I’ve become obsessed with “Networks” – I’ve learned an enormous amount from coordinating the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network and the Colorado Entrepreneurs and Technology Network. Look for lots of interesting things to come to this in the next few months, including some “Intelligence Amplification” stuff that my friends at FeedBurner aren’t even aware of yet (heheh.)
While the FeedBurner Network concept is a “user-organized” network approach (although in this case the “user” is a single publisher coordinating a network of other topically similar publishers), there are now many other well known blog networks that are being driven by commercial publishers. Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis started this off with Gawker and Weblogsinc respectively, Mike Arrington and Om Malik followed with highly visible “new tech networks” TechCrunch and GigaOm, and many others have joined in the fun.
FeedBurner just released a list of 22 networks that cover 1,500 feeds and over 5 million subscribers that are using FeedBurner’s advertising services in some way. While some of the ad activity is in the feed, an increasing amount of it that FeedBurner is providing is on the actual site, and the link between the feed and the site is rapidly increasing in importance and relevance (and – voila – FeedBurner ties it all together.)
As a special bonus to publishers around the world, FeedBurner just revved their Publishers Tips blog to help any and all publishers get more out of their feed.
I know I sound like Brad-portfolio-company-fan-boy today. That’s because I am!