Mike Dammann: Anil, you have been on the map for a while, but one of the things most people will remember you for is your victory in the first SEO contest ever. How has this popularity in the SEO world affected your regular work and do  people still ask you for advice because of it?

Anil Dash: These days, very few people ask for my feedback on SEO, because it’s been a number of years since that contest. But being aware of search engines is still a big part of my job, trying to make best practices automatic on our platforms, so that people don’t have to be aware of
this stuff if they just want to share their ideas or promote their efforts online.

In the past few years you have been responsible for quite a lot of innovations online. Being a part of the team creating Typepad and Moveable Type is one thing that comes to mind. It seems to me that blogging is what really your passion is. How has blogging changed your life, business and private and what do you recommend taking into consideration when creating an online persona per se through a blog?

Blogging’s impacted every part of my life, from being the base of my career to connecting me to some of my closest friends to helping me the couple that introduced me to my wife. I think if you consider it just another communications medium like email or the telephone, but with some unique powers for reaching a large audience, you can immediately think of ways to take advantage of it.

Of course, the potential for reaching that audience has some risks as well. The key thing to keep in mind is that the things you say will be online forever, with your name attached. I probably was a lot more antagonistic when I was younger and hadn’t quite learned that lesson.

Similarly, those of us who run sites are responsible for them, and it makes sense to make sure your authors and commenters are being accountable for what they publish online.

Now about Moveable Type version 4.2. Tell us a little bit about what to expect and in light of the many hack attacks on wordpress blogs, what sort of improvement in blog security can we expect to see?

Well, Movable Type’s long had a history of really strong security. This is where I think we really benefit from having a dual-licensed platform. Many of our best security improvements have come from submissions created by developers in our open source community, and then of course our own team of developers has done extensive work on security as well.

The key thing is, this isn’t about some competition between two successful blogging companies — this is about what’s good for the web. It’s a serious danger when there is potential for a huge number of sites to get hacked or even to be silently attacked and taken over by malicious coders. It’s just as terrible that so many people who don’t use Movable Type are at risk of having their content removed entirely from search engines if they get hacked through no fault of
their own. That’s basically facing an SEO death sentence, and it’s largely avoidable by using tools that don’t have that history of being insecure repeatedly.

How much attention do you yourself pay to seo these days and what are some of the best new things you have learned in the past let’s say 6 months?

It’s interesting, I’ve kind of changed the way I look at SEO. I think my initial introduction to it was from some of the worst black hats kind of defining the space, and there’s been a great evolution as the importance of regular best practices starts to be the focus. I mean, if you’re selling enlargement pills, maybe you need to be super aggressive with what you’re doing, but for 99% of publishers and businesses, they’d do well just to follow a few simple rules and not
having to know all the tips and tricks.

So the thing I’ve mostly been trying to pay attention to recently is, how can we at Six Apart (as a company that makes publishing tools) make it automatic that a lot of the fundamental SEO rules are being followed, so that regular people don’t have to even think about such things.

Looking at the history, I need to ask you what you are planning to do to help make it easier to install Moveable Type. And also easier for not so tech savvy bloggers to get security updates without having to hire anybody. Can we expect something new on cpanel anytime soon? Which are some of the new features coming up and also: Do you believe that the majority of recent attacks on WordPress blogs came thru plugins and is it true that themes aren’t code, so they can’t have security bugs? I have also noticed that when a MT database goes down due to high traffic from Digg or whatever, you can actually still access the  content of your blog. What else is there that makes MT unique and better than WP?

There’s a few different issues all tied in together here, but at the highest level, we don’t focus on our competitors who make software, we try to focus on what’s good for the web as a whole. So, we can do things like making TypePad AntiSpam the only totally free, open source blog spam prevention system. Of course, the competitor in my points
out that it works better than Akismet, but we’ve made it freely available for people whether they’re using WordPress or Movable Type or anything else, because we think it’s good for the web. Same with our Blog It application for the iPhone or for Facebook, which work with any tool out there.

With that in mind, though, there’s still a lot we can learn from other platforms out there, and installation is a good example. By its very nature, MT does a lot more out of the box than most tools, without needing third-party plugins, and partially as a result of that, installation can be tricky. So we’re making available completely-configured systems with MT in formats such as virtual machines and Amazon machine images for EC2. That means we’re definitely interested in working with the Cpanels and Fantasticos of the world about integrating Movable Type.

Here’s the thing, though: A five-minute install doesn’t save you any time if you’re having to repeat it every other week for a new security update. With MT, it’s very common for a major release version to be completely supported and secure for a year, during which time you don’t have to touch your system at all. So the biggest thing we can do for security is to reduce the upgrade fatigue that makes people not want to stay up-to-date with their software.

We also make some smart choices with the application itself. While we’ve supported dynamic publishing for years, we still are huge advocates of publishing static pages, because then you don’t have to worry about that Blue Screen of Death, the dreaded “Database Connection Error” that other tools always show when a site gets Dugg. In the past, static pages had a tradeoff in publishing time, but MT 4.2 is several times faster in publishing and supports some really
smart caching abilities by default, so a lot of that wait time is gone.

And Matt Mullenweg himself placed the blame for most security bug reports on the WP community’s theme developers and plugin developers. I’m not sure if that’s true, or if it’s fair, but I think it’s hard to expect all plugin and theme developers to be completely secure all of the time. As a result, the vast majority of what people would use a plugin for on WordPress can be done using native, secure, tested Movable Type template tags instead.

Where can we see you next? What is new in your personal life? Share something readers may not know and give a few more words of advice for anybody who wants to be successful online. What do you want to be known for the most?

I’m actually taking a little bit of time off from travel for a while, though I’m usually running around nonstop speaking at conferences. As a proud New Yorker, I’m really looking forward to the Web 2.0 Expo coming to New York this fall.

In my personal life, I’ve just been enjoying being in the city in the summer. From the great food to an infinite number of things to do, summer in New York City is still a pretty magical thing.

As far as advice goes, I’m not sure I’ve got any insights that people wouldn’t figure out on their own. But what’s worked well for me is to pick something that I genuinely love, even when people thought it was crazy and there was no money in it. And I’ve just stayed focused on that for nearly every waking hour for a few years now, even long after people said “oh, that’s old news” or whatever. And as a result, every opportunity or achievement I could have aspired to has opened up to me.

I’d like people to remember that I don’t take myself too seriously, and that I really appreciate that I get to have so much fun and have such a good life.