Over the next few weeks, we will be comparing Technorati 100 rank to Alexa three-month rank for the blogs in the Technorati 100. Essentially, Technorati tracks links and Alexa tracks traffic. To help show the relationship, we are creating interactive chart pages to accompany each blog post. The chart pages include live rollovers describing each point in the chart and a summary table.

For instance, the live chart for this post is available for you to explore.

Business and Finance blogs show a fairly linear relationship when comparing Alexa and Technorati 100 ranks.

Why does Creating Passionate Users receive relatively less traffic (according to Alexa) than links (acccording to Technorati)? Perhaps the posts spark linkage or off-shoot posts but don't drive traffic back to the original?

ShoeMoney is in the opposite situation: why does it have so much traffic but relatively fewer links? The blog describes itself as a "diary", so it's possible that users read the blog, but aren't inspired to write their own posts or link; they just enjoy reading what Jeremy Schoemaker has to say.

Are there any other reasons for these outliers? Take a look at the full chart to draw your own conclusions.

And let us know how you like the charts!

The prestigious and long-running DEMO conference ran earlier this week. We looked at blogs for TechCrunch40 companies last week; here's a similar report for DEMO.

Question: does DEMO organize the companies into categories? If so, we missed it. (If not, then ... advantage: TechCrunch40.)

(As always, kudos to the Blogcosm team for research and scripting.)

Did we miss any blogs? Do you have links to personal blogs of any of the founders or employees?

According to a profile in yesterday's USA Today, The Huffington Post has raised a total of $10 million of venture capital.

As we noted previously, entrepreneur Alan Warms was skeptical whether the VCs would get a good return on the earlier $5 million. (See the post for hard numbers that mesh well with other sources we dug up.) Looks like it just got twice as hard.

What's their trick? Well, it's hard to ignore this tidbit from the end of the article:

As the Huffington Post looks to its own future, co-founder Lerer says it has no plans to begin paying bloggers. Ever.

"That's not our financial model," he says. "We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company."

Hmm.... If the distinctly left-wing Huffington Post were reporting that information about a "corporate media site", would they call it exploitation of labor? We report, you decide.

P.S. More data from the article; "The staff has grown from three to 43 full-time employees. And Huffington's list of bloggers has grown to 1,800." (The editors and reporters get paid, just not the bloggers.)

P.P.S. From a commenter on Mashable's coverage:

Ignoring the "small" detail of having 43 FT employees and the $10M in funding, I don't think The Huffington Post is a blog anymore. I mean, look at it. The thing is more crowded than AOL's home page!!

Hat tips: Rafat Ali at paidContent.org, Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider and of course TechMeme.

On Sunday, tech journalist Scott Kirsner's Innovation Economy column (and video) in The Boston Globe looked at blogging by VCs: In venture capitalism, a growing rift over blogs. (In case that doesn't evoke enough tension, the HTML page title is even more pointed: A digital divide: VC's embrace, decry use of blogging.) His thesis:

Some firms blog, and some don't .... an important shift in the way VC firms interact with entrepreneurs.

In favor: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

[Blogging is] a huge benefit to our business. Of course it brings incremental deal flow, but it also filters the deal flow and makes it more targeted and more relevant

Its also a great way to bring needed attention to the companies we invest in

And its a way to do research on new sectors and learn about other companies that compete with our companies

Also in favor: Jeffrey Bussgang of IDG Ventures.

- Definitely less about deal flow and more about transparency and providing accessibility, humanizing the VC process

- Open dialog helps me keep in touch with entrepreneur’s latest issues and hot buttons

- Provides sense of accountability to the entrepreneur community

- Helps me understand social networking, community, blogging, and many other Web 2.0 phenomenon from a practical standpoint as a practioner, not theoretical

(As is common with "old media", the article chops and paraphrases the quotes. The above come from the companion post on Kirsner's Innovation Economy blog. Kudos for providing the full original, and shame on any journalist who doesn't. Also worth noting, a more straightforward title: Why VCs Do (or Don't) Blog.)

Against: Jeff Fagnan of Atlas Venture

It takes a lot of time. We choose to dedicate that time to other outreach and marketing efforts.

Also against: Woody Benson of Prism VentureWorks

Our goal is to share [our experience and intellectual property] in the confines of the meetings that we have with our portfolio companies and potential portfolio companies.

A quick roundup of reactions:

Fred Wilson replies on his blog ("A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC):

That, to me, is the defining argument for and against blogging. There are those who think the best way to manage your "intellectual property" is to hoard it for yourself. There are others who think that intellectual property should be shared, developed out in the open, and that it will grow exponentially. I am in the latter camp.

