Posts from May 2006

FeedBurner (a Union Square Ventures portfolio company) has been all about feeds for as long as I’ve known them.  I started using FeedBurner to host the feeds from this blog in early 2004, less than a month after they launched their service.

And they’ve done an amazing job of becoming the best choice for hosting feeds, marketing feeds, reporting on feeds, and monetizing feeds. That’s why they host over 280,000 feeds and that number grows every day.

But today, FeedBurner announced something that I think its a big deal. They are now allowing publishers to run FeedBurner powered ads not only in their feeds but also on the publisher’s web pages. I’ve written before about how the feed layout is becoming a metaphor for what the page layout should be.

When advertising can be targeted against a specific post, the ad should be next to the post, not somewhere lost on the sidebar.  This screenshot from FeedBurner’s blog this morning (next to a post about landing Wired, which is pretty big news too) shows how the ads will look.

If you use FeedBurner and want to turn this feature on, just go to your FeedBurner monetize page and select "configure ads" and look for the check box that says "display ads on my web site".  If its there (it may not be for all publishers, they are going to roll this out gradually), in about two weeks you’ll start seeing ads between your posts.

As Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner says in the blog post announcing this service,

[The} feed meta data [delivers] extra context that’s
available via the feed that provides the framework for new and better
ad units. Ads that shift to the latest permalinks on a site, ads that
only appear/disappear once a post has comments, serialized campaigns on
a page that understand page/article sequence, etc.

The bottom line is this is new web page ad inventory, but also smart inventory that reacts to what is happening with the post it is attached to.  FeedBurner continues to lead the way in monetizing microchunked content and I have to say I am thrilled to have a ringside seat to watch them work their magic.

A great art project on the web for everyone who loves Washington Square Park.

Go contribute your own story.

I am catching up on my blogs this morning and Brad Feld has a "must read" post on why you must ignore your first 25,000 users.

Great post Brad.

My cliche of the week last week was on "betting the company".

Tom Evslin follows that post with a really great post explaining why all CEOs, even those who run very large companies, need to be betting the company in order to survive.

Great post Tom.

Our portfolio company Indeed announced the commercial availability of its CPC advertising system last week.  Here is a blog post on the Union Square Ventures weblog talking about the importance of this service to employers and other advertisers.

Google and Yahoo!/Overture have pioneered a fundamentally different advertising system with CPC ads targeted against content. Vertical search engines like Indeed are now applying targeted CPC ads to new applications and we are excited to see the results.

I really enjoyed this. It is like waking up from a really bad dream and realizing that everything is OK.

I did try to find this video on NBC’s website, but for some reason it’s not available there.

As you can tell, NBC made YouTube take down the video, but they didn’t put it up on NBC.com yet.

You can still see it at iFim.

I am looking forward to seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform live next weekend at the Nascar Nextel All Star Challenge (formerly the Winston) between segment 1 and segment 2 at the Lowe’s Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina.

The Gotham Gal and I are taking the whole family down for the weekend. It will be our first time at a Nascar race and we are really looking forward to the whole experience.

In preparation, we’ve are getting familiar with the new RHCP record, Stadium Arcadium. Wow.  What a record this is.  Possibly the best thing they’ve ever done.  It’s long with 28 tracks over two CDs, the Jupiter disc and the Mars disc.  I prefer Mars but they are both really good.

My favorite track on the record, on the Mars disc, is called 21st Century.  This song combines all that is great about the Chili Peppers, a funky groove, great fast paced lyrics, and a shredding John Frusciante guitar solo.

Here is live version from a set the Chili Peppers did for Zane Lowe at BBC Radio 1 in london last month. Thanks to Ear Farm for putting the links up and the photo at the top of this post.

21st Century Live

The Gotham Gal and I invited two special guests over for brunch this morning and we recorded a 25 minute podcast with the "father and son of podcasting".

The father of podcasting being Josh Harris, founder of the pioneering podcasting and videoblogging company Pseudo.com which started recording and broadcasting audio on the Internet in 1995. Here’s a post I did about Josh, Pseudo, and podcasting version 1.0.

The son of podcasting being Jason Calacanis, who turned me on to podcasting in 1997 when he invited me to join him on the Silicon Alley Reporter radio show at Pseudo’s studios on Houston Street and Broadway in lower Manhattan.

So The Gotham Gal, Jason, Josh, and I spent about 25 minutes talking about the early days of podcasting and how Pseudo got started.  We then got into the crazy days of the late 90s when Josh turned Psuedo into the digital equivalent of Andy Warhol’s factory.

That evolved into a discussion of Josh’s alter ego, Luvvy the clown, and how Josh and his girlfriend Tanya recorded their soho loft 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The podcast ends with a discussion of the wilson’s family upcoming "red state weekend" and Jason Calacanis trash talking the Nascar crowd.

All in all, a very fun show and well worth a listen for anyone who wants to know how podcasting got started, what happened in that crazy days of "silicon alley" in the late 90s, and Josh Harris’ views on the "synthetic reweaving of society".

Listen Live Here

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes version 4.9 or above, then select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

I can’t pick any one of them to highlight but in total, the comments to my post on Capturing The Internet Component of The New York TImes Company are pretty good.

Before you go and do the hedged trade, please give them a read.