Interview with Dr. Stefan Glänzer, Co-Founder of 20six Weblog Services AG



When did you decide that you wanted to start the 20six venture?

Stefan Wiskemann came up first with the idea in late summer 2002 and we finally decided to go for it in November 2002.

How many people and how much time did it take to build the recently launched service?

Christoph, Stefan and I work since November on it … then Christian, Leif, Anton, Max, Nicola, Julia and Dennis joinded the crew.

How many people does 20six currently employ?

Currently 10.

Do you develop the application in-house or do you use services of an external technology partner?

We developed our service internally as well as externally, but with time, everthing will be done internally.

Corante's "Microcontent News" classifies weblogging tools as either "Weblog Publishing" or "Weblog Community" software. How would you categorize 20six according to Corante's classification scheme?

We simply want to offer our customers the best product and best service available, i.e. 20six offers the best of both worlds. In the near future, our customers will be able to choose between the two options "Weblog Publishing" or "Weblog Community" - in my personal opinion, I like community-blogging, e.g. LiveJournal in the US.

How is 20six different from European contenders such as Knallgrau's (closed) Antville.org or Knallgrau's Twoday.net (both based on HOP)?

20six is based on a knowledge management system, which will lead to some very exciting tools for our customers in the very near future. Of course, the version of 20six which is online now is not the end of our vision for the company, but you can already see some advantages within 20six, e.g. the search engine, which allows you to search either for members, interest or full text search or the community functions, which are wholly absent from Movable Type or Blogger. The easy What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor for changing site design and posts without coding HTLM or knowing what CSS is is probably our main attraction right now. Then there's our rating ("karma-voting") system, which is great because it motivates frequent updates.
I think the main advantage of 20six in the long term is that it's adaptable to the user - you get the completely tech-ignorant person, who just wants to blog and who finds the system easy to use. Then you get people who know a bit of HTML, who can embed video and sound in their weblogs and this kind of thing will continue: 20six will always be easy-to-use, but as users get more proficient technically and as 20six matures, many advanced features will appear on the site. There'll be little limit to what advanced users can do with 20six.

How, in your opinion, are "weblog communities" different from early Internet communities such as Geocities (now owned and operated by Yahoo!)?

Weblogs are the next stage of personal publishing. They are much more simple to create and update and offer more options for real multimedia publishing. And - most importantly - weblogs are read intensively.

The weblog community makes heavy use of content syndication and aggregation, in many cases via RSS and/or RDF. The current templates at 20six do not seem to feature output to syndication formats. Does 20six plan to offer aggregation features to its users in the future?

Yes, there probably will be syndication at some point.

Do sites hosted at 20six ping weblogs.com? Does 20six plan to offer its own central pinging facility to its users?

For now, we've integrated into blogcheckup.de, which is the weblogs.com equivalent for the German users.

Why are individual weblog URLs at 20six so complex? (example: http://www.20six.de/-/de/weblog/ijlt5wm9zetp)

This will be a problem of the past very soon. For now, weblog URLs are www.20six.de/username

Could you explain the ideas behind your "Bonbon"-rewards system?

If you really enjoy reading a blog, you have various options to show the author this: via mail, via comment, by listing the site in your "Good Weblogs" category or via awarding him with a virtual "bonbon".

When are you planning on starting to charge for certain features of your service?

As we say on our website: "there is no free currywurst" - but we do not know when, how much and what kind of a model. Right now its free - lay back and enjoy.

What percentage of your user base do you plan to convert into paid subscribers?

As many as possible ;-) ... But to be honest: we believe in first things first. First of all we focus on bringing the excitement of blogging to the German internet users - not the coder/hacker, but everyone who enjoys using the net.

Where do you see 20six in 3 years from now?

As a veritable, widely recogniced brand in the blogosphere.

You successfully merged Ricardo.de with UK-based QXL. Do you have European expansion plans for 20six?

First things first, but I personally very much believe in the concept of Europe. Let's wait what the future will bring.

Is 20six funded by VC money?

No comment, we just started.

Could you reveal the URLs of weblogs written by 20six employees?

Of course: www.20six.de/zoobra and www.20six.de/koenig are the ones of my partners, and then we have, for example, www.20six.de/martini, www.20six.de/undef, www.20six.de/living_neon, just to name some.

My own weblog can be found at www.20six.de/stefan

Thank you for your time and answers.


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