Mike Feinstein (who appears at the end of the video) takes the middle ground ("The Fein Line: Thoughts about VC, start-ups, sports, politics, and the world in general")

Blogging doesn't necessarily give you an advantage over those who don't.  But, if you don't blog, you need to figure out what other means you will use to stay connected to the Web community.

Bijan Sabet (see the video for a 2 minute interview) of Spark Capital tells the world Why I blog?

First and foremost, I don't consider myself a "VC blogger". I don't talk about venture capital/business exclusively. Or even most of the time. Those that read/interact with this blog know that. This blog is about me. All of me - work, personal, family, everything.

My blog is about getting my thoughts, observations & interests down on digital ink. But this blog is also about the feedback from you all. The conversation is a big reason why I keep blogging.

Jeff Bussgang ("Seeing Both Sides: VC Perspectives From A Former Entrepreneur") noted that Scott Kirsner Stirs The Pot:

Scott Kirsner is always good for a little controversy.

No word yet from David Beisel of Venrock ("Genuine VC: David Beisel's Perspective on Digital Change"), though he made an indirect appearance as the organizer of the Web Innovators Group (WebInno) event where several of the video interviews took place.

Or from Jim Savage, who is one of several bloggers at the Longworth Venture Partners Blog.

Also on the list of Boston area VC bloggers (in the article or on Kirsner's blog):

• David Aronoff of IDG Ventures: Diary of a GeekVC
• Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners: VCMike
• Vinit Nijhawan of Key Venture Partners: Serial Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist "A discussion of venture capital, entrepreneurship and innovation with particular focus on US, India and China."
• Simeon Simeonov of Polaris Venture Partners: HighContrast "Innovation & venture capital in the post-broadband era"

An aside: mainstream media Web sites could learn a thing or two about Web navigation from blogs. For example, neither the column title nor Scott Kirsner's name is a link. Granted the Columnists link isn't too far away -- but when I follow the link from that page to his column, I get a registration wall. Er, no thanks.

While I'm at it, here's one more reason I read blogs over MSM articles: splitting an article across two pages just to double the number of ad impressions is very annoying. Enough already. The short-term boost may seem like easy money, but I'll bet it's a losing strategy in the long run.

Two weeks ago I attended the latest event of the Boston Web Innovators Group. It was well worth the time. 3 "main dish" presentations, 6 "side dish" demo tables, and plenty of time to network with roughly 400 interesting people. If you're in the Boston area, look for me at the next "WebInno" event on Nov. 6. One of the people I met suggested that I check out SezWho.

Let's start with the pitch:

SezWho is a distributed context, rating and reputation service for blogs, forums, wikis and other sites that deal with user generated content.

And:

SezWho is a social-media service that enables site owners to increase engagement with their community and to drive traffic by cross-connecting islands of content based on community participants.

The download page lists plug-ins for Wordpress and Movable Type, with other platforms "coming soon". Once installed by a blog owner, each comment gets several new features:

• a visual rating (5 red boxes, filled-in with what appears to be half-point increments)

• a pop-up profile for each commenter that shows a list of recent comments

• a question for readers: "Was this comment useful to you?"

There's only Yes or No; the numerical rating is determined by a SezWho algorithm. To answer the question, readers must first supply their email address. (Some will object, but I think it's a reasonable step to help reduce gaming of the system.)

A tip for SezWho: I find the current format busy and distracting -- though that should be easy to fix. (And a gripe: make unique title tags for different pages on the site!)

Here are write-ups from blogs that have deployed SezWho:

• Read/WriteWeb's New Comments Feature: SezWho (July 22, 2007) ... note that SezWho founder Jitendra Gupta is an occasional guest blogger at Read/WriteWeb

• VentureBeat: SezWho lets you have say on blog commenters (June 25, 2007)

• sramana mitra (a serial entrepreneur): A Service for Active Netizens (July 19, 2007)

• ifacethoughts: The CommentPower (SezWho) Solution (April 24, 2007)

Chuq Von Rospach has many years experience with online community, so his initial enthusiasm is worth a look ... though he hasn't adopted the system yet.

Several other companies are tackling comments from different directions, e.g.

