I met Mena and Ben Trott to talk about their company only once, at BlogOn, an industry conference that brought many blog enthusiasts to UC-Berkeley in mid-July. They were unmistakably ambitious and deeply engaged in the details of their business, which would not normally be a surprising thing to discover about the founders of a successful start-up company, except that everything I'd read about the Trotts, especially everything I'd read about them in the company's blogs, hadn't prepared me for it. On the blogs, the couple comes off as a very friendly pair that got into this game simply out of a love of good, clean, powerful software and an abiding belief in the ascendancy of the Web and of blogs. This image of asceticism is not entirely fiction; the Trotts, who managed the company from their own apartment, without any real hint of remuneration, for more than a year, would have to be true believers to devote themselves so completely to what some people are still calling a fad.

Yet it's also true that Trotts want their company to take off in a big, big way, and they aren't ashamed to say it. Over the past two years, they've worked at a frenzied pace to make a real business out of Six Apart. In 2003, they accepted funding from the Japanese venture capital firm Neoteny, whose CEO, Joi Ito, is a devoted and popular Movable Type blogger. The firm moved out of the Trott's San Francisco apartment and into an office in San Mateo, Calif. They hired Anil Dash as their first employee, and then, over the following year and a half, they opened a Japanese subsidiary and purchased a European blogging firm, putting the company's staff at about 40.

Along the way, Six Apart launched TypePad, a "hosted" blog service that combines the power of Movable Type with the ease-of-use of services like Blogger and LiveJournal, in that it doesn't require users to download any software or pay for a Web hosting service. TypePad has already attracted about a hundred thousand users worldwide -- a significant achievement since the system is not free, costing users between $5 and $15 a month to blog. And finally, in a thoughtful, well-reasoned post on the company Web log in mid-July, Mena explained that she'd decided to step down as Six Apart's CEO and have Barak Berkowitz, a Silicon Valley veteran, take the reins of the firm. Mena is now the company's president, and Ben is the CTO.

Considering the inexperience of its founders, the firm seemed to handle the transition from tiny to somewhat big pretty well. But while many people online have congratulated Six Apart on its success, its metamorphosis into a blogging powerhouse has not been universally appreciated, and by this year, some of its early fans were becoming annoyed. For one thing, they complained, the company had ignored, for too long, the tool that put it on the map -- Movable Type. During much of 2003, while Six Apart focused on expansion and on TypePad, Movable Type languished. In that time, bloggers who depended on the software became furious at its slow pace of improvement, and especially at the system's increasing vulnerability to so-called comment spam -- unsolicited offers for erectile dysfunction pills and the like appearing in the comments section of MT blogs.

What irked people the most, though, was the company's evolving culture. Throughout its history, the blogging firm run by Ben and Mena Trott had never really acted like much of a company at all; it was just a husband and wife in an apartment, bloggers and coders who were always willing to help out with pressing problems, and who didn't seem to care much about the bottom line. Suddenly, that attitude seemed to be changing, and MT users were none too pleased about it.

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