DISQUS

I've had good experiences with the Blue Run team. They didn't invest, but they were professional, up front about their objectives and have made several introductions over the last year or two (in spite of not investing).

So congrats to them on closing a fund at all in this environment. Having one that's 20% smaller given less international expansion and the current environment seems fair to me. And closing one at all speaks to LP confidence.

This assumes, of course, that you ALWAYS want to unfollow EVERYONE who unfollows you. Ceding that much control of my social experience to an app just seems rife with trouble to me.

And that, of course, assumes that I INTENDED to unfollow you. And, given Twitter's recent issues of randomly unfollowing folk, that lack of intent is a very real possibility.

I get why this is a good idea, I just think there are tonnes of ways for this to ruin your experience of Twitter.

Hmm, the problem with this is that say 2 months after we got to know each other I unfollow you, just cause that happens (I keep my list under 200 folk). Does that *automatically* mean you want to unfollow me?

Ceding that much control of my social experience to an app just seems rife with potential issues.

And nevermind when Twitter itself decides I'm no longer following someone and it's not even my choice that I unfollowed someone!

<3 dude, merry xmas to you too!

While I'm at about 72hrs wait time, if anyone understands scaling issues it's me ;-) g'luck guys, keep rawking :-)

@fragile - it's rogers, of course.

My blackberry data is f*cked up, so I can only tweet via SMS :( Or not. Thanks Twitter.

WTF?! OMG. Seriously, LET ME PAY FOR PRO SERVICE. Stop turning off freaking features!!!

Not to be argumentative, but for the first 6 months, 6 of the 9-12 people FriendFeed suggested were the same. Allen @ CenterNetworks reported on this in detail. It's better now, but it was that way for quite some time.

Not that you don't deserve the followers, of course, but there was some skewing going on :)

Thanks guys (for both comments). Now if you want startupnorth content featured, just let me know ;-)

Thanks for the post Jonas :) And, to answer your question, we do think the model will work, otherwise we wouldn't do it, but there is still a *lot* of work to do before this is a "strong" portal. For now it's a gateway, a reference point and an aggregation point. Ideally in the future it'll be much more than that :)

Matt: I'll vouch that Duncan was one of the original founders. While we parted ways after funding, many of the ideas from the original 5 (ie: Duncan included) are still being executed on :)

Great post Duncan, but it begs the question: who do you see as your heroes, or the folk you genuinely look up to in the industry (note I didn't say "web 2.0", heh)?

P2: The business aspect is Automattic's business of running WP.com, not the business side of blogging. Cause if you're a business, you either go with the Pro Services, or you use WP.org.

P4: Irrelevant. Google can pay the commercial license and run with it. Also, I believe the Akismet PLUGIN is OS, while the service (obviously) is not.

C: Why not use Blogger? Cause the code's legacy code, they could port all blogger blogs in a weekend, and have a new hosted version of Blogger up in months, with every feature every Blogger user has ever wanted.

I'm not saying I buy the argument, but claiming Aaron's logic is flawed, while having flawed logic yourself is pretty ironical (and, yes, before you anally correct me using a not-real word, the use of ironical instead of ironic was irony in and of itself).

Top one's the best pic I've taken of you. Not that I'm an expert in how tired you look, but you seemed lively everytime I saw you at Gnomedex :) And, yeah, Brian's pics are among the best ;-)

Le sigh, per my comment on Fred's original post, there's more to this than just reblogging. Reblogging takes context and moves it, which doesn't help anyone since very, very few comments are self-contained. It's better than nothing, but that's about it.

Hopefully see you guys at BWE.

Great to finally meet Duncan, glad you got to this year's gnomedex which was, by far, the best I've ever been to/listed/watched/participated in!

Note: I'm a guy, so don't hurt me ;-)

But I read this purely as: do your thing, ignoring those who are slighting you or ignoring you, and you'll come out on top. Competition can be good, but just focussing in on what you/your company/your community do best is (in my experience) the true path to success and recognition.

But, again, I'm a guy so I haven't been through what "women bloggers" have. But, I am a young, Canadian, tech/media CEO (started the company with others when I was 25... and until recently was the youngest person in the company). So I do understand how it is to live in other folks' shadow (cause, c'mon, gawker is our biggest competitor and they cast a REALLY big shadow!).

Anyways, gutsy move (as always) Aaron, hopefully it generates some constructive discussion on both sides of the aisle (if there are two sides) :-)

Mine kept working as well. Sorry it happened still. If this was done recently, it might just be a TTL thing. If this change was over the weekend, it might have been our switchover from FeedBurner to Google infrastructure for feeds...

If this is older, I'm still sorry, but wanted to chime in that my subscription is good as well :)

Well I don't think Mike's right. His idea of consolidation is all the blogs selling themselves to him for cheap and him selling them at a premium ;-)

And you're not going to Gnomedex? What's the issue? Would really suck not to see you there... We have some small projects we're about to outsource (some coding, some not) if you're interested...

Either way, the approach on this project is to give bloggers total freedom, total choice and to encourage these kinds of "networks" (in quotes for a reason) to coalesce quickly and easily - and hopefully for bloggers to make more money at the same time!

Just to clarify, what I'm proposing would basically be to create The Inquisitr Ad Network, and for us to run the tech and sales (though you could have a dedicated sales team selling as well). All about choice, freedom and helping small to medium bloggers earn more.

But, again, no worries if you don't want to go down that road Duncan :) Either way I'll be at Gnomedex and can show you the pieces if you'd like. Either for you to work with us, or just for you to use in building whatever it is that comes from this :)

Cross-posting this from Duncan's blog:

While I'm assuming there'll be no interest, I would like to note that we're releasing tech later this year to allow all this to happen very seamlessly (and at no risk to member blogs, since they can set a minimum CPM and set a backup code ... like their AdSense code).

And it also gives blogs access to a sales team which, per my post, is really the biggest challenge.

Again, I'm sure there's little interest to work with me and b5 again, but I'd be happy to show you our plans at Gnomedex, and if you like it, to figure out a way to insulate you from the things you don't like or agree with.

End of the day, what we'll be launching doesnt' lock bloggers in, doesnt' require a commitment, gives bloggers full control and is designed to helping all bloggers (not just the biggest ones) make more money ... without giving up their current revenue streams.

While I'm assuming there'll be no interest, I would like to note that we're releasing tech later this year to allow all this to happen very seamlessly (and at no risk to member blogs, since they can set a minimum CPM and set a backup code ... like their AdSense code).

And it also gives blogs access to a sales team which, per my post, is really the biggest challenge.

Again, I'm sure there's little interest to work with me and b5 again (for obvious reasons), but I'd be happy to show you our plans at Gnomedex, and if you like it, to figure out a way to insulate you from the things you don't like or agree with Duncan.

End of the day, what we'll be launching doesnt' lock bloggers in, doesnt' require a commitment, gives bloggers full control and is designed to helping all bloggers (not just the biggest ones) make more money ... without giving up their current revenue streams.

Definitely. Though there have been *some* personality-driven acquisitions that have succeeded in big media companies, that tends to be when the personality actually moves VERY quickly up the food chain so his/her personality becomes embedded in the culture...

So, basically, they work if the person doesn't leave. But how often does it really happen where the company gets bought and the founding team / SME's / CEO / visionaries stick around forever?

We've seen evidence of a TC shop fest going on, so I wouldn't discount this. I think VWag is the only one with enough balls to run the story though. but the point's the same, Mike's an integral part of TC, no matter how many other folk he hires. And acquirers will always massively discont the enterprise value because they'll assume he'll leave and when he does some unknown percentage of "the magic" will go with him.