For the third quarter of 2011, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation leavened its otherwise morose quarterly survey of economics bloggers (PDF) with something new: a haiku contest. The 63 academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists who participated in the survey, including myself, were asked to describe the state of the economy in the form of a haiku, the classical Japanese poetry form consisting of three lines in five, seven, and five syllables. More than 500 public readers voted on the compositions, which were published last week by The Economist.

I didn’t win, perhaps because my poem didn’t hew to the required number of syllables—but more likely because I just was trying too hard to be clever:

Employment down, output up 
Doing more with less 
Until everything is done by no one

The most popular poem was penned by Art Diamond, a professor of economics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Like all of the best haiku, it was both poignant and true—I voted for it myself:

jobs and Jobs are gone 
need more Jobs to get more jobs 
innovate to grow

The rest of the haiku are below, for the amusement of poetry and economics fans. And the survey itself? Well, reflecting the tone of the poems, the collective outlook of the participating bloggers was at its most pessimistic since Kauffman Foundation senior scholar Tim Kane began doing these surveys back in the first quarter of 2010. A crushing 95 percent of the respondents said they think the economy is either mixed, facing recession, or in recession. Across the board, respondents rated business conditions for entrepreneurs, venture and angel investors, bank lending to businesses and individuals as either fair, bad, or very bad. The most frequent adjective picked to describe the economy, as in past surveys, was “uncertain” (click on the word cloud below for other frequently used descriptions).

On the positive side, respondents seemed to feel that the economy has nowhere to go but up. Some 71 percent said that global output is bound to either “increase” or “increase strongly” over the next three years. But only 50 percent thought that employment would increase over the next three years, while 63 percent foresee an increase in the top marginal tax rate, 61 percent predict interest rate increases and a jump in inflation, and 48 percent expect federal budget deficits even higher than those today. The report called that last finding “a depressing surprise.”

Asked what government policies they endorsed to restart economic growth, the bloggers rallied behind three solutions—reducing regulatory burdens on new firms, enacting free-trade agreements with countries like South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, and forcing Congress to account for future liabilities such as entitlement payments in annual budget assessments. On other proposals, such as Medicare reform, capping tax deductions, and balanced-budget amendment, the respondents were more divided.

Survey participants included luminaries such as UCSD economist Jim Hamilton, UC Berkeley scholar Brad Delong, Craiglist founder Craig Newmark, author and columnist Robert X. Cringely, and Kauffman Foundation senior fellow (and Xconomist) Paul Kedrosky. ”As independent thinkers who are immersed in discourse through the innovation of blogging, these economics writers have a unique voice and perspective, and potentially profound influence,” the foundation says.

Here’s the full collection of poems, reprinted by permission. They range from the uplifting to the downcast to the downright cynical. If these inspire you, feel free to leave your own economics haiku in the comments.

Tax the Rich and Now
Borrow to Invest in Stuff 
Bring Back the New Deal
– Daniel Gross

Boost U.S. Demand 
Need More Money and Tax Cuts 
Hands off the long run
-Karl Smith

… Next Page »

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New York startup Gojee says it raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Kapor Capital. Gojee CEO Michael LaValle said via e-mail that Brad Hunstable, co-founder and president of Ustream, will serve as an advisor. Gojee curates recipes for its members based on ingredients ostensibly from their own kitchens. The recipes come from food bloggers chosen by Gojee’s staff. According to LaValle, Gojee is also doubling its roster of food bloggers to 160 from the current 80.

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Details continue to emerge about Tumblr‘s reported venture fundraising round. GigaOm first reported on October 27 that the New York-based blogging platform startup was raising money. BusinessInsider reported November 12 that Menlo Park, CA-based Sequoia Capital was leading the round and that Sequoia partner Roelof Botha would join Tumblr’s board, and on November 19 Fortune put the size of the round at $25 to $30 million, on a valuation of roughly $135 million, an estimate supported by AllThingsD. Tumblr has confirmed none of these details. Its site lists Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Betaworks, John Borthwick, Fred Seibert, Albert Wenger, and Martín Varsavsky as investors.

