Archive for January, 2009
I read about 25 pages and thought it was a bunch of obvious and self evident truisms. Not worth investing my most treasured asset — time. Plus, I met Gladwell once and kinda thought he was a self important jerk.
comScore just released a report on the fastest growing sites on the web in 2008.
Our portfolio fared pretty well: excluding sites whose growth occurred through acquisition, WordPress and Weatherbug Properties ranked no. 2 and no. 3. And, while not featured in this report, JibJab was something like the 3d fastest growing site on the web in December.
Cool article today on WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg.
I'd go to REI and load up on a bunch of North Face and Mountain Hardwear stuff. Jackets, ski gear, etc.
About 7 or 8 months ago we seeded web entrepreur Jason Shellen to pursue a pretty intriguing project that he had been noodling on with my colleague Sim Simeonov. On Thursday of this week, Plinky was officially launched.
In there own words, “Plinky is a service that makes it easy to create inspired content on the web.” The company is based on the insight Jason had from his days at Blogger (and which I immediately related to based on my experience as an investor in Automattic/Wordpress) that the number of truly active bloggers is much smaller than the number of people out there who are very interested in joining social media conversations but quickly run out of ideas to write about. Plinky makes it a snap for these people to become social authors and join the conversation.
It is very early to say where Plinky is likely to end up several years from now. But Jason is a terrific, proven entrepreneur, and I think he is focusing on a very fertile area.
Go check Plinky out!
Two weeks ago I posted that I thought conversation was going to be an important ingredient to the web, not merely as an adjunct to content but as the content itself. This was a theme that I was starting to see recurring.
Since then, this theme has taken on an even greater prominence for me. I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is likely to be the most important and lasting contribution made by the social media movement. Namely, the turning point for the web shifting from a publishing platform to a conversational medium.
I think the implications will be really substantial. And I hope to have some investments that play a big role in capturing the value I believe will be created.
Lots has been written about user generated content. But recently I have been in alot of conversations about what I call “user encouraged content.”
Recognizing that the conversation amongst readers is often of more interest than the original content being read in the first place, a number of smart web media types I know are starting to think about conversation as the content itself, and about ways to encourage, aggregate and edit conversations around interesting content.
In addition to being more engaging, conversation as content also happens to be free, making for an interesting potential business model.
Expect conversation to be an important tenet of Content 2.0.
