The Next Net

My Next Job, at TechCrunch

So I haven't said much about the demise of Business 2.0 or what I will be doing in the future (despite getting asked about it at least 50 times a day).  I will leave the carcass-picking to others.  But I will also be leaving the magazine business to others.  As of next week, I will become co-editor of TechCrunch with Michael Arrington.

It's tough to leave a place like Time Inc. after 14 years.  I often felt I had one of the best jobs in journalism—finding and writing about the smartest people on the planet.  But over the past two years, as I had one foot in print and the other in the Web, the Web stuff just seemed to matter more—both to my readers and to me.  So going all-digital seems like the natural thing to do.

I really do feel we are still at the very beginnings of what could become a vibrant Web media industry, with its own rules and its own consumption patterns.  I can think of nothing more fun than trying to help Michael figure out what those rules are going to be and how to build a media company that can thrive under them.   I'm just glad he trusts an old-media guy like me not to screw up what he's already built.

Beginning next week, I can be reached at erick at techcrunch.  For my feed subscribers, if you are not already a TechCrunch reader, you can keep up with me here.  And, oh yeah, I'm looking for some office space to sublet in lower Manhattan.  Anyone with some good leads, please shoot me a line.

Blog Holiday

End of the Road, originally uploaded by vtpeacenik.

Posting will be light this week.

FeedBurner Drops Subscription Services

Feedburner, the Chicago-based startup recently bought by Google, is now making two of its subscription services free.  feedburner is used by bloggers (including this one) to manage all of their feeds, monitor what posts have been read and by how many people.  Its Stats Pro and MyBrand services, which you previously had to pay for (with prices starting at $5 and $3 a month, respectively), will now become standard.

It's all about the advertising now, folks.  Google doesn't need no stinking subscription revenues.

Fave Me

Blatant self-promotion here.  If you enjoy this blog, please fave me on Technorati by clicking on the button below.  (If you are not a registered Technorati member, it will ask you to join). 

We will now return to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Another Business 2.0 Staffer Gets The (Full-Time) Blogging Bug

My Business 2.0 colleague Owen Thomas, our online editor, just landed a new gig as the editor of tech-gossip blog Valleywag.  He's taking over from Gawker Media owner/publisher Nick Denton, who has brought the blog up to 1.5 million pageviews a month.  Owen follows another former Business 2.0 staffe to uberbloggerdom: Om Malik of GigaOm (who broke this piece of insider dope).  And his move is triggering some thoughtful posts about the pros and cons of magazines versus blogs.

I've known Owen for seven years.  He's going to do a great job at Valleywag.  As my boss Josh Quittner put it in an email to the editorial staff earlier today:

Given how the ad dollars have been flowing, many veteran print journalists
are fleeing the business these days for online media.  In the case of life-long contrarian Owen Thomas—who's been at this magazine from the very start—he's actually returning to new media. On the upside, since Owen tends to zig when everyone else zags, that could mean good news for print—perhaps it's a signal that the ad market is about to get way better. On the downside, we'll miss him terribly, and wish him great good fortune in his new role as resident Valleywag.

Owen has done virtually everything here: from reporter, to chief of reporters, from writer, to senior editor. . . . He was our resident Mr. Spock and knew more about the who's who and history of information technology than Wikipedia. And when I had an idea to build out a blog network, it was Owen that did the actual work of cobbling it all together and made sure it ran well. On top of it all, he's a wonderful guy.

Rumor: Google About To Buy Feedburner

Blog-related startups are such M&A bait these days.  Even more appealing than Technorati (per my previous post), may be Feedburner.  TechCrunch is reporting that Google (GOOG) is finalizing a deal to buy Feedburner for $100 million.  Treat this as a rumor.  But there would be some logic to such a deal.  Feedburner manages 721,024 feeds (at last count) that go out to millions of people who read them in feed readers like Bloglines and Google Reader or personlized home pages like My Yahoo, Netvibes, and Pageflakes.  (Feedburner manages all the feeds for the B2.0 blogs, for instance).

As more and more people consume blogs and news via feeds instead of going directly to the hosting Websites, the ads in those feeds will become more valuable.  Google wants its ads to be everywhere, on the Web and in feeds, so buyng Feedburner could help its quest to expand into all reaches of the universe.  But $100 million would be a huge payday for Chicago-based Feedburner and its CEO Dick Costolo, a former comedian (no joke).

