John: this idea of prosumer media, define more. prosumer media is big business
Mark: started bloglines to scratch my own itch. other people must have this problem too, that was genesis.
Rich: folks in newspaper companies surprisingly savvy about the Web. more and more content every day – our job direct people to that.
Mena: the day we took funding, wanted to be more than lifestyle business.
John: google weather, feed reader
Mark: google joining long list of companies doing feed reader – “one more data point that validates our original vision”. bloglines changes the way people use the internet, so will be very important in future (ref: google feed reader, but framing it in bloglines terms]
Rich: doesn’t have to be all or nothing, win-win, etc.
Mena: competing with all the big players…
John: re creating content – do you have populist vision, celebrity culture.
Mena: project comet… it’s about communication more than publishing for her Mum, but are limited numbers of publishing. communications first and foremost for sixapart.
John: all have built platform on top of roiling conversations
Rich: we’re really early. like web in 93-94. over next 2-5 years, going from bloggers writing “real content” to much more about discoverability for people on topics they’re interested in.
Mena: it’s about privacy, writing to specific audiences. no scale expectations.
John: video, audio in bloglines etc.
Mark: video, audio not as easy to consume. search technology isn’t there. text will be king for forseeable future. use internet as it matures for different types of communication – more nuanced forms of communications. different mediums, more segmentation.
Mena: should be counting how active people are, how are they engaged, what are they doing.
John: spam, what do you do about it? threat or will we manage?
Mark: we have natural barrier – we only crawl sites our users subscribe to.
Rich: created opportunity for google, relevancy.
Q1: bloglines hasn’t changed much recently [that sounds familiar!]
Mark: challenge for us is one of scaling, keeping up with huge recent growth. #1 priority is to keep the trains running on time and keep decent user experience. has most of that solved, so soon will see more innovation.
Q from Jason Calacanis: monetize for RSS for bloglines.
Mark: we haven’t settled on a business model yet. couple of diff ways we could go – e.g. one option is we never monetize it. if we monetize, you the content owners are partners. so if we go down that route, we’ll talk with publishers.
Rich: has to be publisher tie-in.
Q: only business model among entrepreneurs seem to be to be acquired. are there business models?
Rich: there are business models (they didn’t take investment). ad-targetting, ads on sites etc brought in revenue. business model innovation required.
Mena: could’ve flipped two years ago. it’s a long game.