BigSwerve (which was in the TechCrunch40 DemoPit)

BigSwerve's crawler aggregates comments to discover the underlying social network that is created as a result of this implicit behavior and provides a view into the conversation. Users can follow the comments for a given person and discover new content by seeing where other people are engaged.

coComment (the market leader?)

coComment keeps track of all the online conversations you're following in one convenient place, and informs you whenever something is added to a conversation.

With the browser extension, comments are automatically collected, no need to remember where you commented, coComment does it for you.

Co.mments

Use co.mments to bookmark posts you want to follow. It tracks new comments for you, so you don't miss out. You can see all the new comments from your tracking page, or subscribe to the feed.

Disqus

Disqus is about enhancing online discussion. We are starting with a better comment system for your blog, backed and synced with your own dedicated forum.

Track replies to your comments, follow others' posts, and claim your identity across websites.

Intense Debate

We provide a substitute to your current blog comment system that is feature packed!

In the comments to a post on Web Worker Daily, Jitendra contrasted his service with coComment:

The main difference is that SezWho drives the traffic related to comments to the site where as CoComment provides the service for commenters by consolidating all the comments in one place…As such SezWho sells to Site owners where as coComments sells to commenters by mostly providing the service via a browser tool bar…

Comment management is long overdue for innovation. In a nice roundup post, VC Brad Feld called comments The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere (July 21, 2007) with links to Joel Spolsky, Dave Winer and Fred Wilson. Check them out.

Which "comment management" products and services do you like?

On Tuesday, Rand Fishkin announced that SEOmoz was in the final stages of raising $1.25 million. SEOmoz isn't a blog per se, but their blog raises the company's visibility and the lively comment section both builds and reflects a real community. Although the blog is not one of the SEO-related blogs in the Technorati top 100 (measured by incoming links), Rand Fishkin ("randfish") did make #44 on NxE's list of fifty most influential bloggers.

Back in February, the company updated their site and added premium content:

• information: The Illustrated Guide to Building a Search-Friendly Website, The Professional's Keyword Research Guide, The Professional's Guide to Link Building
• tools: Rank Checker, Crawl Test, Term Targeting, Keyword Difficulty, Page Strength, Juicy Link Finder
• support: ask questions, access the Link Directory

The about page still talks about "consulting, Internet marketing and search engine optimization services" but:

Right now ... we're concentrating more on growing premium content, so we're not accepting new clients, but still working with folks like NPR, Yelp, AllBusiness, Answers, etc. (source, emphasis added)

As of August, the new business was adding about $40,000 per month (my estimate based on membership of $399/year):

In the 6 months since launch, we've had approximately 1800 people sign up for our premium membership, of which ~1200 are members today (looking at our subscriber details, it appears that many folks will sign up for one month, cancel, then sign up again 3-4 months later). (source)

But perhaps not as profitable as one might expect:

Salaries are our biggest expense, but server hardware isn't insignificant either. That, combined with travel expenses (to help promote all this stuff) will probably make it so at the end of the year, we'll be looking at around 850K in revenue and 100K in profit, which, while not insignificant, certainly isn't incredible. (source)

Rand is known for being very open about the company. Back in December, he posted estimated financials for 2006:

Here's my quick summary of income & expenses from their longer list (combining categories, omitting smaller items and rounding off to emphasize that they are just estimates):

Worth noting: Rand was only paid $38,000 in 2006, and $26,000 in 2005. It's pretty clear his priority was to grow the company.

That's also the main rationale for raising money:

We literally have a hundred different ideas for tools, search analytics, tracking, guides, resources and more and we're in a position to recruit help from the best and brightest the industry has to offer... but, we can't do it alone.

In addition to recruiting, they're concerned about retention:

with our staff getting competing job offers every other day, we need to make sure that we can compensate our team at market rates (we've been playing the scrimp and save game a long time)

And getting paid (something I wholeheartedly endorse!):

Gillian and I will start to take home real salaries, rather than taking pride in our positions as SEOmoz's two worst-paid employees :)

Rand is also ready to accept the end game:

One final note on the outside investment - when we decided to accept this money, we took a step in a direction that will probably end with the sale of SEOmoz (as we're most likely not a target to go public). I think that this is one of the other big fears that members and commenters had - and I can completely empathize. However, I will say this - I'm in this for the long haul, and even though SEOmoz may, in 4-7 years, be part of another company, I'm going to do my damndest to make sure that all the great things about us get preserved.

The (pending) investment comes from VC firm Ignition Partners and Curious Office:

Ignition was founded by a group of former execs from Microsoft and McCaw.

