Six Apart announced today that it has officially launched Blogs.com in an attempt to “find the best blogs on the Web.”  And even better, the company said that it’s willing to let any blogger submit their site for consideration.

At first glance, Blogs.com is well-designed and its editorial staff, which picks the top ten stories to be placed on the site, seems to be working hard at finding the right balance between the top stories and a wide range of subjects.  But at this point, I can’t help but be suspect of its implementation and whether or not it’ll really be the place for small and big sites to co-mingle.

A quick glance at Blogs.com’s technology page tells you everything you need to know about its current focus.  Sure, the topics are wide-ranging, but the sites they link to are mostly those you would expect to see on sites like Digg or Techmeme: Engadget, Techdirt, and Wired.

Granted, the company didn’t explicitly say that its aim is to make blogs.com into a site that’s dedicated to finding good content from small bloggers, but Six Apart did say that it’s trying to “help all bloggers.”  If that’s true, why wouldn’t Six Apart actively seek out smaller blogs and let those that have little exposure get a piece of the limelight for once?

By Six Apart’s very own billing, its crack editorial team is “assembling Top Ten lists of blogs by category, to help you discover the best sites that you never knew existed.”  If that’s true, I’d like to see more than the obvious choices on the site and let the smaller bloggers take the limelight.

But just because things don’t necessarily reflect Six Apart’s intent right now, it doesn’t mean that it won’t work.  Blogs.com is now accepting submissions to be included in the top ten lists and your site could get more exposure if it’s picked.  And if it follows through on that promise and gives small bloggers the kind of exposure they wouldn’t normally get, I’ll be the first to take up arms alongside Six Apart.

But until then, I want to wait and see what comes of it.  If it turns into a derivative service that tries to mimic Techmeme, albeit with a more editorial flavor, that will be a mistake.

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A couple of months ago Six Apart launched a new initiative that provided custom ad options aimed to offer more engaging ways for brands to interact with content producers and consumers, thanks in part to its acquisition of Apperceptive. Things seemed to have worked well for Six Apart as a result, and the next step for the blogging software creator is a new self-service option for site publishers to add social networking capabilities to their online publications with the upgraded Movable Type Pro (MT Pro).

This combines Movable Type’s blogging platform with social networking features, which is something that many traditional and new media sites have begun to do in the past couple of years for branding purposes and additional engagement with consumers. Many traditional media companies have found this to be a challenging task given the existing crossover audience and lack of integration with publishers’ content for consumers’ purposes.

Now that companies have begun to find more productive ways of interacting with their customers online, Six Apart is capitalizing on this growing necessity with additional social networking tools that can be integrated with the Movable Type blogging platform. This will include things like social media content aggregation capabilities for users, more ways for users to share and contribute items, forums, groups, and more.

I asked Chris Alden, CEO of Six Apart, and a few of his team members how brands are hoping to use any of this user-generated content that’s coming through these newly enhanced blogs and online publications, and he mentioned that things like forums and content aggregation are quite popular, though there may not be a direct way in which brands will be using the content per say. Being part of the conversation, however, is priceless. “Even if it’s sharing content that they find interesting across the Web is contributing content,” said Alden, “aggregating is important for these larger companies. It’s not theoretical anymore. It’s real.”

Along with the new MT Pro launch, Six Apart is also releasing Movable Type 4.2, which is the most recent version of its platform. It comes with a handful of new and improved features, including enhanced performance, simplified default templates for easy “quick start” blogs, and open source TypePad Anti-spam built in.

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