Through our investments in FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati I’ve gotten my mind firmly around the idea (and dynamics) between “publishers” and “subscribers” in the universe of blogs, user-generated content, feeds, and search.
I’ve learned at least 731 lessons. Lesson #1 is “delight your publishers.” FeedBurner did an awesome job of this and I’m using plays from their playbook at all the other companies I’m involved in that are publisher focused.
Lijit is one of them. I’ve written about Lijit in the past, including in a recent post titled Calling All Bloggers – Get Lijit.
Now, while I accept the accusation that I’m pimping out one of my portfolio companies, I’m always on the lookout for publishers (e.g. bloggers) that are fans of Lijit. Today I came across a post by John Carr (who I don’t know) who wrote on his The Main Bang blog about his experience with Going Lijit. Great stuff and an awesome example of rule #1.
I’ve been excited about Me.dium since fifteen minutes into the first time I had it explained to me by David Mandell, Robert Reich, and Kimbal Musk. Up until today, Me.dium was in a controlled beta as the company spent a lot of time and energy making sure that the magic technology both worked and scaled.
Today they’ve launched two new things – an IE 7 browser extension and a Me.dium map widget for bloggers (note the pretty new widget titled “my world” on my sidebar.)
Peter Butler at CNet has an outstanding description and overview of Me.dium up on The Daily Download.
Me.dium’s vision is to reveal the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. For the first time, you can see your friends and others as they surf around you on the web.
Today’s release is a giant step forward to accomplishing this vision. Joining Me.dium and friending me is easy – just click here.
I’ve loved the phrase “open source hardware” from the first time I heard it from Peter Semmelhack, the CEO of Bug Labs. It made me think “software” which is exactly what Peter was trying to do. Bug Labs is starting to emerge after a year of hard work – Fred Wilson has a short post on it explaining that it’s about software/services and Dave Winer has a great post summarizing the dinner he was at last night where he got introduced to Bug’s stuff.
The phrase “open source hardware” has expanded some into “an open, modular, consumer electronics web services + hardware platform. Designed for the general audience, not just the technically inclined, BUG is intended to bring to the world of hardware gadgets what the Internet, open source, XML and web services have brought to the world of software and media.”
Like all great platforms there is a clear “enabler” component – this time it’s the hardware which – even as a software guy – I can deal with and relate to. Everything about the software is intended to be open source and driven by the community. Fundamentally it’s going to be a hardware and software hackers delight – no more legos for me.
I’m really psyched that my friends at Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital are investors here. I’m a small investor and have been cheering loudly from the sidelines. Fred describes it as their most “out there” investment. Maybe, but in the category of big or nothing ideas, it’s a big one. My Ph.D. advisor and academic Yoda – Eric von Hippel – must be smiling. I imagine a bunch of my fraternity brothers, including Colin Angle and John Underkoffler can’t wait to get their hands on it.
Got an iPhone? Want to read your feeds on it? Try the new NewsGator iPhone reader.
As one of my partners who uses NetNewsWire said, “wow!” (ok – he said “holy shit”, but “wow!” seemed more appropriate.) And – of course – it automagically synchronizes with your NewsGator Online account (and any other NewsGator products you use, like NetNewsWire for all you Mac people.)
I love things that are like chocolate and peanut butter. Microsoft has embedded RSS throughout SharePoint – NewsGator’s new Social Sites product (built on top of NewsGator Enterprise Server) makes it tastier than a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (did you know those things were created in 1928 – more useless trivial to fill your brain with.) As a happy user of both of these products (and an investor in one of them) I’ve advocated adopting the slogan “two great tastes that taste great together.”
If you want to learn more, Rob Koplowitz from Forrester Research and Greg Reinacker from NewsGator are doing a free webinar titled “Increasing SharePoint Value with RSS” on July 31st at 2:00 EDT.
My buddies at Rally Software were just named the fastest growing company in Colorado in the “Small Company” category by the Denver Business Journal. Last month they were named the fastest growing company over $2m by the Boulder County Business Reporter. According to official measurements, Rally grew 13,378% between 2004 and 2006. Congrats guys. 100% growth between 2006 and 2007 will be just fine (but don’t relax.)
Todd Vernon – the CEO of Lijit – went on vacation last week. While searches continued to happen, the gang from Villij got together with the some of the Lijit folks and they worked on a new top secret project.
Yeah, well. I’m not sure that’s what he meant when he said “keep up the good work” before heading to Paris.
I love companies with a clear mission in life. FeedBurner’s was “we will do all kinds of wonderful things for your feed.” Lijit’s is “we will do all kinds of wonderful things for search on your blog.” Lijit’s goal is simple:
Replace
with
The new Lijit home page is up and it’s simpler and clearer than ever to add Lijit Search to your blog. Just enter your blog URL into the “Want a Wijit?” box and you’ll be up and running in a minute.
Lijit even now has Facebook integration. Let your Facebook friends search all of your content (your blog(s), delicious tags, YouTube videos, Linkedin data, StumbleUpon stumbles, Twitters, and so much more) from within your Facebook page.
Try it. You’ll like it.
Whenever I show up in a powerpoint slide next to Paris Hilton, I’ve got to wonder.
Stan ponders whether Paris has too much attention. I ponder why I let them cut my hair so short. Entertainingly, this is not the most popular image in Google Image Search for “paris hilton term sheets.” For the historians out there, you can go back to the original source of the picture.