"U-Blog, Six Apart, and Their Angry Bloggers": first answer.

As some of you may have read, Stéphanie has posted a note about a few French U-bloggers being angry about the way we introduced TypePad to them. I will write a longer note on this subject but I would like to share with you the comment I have posted today on Stephanie's note and Jeff's blog as a start.

"Hi Stéphanie, thank you for the last update on your post that takes out any doubt readers of Jeff’s note may have about me hiding the issue to Six Apart which would be quite stupid from me, here are some notes about the story that I have also posted on Jeff Jarvis’ blog.

About the fact that there are only a few angry U-blog users on 22000 I agree that they should be taken care of and that is what I believe I have been doing since it started and I also spend hours answering comments on my last post in French.

The problem has started to happen as early as we announced the Typepad exclusive representation partnership in Europe, months ago.

Six Apart US has known about it since the very first day (and even before as we all thought there were risks that it would happen and difficult to avoid it by introducing Typepad on Ublog) and therefore months before the acquisition of Ublog, it is not really my style in business to hide anything to my partners, Stephanie may check that with any partner I have worked with in the last 8 years of business.

I had written a post immediately about it in French here [FR] and discussed with the angry Ubloggers immediately, with tens of comments on this post and a discussion that started with my clients.

Some users offered me to organize a chat with me which I gladly accepted and just before the hour chosen for the chat, nobody showed up, so I also think we tried to discuss as much as we could with our users.

Anyway, this has been an issue for a while, limited to a few number of U-blog users as most of them are obviously happy, some moved obviously to Typepad too. The number of blogs created on Ublog went from 2000 when I acquired it to more than 22 000 with a strong growth, I think this shows that we have a few happy users too…

I have posted again [FR] about it on my French blog and there are tens of comments so the discussion is going on again and I am trying to understand the issue better and solve it as much as I can with my team.

If you are interested in this issue, stay tuned for a post on my side soon. Thanks."