Popular blogging software company Six Apart, in addition to launching Movable Type 4 Beta this week, also announced some updates for TypePad, its hosted blog service. These updates were among some of the most requested in a recent TypePad customer survey.

Prominent among the new features is TypePad pages. Pages found on traditional websites, said Six Apart, like “About Us,” “Our Products,” or “Contact Us,” can now be created in TypePad using a wide variety of new themes and layouts designed expressly for professional and business users. These new themes and layouts can also be used for blog pages as well.

Other new TypePad features include integration with Windows Live Writer and also enhanced visitor statistics such as a graphical presentation showing historical visitor information and a downloadable Excel file for deeper analysis.

Six Apart announced the beta release of Movable Type 4, a blogging platform designed to meet the website content management needs of growing organizations and to serve as a social media platform that enables businesses to create community-driven websites. The company also announced the inauguration of the Movable Type Open Source Project which will culminate in the release of an open source version of Movable Type.

“We support a wide range of industry leaders for publishing, marketing, and internal communications,” said Chris Alden, EVP and General Manager of the Professional Division at Six Apart. “These are world-class blogs, organizations and individuals that demand flexibility, scalability and interactivity as they deploy blogs on a global scale. MT4 has been re-designed and re-architected as a platform to address their needs while providing a basis to build social networking features that re-define the scope of blogging.”

Today’s announcement marks the first of a series of new products, features, and services around Six Apart’s flagship blogging platform that will be unveiled throughout the summer.