Yesterday, BubbleGeneration’s Umair Haque set off a storm by suggesting that tech blog networks are peaking. I agree that the signal-to-noise ratio in the technology blog network space has gone down considerably. While many of these blogs are hiring from traditional media, established publications are firing back with their own blogs and blog networks. CNET for one has been very aggressive, even appointing blogger Dan Farber to become editor in chief at News.com (of course, Farber is so much more than a mere blogger).
In fact, in the past year, many of these technology blogs have gone from being a one-site, one-man operation to a multi-site property hiring large operational and editorial teams. In a few instances, companies have even raised considerable funding. The quest to build an audience and generate ad revenues has pitted many of these sites in a competitive and cooperative dynamic that might indeed suggest that most of these sites have peaked. continue reading...
Om Malik sent me a link to his post on “NewCo thinks it’s worth $1B.”
Is it? Well, it’s not what I think that matters, it’s what the market thinks, be it private or public. continue reading...
I think TechMeme is great, but something tells me that Alexa wildly over-estimates its actual traffic. If you think about it, tech bloggers are heavy Alexa-weighters and they skew most tech blogs. Seeing how so many rely and link to TechMeme.com you can imagine that TechMeme gets a favorable bounce. It’s all good, it’s definitely deserved: the site is efficient and a great source of great new content. I do sometimes wish that it penalize some of the me-too blogs that simply rehash what others post, but hey, that’s where your brain should kick in and determine where to pay more attention to.
But I also think - like most people - that the intricate and intuitive way that it indexes and organizes news is very interesting, and it has the potential to really dominate across many categories, not just tech. continue reading...
Daylife raises $8.3M in round 2. There was a round 1? Wasn’t social news over? And does that mean investors are twice as dumb? Not quite.
Yet another news service is getting funded though, does this suggest that indeed news on the Web is still a wide open game? continue reading...
I had the opportunity to meet and chat with TechMeme founder/creator Gabe Rivera in LA last month.
Check out this interview with him on Wired.com. As someone who’s studied, written about and interviewed hundreds of very successful blokes from media, business, sports, entertainment etc., I was really impressed with Rivera. continue reading...
Techmeme is a great site, Gabe Rivera is in many ways Rafat Ali 2.0. That, of course, is a huge compliment to both Rafat and Gabe. Rafat’s influence has been galvanized and being a trade publication, he is not going anywhere (harder to lose relevance, in my humble opinion, than a consumer brand that needs to appeal to fickle and ever-changing tastes). I wrote about the impressive roster of speakers that he and his team at Paid Content, Content Next Media have assembled here.
I do not think that a site like TechMeme competes directly with Paid Content, in fact they are highly complementary. Some time ago, I did write a post looking at how Digg and Techmeme could scale, expand and ultimately, exit. continue reading...
As we continue to grow at WatchMojo.com, I am always looking for more and more ways to scale the production, distribution, syndication and monetization of our content. It’s not obvious, but it’s a nice little challenge.
Of course, these days, the promise and premise of aggregation is one that all publishers are looking at. Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang presented something interesting on the opportunities of aggregation and contextual content. We embrace the context is king mantra quite a bit ourselves. continue reading...
