A quick note to locals: if you get a chance, stop by the Web Innovators Group meeting tonight at the Royal Sonesta hotel in Cambridge:

An informal gathering of people interested in internet and mobile innovation, WebInno is free and open to all in the community.

Pre-registration is requested though I don't think it's required. (I'm not one of the organizers; just going to meet people.)

Informal networking starts at 6:30, 3 "main dish" presentations are at 7:00, then more networking and 6 "side dish" demo tables. I'll be the guy wandering around giving quick demos of Blogcosm on my Fujitsu P1610 -- which is cross between a super-small tablet PC (8.9", 1280 X 800) and a UMPC with a touch-typeable keyboard. Too bad Apple, Nokia and others don't make anything comparable (i.e. at least 1024 pixels wide, with 7"-9" screen).

Every year, the World Economic Forum hosts a meeting in Davos, Switzerland: "committed to improving the state of the world". It's a remarkable collection of political and business leaders from around the world ... plus a few bloggers.

There are few other places where Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) could grab tech blogger Robert Scoble to have breakfast with President Musharraf of Pakistan.

Blogger Jeff Jarvis noted an interesting contrast between two ways of looking at the world:

Gore concentrated on the things we must stop doing ... while the Google team concentrates on what we can start doing, thanks to technology.

It's not just talk; the non-profit google.org is putting money behind making renewable energy cheaper than coal, plug-in electric vehicles and more.

Other reports from Buzzmachine are filed under davos08.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch covers the so-called YouTube Room.

Video and audio of every Davos session is available online. (Hat tip: i-boy)

Major advertisers (and their ad agencies) typically want audiences that are larger than most blogs reach. Independent of their potential, few blogs can justify paying up front for an ad sales rep. Results could take months and may not cover costs.

One solution used by many top blogs is Federated Media Publishing:

At FM, we believe that the best conversations are those where all parties are engaged, informed, and valued. Working with our marketing and publishing partners, Federated Media is helping to define this innovative form of online marketing: a three-way dialog among creators, audiences, and marketers.

(Hmm; too vague and high-minded for my taste. What percentage of CPM display ads are "conversations" vs. just paying for attention?)

Yesterday, Rafat Ali of paidContent.org noted:

Federated Media, the high-profile blog ad network founded and run by John Battelle, has hired investment bank Savvian, potentially to look for more funding, and maybe a sale for the right price.... Another source, this one among the interested parties, says that FM is indeed looking to raise as much as $50 million, and the valuation is in the $125 million pre-money range.

Read the post for details on earlier funding.

Today, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch weighed in:

This action was taken after FM Publishing was approached by several investors. One investor, we have learned, put a $100 million buyout offer on the table for the entire company, which FM Publishing declined.

Read that post for a great quote from John Battelle about having to turn down acquisition offers at The Industry Standard in 2000.

Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, just raised $29.5 million. As is often the case, GigaOM has the scoop:

While we were chatting, he let it slip that Automattic had raised a whopping $29.5 million in a Series B Round of funding, including a strategic investment from The New York Times Co. True Ventures led the round, which includes previous investors Polaris Ventures and Radar Ventures.

Correction:

Polaris Venture Partners is the lead investor, having provided $20m of the $29.5 million (Mike Hirshland, general partner at Polaris, is on the WordPress board).

Source: an email from KMC Partners, who handles PR for Polaris. I just checked the Polaris site. There's a news item on the investment but no numbers.

Founder Matthew Mullenweg fills in the details:

Fast forward to 2007: ... should we sell [the company], or build out Automattic to be an independent company for many years to come.
...
That decision actually wasn’t hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunities and it became clear that the road ahead was much longer than the road behind us.
...
Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in anti-spam, identity, wikis, forums, and more — small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far.

Read the whole post for a quick wrap-up of 2005-2007. For example:

revenues grew quickly, allowing us to remain break-even even as the team scaled to 18 full-time folks and a number of contractors ... we started to look like a real company despite having no office and some of us never meeting in person.