Michelle [Goldberg] is a principal at Ignition, investing in enterprise and consumer software and services. ... Prior to joining Ignition Michelle worked as an independent consultant at Microsoft where she developed the initial business plans for products in the enterprise server space. Michelle was an investment banker at Olympic Capital Partners where she specialized in mid-market mergers and acquisitions.  ... Michelle earned her B.A. degree from Columbia, and an M.A. degree from Harvard University.

Curious Office [is] a new kind of "micro-venture lab".... If you are looking for seed stage or Series A financing or you just want more development, design and executive support for your own venture then there is a very good chance that we could be a good partner for you.

An aside: I omitted a link to the SEOmoz premium content pitch. Rather than a clear, well-organized explanation of features and benefits, it strikes me as exactly the sort of long annoying sales letter that is used to hawk wares of dubious value. I suppose that approach must work with a certain audience, but I wonder if it's something that the company and larger SEOmoz community is proud of. Perhaps they just see it differently, or shrug it off as no big deal.

I know of a few other blogs that have raised money, and several more that are growing based on internal revenue. If you've seen any that provide such a detailed window into their thinking and the numbers that drive it, please let us know!

Michael Arrington has become an influential voice in the world of Web startups. (We covered their TechCrunch40 conference yesterday.) TechCrunch started as a hobby blog and is now the flagship site of a growing media company, with 5 full-time and 16 part-time employees. (source: USA Today) Or perhaps 6: Erick Schonfeld just joined from Business 2.0 magazine (including their popular group blog: Next Net). Also blogging at TechCrunch: Duncan Riley (#24 on NxE's list of fifty most influential bloggers). TechCrunch CEO is Heather Harde, previously the SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media.

Whether by luck or design, Mashable's focus on social networking proved a good choice. Founder Pete Cashmore hails from London.

Read/WriteWeb comes from New Zealand, founded by Richard MacManus. Regular contributers include Josh Catone, Alex Iskold, and Emre Sokullu. Marshall Kirkpatrick joined the team last week. The site also lists 7 occasional contributers.

Tim O'Reilly is an icon of the computer book publishing industry, a key mover behind the open source movement, and has his finger on the pulse of the Web. He and members of the community share their views at O'Reilly Radar.

Om Malik is a professional journalist turned blogger, and a great source of scoops and inside info. With the succes of GigaOM, he raised money and launched several other blogs: Web Worker Daily, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, and FoundRead. The blogging team includes Katie Fehrenbacher, Liz Gannes, Jackson West, Wagner James Au, Anne Zelenka, and 8 contributors.

Robert Scoble parlayed his initial blogging experience into becoming what many regarded as the blogging face of Microsoft. He left to become a videoblogger at PodTech.net, where he interviews "geeks, technologist & developers". His personal blog remains popular, including an active comment section.

Founded by 22-year old college student Neil Patel, Pronet Advertising is a group blog from ACS, with posts by (among others?) David Chen, Jay Cross, Ryan Fujiu, Cameron Olthuis, Muhammad Saleem, and MG Siegler. The blog doesn't talk specifically about SEO though is no doubt informed by their SEO work.

Download Squad is yet another blog from AOL's Weblogs Inc. (WIN). It currently lists 2 bloggers who posted more than 100 times each in the past 30 days: Brad Linder and Chris Gilmer. Rounding out the list with at least 6 posts: Ted Wallingford, Lisa Hoover, Emily Price, Jason Clarke, Dolores Parker, and Peter White. Like most of the WIN blogs, their "About" page is nowhere to be found.

On Monday & Tuesday, the TechCrunch40 conference (co-hosted by Jason Calacanis) put the spotlight on 40 startups. Conferences that feature presentations from hot startups are old hat in the computer industry. One aspect that's not widely known: some of them charge each startup a hefty fee to appear on stage. (Jason says $10,000-$20,000. If anyone has links that show the fee for a specific conference, please include in a comment.) The TechCrunch40 charged $2,500 to attend but no additional fee to present.

Here's the Blogcosm angle: a look at which of the presenting companies have blogs.

By our count: 21 out of 40. Did we miss any? Do you have links to personal blogs of any of the founders or employees?

The Technorati 100 (as of Aug. 1) contains 10 blogs written in a language other than English. 4 in Japanese, 2 in Russian, 1 each in Chinese, German, Persian and Spanish. (It's worth noting that some of the top English-language blogs come from countries where English is not one of the primary or official languages.)

A note to our bilingual and multilingual readers: I apologize that we don't have the resources to provide more than superficial coverage of blogs in other languages.