Director of Public Technology Incubator Expert Labs and a partner at ACTIVATE, a media & technology consulting firm.

Previously an independent technology consultant, and a new media developer for the Village Voice, Dash was the first employee of Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, and served as its Vice President and Chief Evangelist until moving on to Expert Labs. In 2003, Dash was one of four bloggers featured on the PBS series Media Matters. He is also in demand as a speaker at such events as Northern Voice and the Web 2.0 Conference.

Dash's current role is directing Expert Labs, a non-profit, independent group with a mandate to help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government utilize the expertise of their fellow citizens.

Dash was born and grew up near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A long-time resident and vocal fan of New York City, he lived in San Francisco for a time but has now returned to New York City.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Are you the founder of blogging?

Anil Dash: No way. Blogging is one of these things where it’s a little bit like asking, “Who’s the first rapper?” or “Who invented rock and roll?” You can always go back to somebody earlier. I’ve been doing it 10 or so years. I started in maybe 1999. There’s clearly people who influenced me who called what they were doing a web blog in ’98, ’97; for me, Peter Merholz who does peterme.com or davewire.com, those were influences. But if you look at the traits of what we consider a blog—a personal voice who uses the internet well, rich with links, edited by a real human with a human voice—those things, I think you go back to the very first webpage. I think if you look at the first thing that Tim Berners Lee posted when he invented the web, or Marc Andreessen at that first page for the first browsers that would later become Mozilla and Netscape. The very birth of the web was really very similar in format and content to what a blog looks like today.

Question: What is the story behind Six Apart?

Anil Dash: Six Apart has been an amazing journey for me. The company’s name comes from our co-founders, Ben and Mena. They are a husband and wife couple whose birthdays are six days apart, and it’s interesting because people always perceive as it being about six degrees of separation or something like that, and what I love is, instead, it’s a real human story of two people who are among my closest friends; they are this great, kind of cute, young married couple with a little girl, the American Dream; they were high school sweethearts, and the whole thing has spun into the biggest blogging company in the world, arguably one of the biggest social media companies in the world. It’s been tremendously influential.

The things we’re known for is creating blogging platforms like Movable Type and TypePad; so, when people go into blogs or have posted, at the bottom it says “Powered by Movable Type.” You could go to barrackobama.com or britneyspears.com, and you see that they are using these tools. There is a lot of pride in thatm and these days the company does a lot more.

We have a very successful services team here in New York that’s helping all the biggest publishers in the world. We have an advertising team that’s helping individual bloggers to become more successful, so maybe they can do more reporting in their free time, or cover their topic a little bit more passionately.

What I think has been amazing is, when I joined Ben and Mena there was 3 of us. I was literally in a spare bedroom; it’s that kind of almost prototypical story of a technology company—you just have a belief beyond all rationality that what you’re doing is important, and back then a lot of people thought blogs were a fad and was going to be like CB radio and go away. They certainly never thought you would go to whitehouse.gov, and the White House website will have a blog. Some small part of the reason why that’s true, or why so much of what we read for fun is from blogs, is because the work Six Apart has done.

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