MyBlogLog was founded in 2005 by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson, adding Scott Rafer as a third co-founder in 2006. It helps people "Discover who reads your favorite sites (including your own)". Bloggers can display photos of recent readers in a widget; readers get a profile page at MyBlogLog.com, now part of Yahoo. It's both a social network and a set of analytics:

We wanted to provide truly actionable data — where were people coming from, what did they look at and what did they click to leave?

What does Yahoo get? Marshall Kirkpatrick says it best:

MyBlogLog is an incredible model of how to leverage human psychology in order to access peoples' data. The prospect of seeing the faces of people who visit your blog is so seductive that thousands if not millions of people have offered their faces and information to MyBlogLog in order to participate.
...
By acquiring this ingenious service, Yahoo! has gained access to the browsing history of scores of users and the traffic history of scores of websites.

Last week, Yahoo announced an API for developers, currently an invitation-only beta:

retrieve lists of readers, tags, and members of MyBlogLog communities, search for members, get a member's profile data including sites authored, tags, and identities on other sites, and more.

What does that means? Back to Marshall:

a website can offer personalized content based on a user's tags in Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, etc. all via one easy to use service, MyBlogLog

Kent Brewster of Yahoo has already posted an example.

In a long piece on audience participation at mainstream media sites, Mark Glaser of MediaShift asks:

How do you harness the audience’s knowledge and participation without the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires time-intensive moderation?

High-traffic blogs face the same question. Here are several links to earlier parts of the cross-blog conversation:

• Chris Tolles of Topix: Anonymous Comments – By The Numbers - Jan. 8
• Rich Skrenta (formerly of Topix) covers 4 downsides of registration - Jan. 8
• Howard Owens (a newspaper guy) has some quibbles and further points - Jan. 9
• Scott Anderson of Online News Squared: X-Raying The Cloak of Anonymity - Jan. 9

Several of the posts have lots of good comments.

The Gizmodo gadget blog is part of Nick Denton's Gawker Media, and full of the snark that pervades that blog network.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, someone from Gizmodo used a remote control to turn off several monitors, including in the middle of people's presentations. Reaction around the blogosphere was mixed. Bryan Gardiner at Wired thought it was cool, though many of the commenters disagreed:

it wouldn't bit a big deal if they just switched off a couple of monitors on those walls of screens. but they repeatedly turn off monitors during a guy's demonstration, during a gaming presentation, etc. that's just stupid. (alex)

a lot of time, money and work goes into displaying at CES, and you should not have to prepare for such childish pranks at a professional event. (strax)

Not content with a lame apology, Gizmodo went on the attack:

when I see some fellow press damning us for the joke, I feel sorry for them: When did journalists become the protectors of corporations?

Being a jerk and causing extra work for the staff at trade show booths isn't "sticking it to big business".

Having taken the low road, Brian Lam then goes on to claim the opposite:

In this job, integrity and independence is far more important than civil or corporate obedience.

Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb knocks down that bit of self-righteousness:

Sorry, Brian, that's not what the prank demonstrated. What it showed was that your employees don't know how to behave in a public, civilized setting. You can still ask the tough questions, demand the the truth, not publish corporate talking points, and check facts before publishing without acting like delinquents.

Nick Carr seems to thrive on controversy. His 2004 book asked Does IT Matter?. (My answer: yes.) In April 2005, he joined the blogosphere with Rough Type, sometimes gaining grudging respect.

His latest book is now out. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. The theme: "Cheap computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did."

Today at GigaOM, Anne Zelenka posted a detailed and well-sourced reply to one of Carr's arguments:

He suggests that the switch to utility computing — also sometimes known as grid-based or cloud computing — will shrink the workforce, lead to increasing income inequality, and destroy the middle class.

Er, no, it won't. Haven't people gotten tired of the scare-mongering about technology and jobs? Yes, changes are often painful, but that's a far cry from shrinking the workforce. My favorite of many contemporary examples: look at all the employment related to mobile phones, which is a relatively new technology. How about GPS?

Zelenka points out a key benefit of cheap computing and the ongoing social media revolution:

It used to be that if you wanted to have your writing published, you'd need to have a job with a newspaper or magazine. Now anyone can publish their writing on blogs. It used to be if you wanted to have thousands of people watch your films, you'd have to get lucky in Hollywood. Now you can upload your video to YouTube. It used to be if you wanted to become a radio talkshow host, you had to convince a radio station to give you airtime. Now you can record your own podcast.