Update: Costolo confirms that Google did in fact buy Feedburner

MOG 2.0: Better Music Through Blogging

As I am posting this Wednesday night, music discovery and blogging site Mog is getting a major redesign that combines elements of Last.fm, MySpace and MTV.com.  So far the site has only been able to attract about 250,000 visitors a month, mostly hardcore music fans who write about music and upload songs (legally). Some rock musicians have tried it outtoo, like Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard, the Roots drummer Questlove, and Mike Watt (now with the Stooges).  The Mog community, aka Moggers, write about 3,000 music-related posts a week.  But the site has been poorly organized and hard to navigate for the casual user.

Founder David Hyman previously started was CEO of Gracenote (the music database that iTunes uses to look up the name, artist, and album of each song on your computer).  He came by my office earlier this week to give me a preview of the new Mog.  "Today, Mog is a circle jerk of music geeks," he admits. (The screenshot at right is Mog 1.0).

The most popular part of the site was something called the Mog-o-sphere—a river of all the music posts across the entire site written in one of the 50,000 individual Mog pages on the site.  But as Hyman soon realized, "most people don't have the time to go through 300 posts a day."  That is going away.  In it's place will be more fine-tuned filters.

Mog's redesign does a lot of smart things to surface the best music posts, shared MP3 streams, and music videos from YouTube in a way that is customized to your personal music collection. Mog is a place where you can blog about your favorite music and shows you've seen.  What makes it cool is that you can upload the song you are talking about into your post, where it is available for others to listen to via streaming.  (According to Hyman, this is not considered radio, and thus he doesn't pay any royalties, because you have to click on each song separately to listen to it, whereas online radio is a continuous stream of songs.  Only one song upload is allowed per post and each one links to iTunes or Amazon).  You can also embed videos from YouTube, where there are a lot of music videos and concert footage.

Michael Eisner, Meet Ze Frank

  Ze 
  Originally uploaded by .michael.newman..

The Web video pile-on continues.  Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who is already an investor in video-sharing site Veoh, today announced the formation of a Web video production company called Vuguru.  The Web video studio will focus on professionally-created clip content.  Whether an old-media mogul like Eisner truly gets the Web remains to be seen.  But there is no doubt that the race is on to find a post-YouTube formula for must-stream TV.

Perhaps Eisner should talk to video-blogging pioneer Ze Frank, who is now looking for new projects.  (Coincidentally, Ze Frank is represented by the United Talent Agency, which has strong ties to Eisner.  UTA has already done a deal with Veoh and brokered VuGuru's first show, Prom Queen).  Ze Frank just left Revver for Blip.tv, one of our Next Net 25 startups.  Blip.tv got Dewar's to sponsor Ze Frank's show, even though it is about to end.  Does that make him the first video blogger to go into syndication?

Eisner would definitely appreciate that.

Adify to Power The Washington Post's Blog Ad Network

The Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, which announced last summer that it would create it's own vetted blog network, has signed up with startup Adify to manage the network and serve up ads across it.  Adify lets publishers roll their own ad networks across different niche categories like travel, health, technology, and politics.   The Washington Post will sell ads on the blogs using its existing sales force and relationships with advertisers.  Lufthansa is the first advertiser to sign up.  Adify CEO Larry Braitman tells me:

We are seeing that a lot of the traditional media companies as they shift into becoming digital media companies are looking to take their properties, expand their reach and become category killers.

So far the Washington Post has signed up about 100 blogs into its sponsored network, including Mr. Wave Theory, Profitable Signals, and Slacker Manager.  But it is considering a total of 1,500, which could increase by 40 to 50 percent the number of monthly pageviews  beyond its own sites where it can serve ads.  And since the ads can be served into targeted content categories, Braitman says the ads command three to five times as much as a run-of-the-mill remnant ad on one of the bigger ad networks like DoubleClick.  Instead of $1 to $2 CPMs (cost-per-thousand ads), he thinks his nichebuster approach can get $8 to $10 CPMs. 

The Ultimate DEMO Diss

  giraffe 
  Originally uploaded by al greer.

I love it.  TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington announces a competing conference to DEMO (where startups get to do a high-profile launch), from DEMO!  He zings DEMO for its pay-to-play model:

The entire conference is paid startup demos. There are way too many to digest - 60 - and it is a well known secret that if you are willing to pay the $15,000+ fee, your startup will really need to suck to be turned down.

Ouch.