Today, he shared this quote from Anil Dash:

“It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.”

Anil Dash, The Web in Danger, Nov 16th, 2009

Oh, how clear it is. As I commented on Simon’s post:

Anil is a VP at Six Apart.

Why do images on TypePad not have file name extensions?

Why are there no export features for Vox?

I could go on… I’ve emailed Anil Dash personally months ago about each of these issues. As has historically been the case with my interactions with Anil, I’ve only got hand waving back.

Here are the Get Satisfaction threads on those two issues:

• Explain image URLs in TypePad and why they differ
• How to export my Vox blog?

This is something that gets me emotional. Even if Six Apart did not compete with us (WordPress/WordPress.com/Automattic) in some spaces, this issue is one of my emotional Achilles’ heels.

For all of their tooting about the open web, not only are Six Apart’s main services not open source projects, but they have long outstanding issues with locking in their customers.

Being able to get your content and data out is the greatest fundamental of the open web!

Update (later the same day): Announced today at Web 2.0 NYC, Anil is no longer employed by Six Apart. He is now Director of Expert Labs. I wish him all the best in his new job trying to effect change on the greatest scale.

While working on the TypePad and Movable Type AtomPub Exporters (still in progress), programmer Ronald Heft Jr had a problem interacting with the WSSE authentication both use. The problem ended up being in his own code, but it also led to some interesting observations about how the authentication works.

TypePad doesn’t require as secure code.

This is a good reminder that allowing programmers a less secure option, and they will likely take it because they trust you, and have other deadlines.

WSSE authentication is inheritantly insecure.

When Ronald looked in his Movable Type database he found that the passwords were stored in plain text. WordPress remote access development lead Joseph Scott explains that the only way to support WSSE is to store the passwords in plain text on the server, which is one of the reasons why WordPress won’t be supporting WSSE.

Like last year, I’m mentoring Ronald Heft, Jr’s. He is working on TypePad AtomPub-based Content Importer. Ronald has been good about keeping me updated, asking good questions, proposing solutions, prioritizing issues, and sharing his results with the community.

Today seemed like a good day to take a look at the code and take it for a spin. I identified some issues and Ronald immediately responded with a plan to investigate and address them.

It isn’t quite ready for you to test importing from TypePad, but things are looking good. It’s getting close.

And TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO when it comes to search engine indexing. TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline.

Are there specific issues that WordPress needs to fix to reverse the blow (hard)?

Anil, do you have any data to support the wild claim that TypePad has better SEO than WordPress.com? Of course you don’t. Further, I don’t understand what the 2nd sentence means (link with additional info?) or how it even relates to SEO.

WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (once you enable permalinks) share the same great SEO, and WordPress is generally recognized as having the best SEO of any web publishing platform out there. We are very fortunate for having numerous SEO experts that have long participated in WordPress development including SEO luminaries like Google’s Matt Cutts.

Here are a couple of the most obvious issues TypePad could fix to get on the path to WordPress levels of SEO:

1. For years TypePad’s URLs of posts (permalinks) had underscores between_words, which still are not well supported by search engines. In the last couple of years thankfully they now default to using-hyphens for new posts which allows search engines to recognize the individual words.

Unfortunately, TypePad still only includes fifteen characters from the title in the URL. Anil’s example http://www.celebrity-babies.com/2008/06/scott-and-renee.html didn’t show this, but it often results in words being cut off in the mid.

Lets look at the articles of one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Seth Godin. What would you or a search engine think is going to be the title of the post with the URL of http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/the-marketing-o.html . No, it isn’t “The Marketing O’”, it’s “The Marketing of Fear”. If you look at his other articles must suffer from this same problem.

If you want TypePad URL SEO you have to limit your titles to a couple of words?!

2. TypePad sets an article’s URL when a draft is first made and doesn’t update it when the title is updated. This one is the far more annoying and potentially embarrassing if the original title was inappropriate.

Lets look at the posts of another one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Steve Rubel. Just looking at his posts on the front page, I only have to look to the 2nd post from the top to see an example of this problem. The title is “Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing”, but the URL is http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/06/how-friendfeed.html. How? That must have been how the beginning of his original draft read.

Where I see this issue the most is blogs with editors. Look for it the next time you are reading a Wired blog. I’m sorry now that I’ve pointed it out, you likely won’t be able to help but notice, and it will start to bug you too as much as it bothers me

Six Apart is well aware of both issues, and knows the SEO implications. For the second issue, I emailed Anil about this over six months ago, because it bugs me that much.

On the other hand, not only does WordPress not have either of these problems, if you change the URL after publishing, the old URL will continue to work and forward to the new URL.

I’ve done a few exports from TypePad, one of the most recent being Health.com’s blog. One of the things I did was review the existing search engine optimization and I’ve been repeatedly surprised to find scrapper sites some times show up above the blog in search results. My guess is these two issues at least play a part in this happening.

These type of issues are in the most basic examples of SEO. Worse, it’s just a lousy experience — I like to think the first rule of SEO is that the optimization is also a good user experience, or at the very least doesn’t detract from the experience. Come on Six Apart fix these issues. It’s better for everyone.

• Friends don’t let Friends use TypePad
• WordPress vs. TypePad, Round 2

These articles are clearly based on his extensive experience using both platforms.

There are many fantastic people at Six Apart, but I’m exhausted by their leaderships tactics and disappointed by their response to those articles. Although I’m just as focused on solutions for our customers, the gloves come off, and I plan to be more direct in combating their falsehoods and misdirection.

Take my observations from the biased position that I have, as Six Apart’s #1 competition. But hopefully by sharing my biased experience and observations, I can either help you become a WordPress member, or demand better from Six Apart. Please challenge me on what I write!

The inconvenience and their frustrations with software usually leaves them too afraid to even consider switching to another publishing platform.

It is ok that it isn’t their issue. We all have a limited amount of energy, and relative to other causes open source isn’t urgent.

It is our opportunity, those that are passionate about open source, to provide a solution that is superior. We need to allow those people to see benefits that overwhelm their fears and helps them champion their own causes.