Read the whole thing for details, including links to "one of the most influential living legal theorists and a major voice in the law and economics movement" (who happens to be a blogger).

Many people prefer to read blogs in a feed reader or "RSS aggregator" rather than making the daily rounds in their Web browser. Today, two of the oldest and most popular desktop clients were released by Newsgator with a compelling new price: $0. Several key people at NewsGator have blogs; let's take a short tour.

Here's Brent Simmons, the developer of NetNewsWire:

Why go free? ... the software is great marketing for our enterprise software; and the more users we have, the better able we are to calculate relevance and importance.

I dream of being able to make it so you spend less time reading stuff you don't care about—I want the important news to go right to the top.
...
for me personally, this is a dream come true. Every developer wants to be able to work on the software they love, make a living at it, and give it to the world for free.

Usually you get to pick two out of three—if you're lucky. Me, I get all three.

Next is Nick Bradbury, the developer of FeedDemon:

1. It's the Enterprise, Stupid

2. Your Attention is Valuable

PS: Your Privacy is Valuable, Too

CTO and Founder Greg Reinacker:

What we're working to do is to saturate the market with our clients.
...
we've found that when we go into an enterprise to sell NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and Social Sites, there are already a ton of people using one of our desktop apps already. The more folks are already using them, the easier it is to sell our server products....

More on "attention" from Jeff Nolan, VP of Corporate Development:

Better content means feed discovery based on preferences and behaviors, network search and relevance filtering, in effect achieving community-based collaboration and filtering on top of what the system can do off keywords and word association. You will be hearing more about this in the months ahead, we have a slew of partnerships and product updates in the works that will deliver best in class features to help you find feeds that are map to your interest areas, and individual content items that are relevant to the posts you are clipping and sharing.

Bits of history: NewsGator purchased NetNewsWire (and hired Brent) in October 2005 and purchased FeedDemon (and hired Nick) in May 2005.

Writing a catchy title has long been a way to attract readers; blogs are no different. However, it seems to me there's a real risk of going too far. If the title promises something that it doesn't deliver, the reader may feel cheated and ignore future link bait from that publication.

That's how I feel about this article. What does it deliver? Not a list of actual VCs, just a "list of archetypes":

1) Mr Armchair
2) Mr. One-Hit-Wonder
3) Mr. Spray-n-Pray
4) Mr. Revisionist Historian
5) Mr A!@#!-BFF all rolled up into one
6) Mr. Blue Blood
7) Mr. IRR
8) Mr. X-Product Manager
9) Mr. Regurgitator
10) Mr. Imitator
11) Mr. Retired-on-the-Job
12) Mr. ROTJ

I suspect the article would have still gotten plenty of clicks with an honest title: "9 types of VCs to avoid".

(An aside: I actually like the FoundRead blog; that's one reason it's worth criticizing.)

Blogmaker™ 0.5 (which we released a month ago) attracted some interest in the Django world. Thanks in part to questions and contributions, we added some missing files, clarified the README, and reorganized a bit. The result: Blogmaker 0.6 (released last week), now with its own (very plain) website. The project is hosted at Google Code: code.google.com/p/blogmaker/, with SVN and issue tracking.

Many thanks to various emailers and 2 outside contributors: Kumar McMillan and Antoni Aloy, plus Kent and Peter here at Blogcosm.

If you've been waiting for a Python-based alternative to WordPress and Movable Type, dive in!

Update: added final Democrat results from IowaCaucusResults.com and near-final Republican results adapted from IowaGOP.net and USA Today's table.

Quick summary: Elliott correctly called Obama's poll-defying upset, though did less well on the GOP side.

I'll let Confederate Yankee introduce this post: Stunning Iowa Prediction:

Coming from anyone else I'd not give these numbers a second look, but Elliott's track record speaks for itself when using his formulas.

He is however, using his intuition instead of a formula for this particular prediction, so keep that in consideration.

Here's the prediction from Scott Elliott of Election Projection ("EP"); I added the latest RealClearPolitics poll average: