Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in December 2005, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
There is a special kind of irony that only the first blogosphere can produce. In December 2005, Mena Trott—co-founder and president of Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal—took the stage at Les Blogs in Paris to give a talk about culture. About kindness. About the importance of thinking before you write and treating people the way you want to be treated.
Somewhere in the audience, an IRC chat was running live on the screen behind him. And somewhere in this conversation, the name of a British participant Ben Metcalfe wrote two words: “This is stupid.”
Trott stopped his speech. He asked Metcalf to stand up. When he did, he called her an ass—and used language that wouldn’t have passed her citizenship test anyway. The room of 400 people became very quiet.
What followed became one of the defining events of early blog culture. Not because it’s unusually dramatic, but because of what it reveals—about the difficulty of promoting values you don’t fully embrace, about the gap between how founders present themselves and how they behave under pressure, and about what happens when the person you single out in public turns out to have a lot more standing than you thought.
Who was Ben Metcalfe really?
Hours after the confrontation, it became clear that Ben Metcalf was more than just a random critic with a laptop. He was project lead for the BBC’s backstage.bbc.co.uk developer network, representing one of the most respected public broadcasters on the planet. It turned out that one of them was a client of Six Apart.
The optics were not good. Six Apart publicly humiliated a senior BBC executive – a paying customer – in front of peers, investors and the press during a conference call.
Metcalfe, to his credit, handled it with more composure than the moment might have called for. He wrote candidly about it on his blog, admitting he was at a loss to use the word “gap” and describing a private conversation he had with Trott after the session—which he said ended in a handshake, and was, in his words, “really helpful.” He did not try to raise. It raised questions worth raising: how blogging culture manages dissent, the tension between the American West Coast approach to communication and the directness common in British and European professional circles, and whether “civility” as a concept is used to stifle legitimate criticism rather than encourage genuine dialogue.
These are still live questions. Over time, they became less interesting.
The contradiction at its center
What makes Les Blogs incident so faithful—what gives it power beyond initial gossip—is the precision of its contradiction. Mena Trott’s main argument was not wrong. By the mid-2000s, the blogging world was going from bad to worse. Personal bloggers have faced harassment. Comment sections were getting worse. The dream of the Internet as a place of genuine exchange ran up against the reality of anonymous brutality.
But delivering that message from one stage, then immediately losing your temper at the first person to push back, demonstrated why appeals to top-down civility so rarely work. The problem was never that people didn’t know how to be kinder. The problem was—and remains—being kind is harder than promoting kindness, and the pressure to act polite while stifling the original response creates a peculiar dishonesty.
Metcalfe was not cruel. He spoke directly. He disagreed with what he heard, using strong language that in his cultural context was closer to a hurt accent than a personal attack. The decision to project the rear channel on the main screen – the choice of Six Apart as the conference’s organizer – meant that his comment was publicized. In this sense, Trott was reacting to something that seemed accidental.
There’s a lesson here for any founder building a public platform around a set of values. Values must be exposed to true criticism. If they only hold when everyone agrees, they are benefits, not values.
What this meant for Six Apart’s reputation
By late 2005, Six Apart was already navigating rough waters. MSN Spaces was eating its audience. WordPress was growing faster than anyone expected. The company operated three distinct products—TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal—each aimed at a different market, each requiring continued investment.
In this context, the case of Les Blogs was not catastrophic in itself. But he added an example. Mena Trott was the public face of Six Apart – its most visible spokesperson, its main voice. When he behaved in a manner that seemed impulsive or callous, it was not just a reflection of his personal situation. This has colored perceptions of the company’s judgment, culture and ability to lead a space that is about true communication.
The blogging community is unusually attentive to how its leaders behave. You can’t defend openness while suspending criticism. You can’t make tools for self-expression while punishing people who use them.
A more difficult question, the event has never fully answered
Ben Metcalfe wrote something worth sitting through after the dust settled. He noted that many of those who objected to Trott’s speech came to see in later years what he was pointing out—that the hostility of online spaces has real costs, especially for personal and amateur bloggers who are not registered to be public figures.
He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t wrong. Both things can be true.
In 2005, the blogosphere was learning what social media platforms are still learning: that real community requires more than a publishing tool. This requires norms, shared expectations, and some mechanism to manage the inevitable friction between honesty and harm. That problem has not been solved. Every platform that promises to be “different”—more civilized, more thoughtful, more human—ultimately faces the same tension that Mena Trott tripped over in a Paris conference room.
What the Six Apart vs BBC moment captures in miniature is the fundamental difficulty in building communities around values that you truly possess but fail to fully embody. It’s easy to be patriotic. In front of 400 people in a room you’re organizing, it’s much harder to model when someone is writing “blabbermouths” in big letters on the screen behind you.
The event is not over at Six Apart. It did not define it. But it was a moment when the gap between the company’s public persona and its private reality was briefly visible to everyone, including the BBC.
