Sippey, Superstar!

One of the most satisfying and fun things I've ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just about the biggest shows in town, and Sippey killed it on the toughest stage around.

As Michael graciously mentions in his own post, the demo wouldn't have been possible without our great developer (and demo god in his own right) Ray Marshall, along with Stephane Delbecque on our team who helped pull the entire effort together. You can watch the whole keynote on Apple's site, or just see a short clip of the TypePad demo for yourself:

But while I'm happy for Michael and the team on such a great demo, it also made me happy to see Michael onstage showing that his knowledge of blogging is second to none. Michael was, along with Peter, one of the people who really inspired me to start blogging, and he's probably under-recognized as a pioneer.

The list of ways he's influenced blogging and our industry are countless: Even the biggest gadget blogs today still make a huge deal out of featuring big-name tech CEOs when they get an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, but Michael interviewed Jeff Bezos for his seminal blog Stating the Obvious twelve years ago. I interviewed Michael for our series on the 10th anniversary of blogging last year, in which Michael talks about creating what was arguably the first link blog, Filtered for Purity, ten years ago. And of course, Mena mentioned Michael's joining Six Apart back in 2004 as our VP of Products. It's a role he's held ever since.

Add in his influence in efforts like advising the original Pyra team, which created Blogger, and it calls to mind the old chestnut about the Velvet Underground: Not everybody has read Michael Sippey's blog, but everyone who did, started a blog. (And at some point in recent history, it's possible that everyone who did started a blogging company.) Congrats to my friend Michael on putting that experience on display on the biggest stage around.

(And oh yeah, if you're the best in the world at what you do, you can work at Six Apart, too.)