Too young, too rich, too... bloggy?

Do you know who Ben and Mena Trott are? They are apparently two of the first people, at a very early age, to really cash in on the blogging craze. Ben is the original developer of Movable Type and TypePad, and last year he and his wife sold a controlling interest in their company to an investment capital group for a fat $11.5 million.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Like so many other 20-somethings hoping to mine the Internet gold rush of the late 1990s, Mena Trott was thrown for a humbling loop by the dot-com bust, yet still craved stardom. Her unassuming husband, Ben, just wanted another computer programming gig in Silicon Valley's depressed job market.

The couple's odd chemistry cooked up Six Apart Ltd., a startup that has helped popularize the "blogging" craze, with millions of people worldwide maintaining online personal journals that dissect everything from politics to poultry.

The Trotts, both 27, have amplified the buzz about Web logs, or blogs, by making them easier to set up and write.

San Francisco-based Six Apart provides two widely used blogging tools -- a software publishing program, Movable Type, and a hosted service, TypePad, for people who don't want to do the technological grunt work themselves.

It's nice to see an enterprising young pair of upstarts make good, and they have certainly added to the growth and buzz of the still emerging blogosphere. But man... 27 years old? A bit of jealousy seeps in, much to my shame.

Personally, I think that TypePad is doing better than Blogger (which would certainly not be difficult this week) but still has issues. Free hosting is always going to have problems because developing a revenue stream out of it is so much harder. Conversely, pay services will usually wind up with better performance because there are less people willing to pay for the hosting. So TypePad has a built in advantage over Blogger or Microsoft's new service as long as enough people are willing to pay.

Keep an eye out for a move to a new platform over at Running Scared. However, while we considered Movable Type, it looks like we're going with Powerblogs.