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You shape the view that others hold of your company via either one-to-one interactions or one-to-many interactions. Of course, the one-to-one interactions in business meetings and social settings are the most potent, because you have both quantity and quality of attention. But this doesn’t scale well. Another reason that personal one-to-one contact is so effective is that you can adjust your message based on real-time feedback from your ‘audience.’ If only that were the case for one-to-many communication! But maybe it can be. Hold that thought.

Network Theory

So, it’s obvious that newspaper, magazine and electronic media stories have the one-to-many benefit of touching lots of people, but the message and impact are highly attenuated because the contact is brief and attention is extremely fragmented by the clutter of competing stories and ads. There is nothing as exciting as scoring a great story in a prestigious outlet with wide circulation, but the real impact of a media program is the network effect that comes from multiple positive impressions bumping and rattling around in the environment. These collectively create a picture of your company in the minds of the key audience.

The second, third, and even higher-order effects are where the impact really lies. Imagine a VC reading a long positive story in her daily Dow Jones VentureWire e-mail newsletter ($6,000/year) nine months after your public launch. While the reporter’s story is initially triggered by your press release about a partnering deal, the length of the story and his extra effort to write it were driven by dozens of impressions that have already reached him. These include one article about you that he has seen and filed away from the New York Times, and two from local business press that he follows. Several round-up stories about your industry mention your company as a player. As he is preparing his story from your press release, his Google search turns up ten links to three industry-specific conferences where you’ve presented; one even includes a flattering photo of you at the podium. Search also turns up news stories he has missed, mostly snippets about your company in the trade magazines, a nice mention in Xconomy, but importantly, some of the company’s scientific publications in quality journals. A dozen bloggers have mentioned your company, mostly in a favorable light. His story is better, and the repetition he has experienced helps him get the kernel of your message right. He calls a couple of industry analysts about your thesis, and they, too, have been touched by your message frequently enough to offer neutral to positive comments. The VC reader is also consuming this story in light of a half dozen touches you have accomplished without ever having met her. These range from the first three minutes of your first conference presentation (before she left to take a phone call) to the NYT story she quickly scanned. Or imagine how helpful it is to your internal champion at a large corporate partner when he hears a story about your company in front of his boss at a cocktail party and someone else chimes in with another bit of news about your company.

The positive network effect grows out of repetition, consistency, and trust. Getting attention requires something else: news. More on that in a moment.

Audience

So let’s consider who is participating in this network you want to shape, starting with your key audiences. Most leaders would quickly identify prospective investors, customers and employees as the targets of interest.

It’s tempting to think of players such as your PR firm, reporters, editors, and other gatekeepers as simply a means to the end of reaching key audiences. But it’s appropriate to think more broadly about influence. You have to win over the gatekeepers as well. Also, don’t simply think of your current employees, vendors, and customers as a means to an end; they are also a key audience. In other words, … Next Page »

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Over the last week, as summer waves goodbye, the autumn deals have started rolling in. Take a look at the highlights:

—Seattle-based startup DigitalScirocco rolled out of stealth a few months ago, and into a deal with US Presswire last week. The digital content marketplace teamed up with the sports wire service to build out a collaborative sports photo news service. The partnership gives news organizations, bloggers, and personal websites the ability to purchase photos with captions from the US Presswire catalog and republish them online.

—Cequint, a Seattle-based developer of caller ID technology for mobile devices, entered into an acquisition agreement with Virginia-based Transaction Network Services (TNS) worth up to $112.5 million. The deal is expected to close in the beginning of the fourth quarter. The terms state that TNS will purchase the company for an initial $46.7 million in cash plus $3.3 million in stock, with the potential for an additional $62.5 million if Cequint meets future performance targets.

—This isn’t a deal, but it was a big story in the Seattle tech scene this week. After a long silence, local startup online media Intersect came out of stealth and onto the Web. The venture—a self-proclaimed community journalism site—is something in between an online publication and a social network. At Intersect, people can publish and share stories, all marked with time and place stamps, allowing users to create personal storylines and view, through these stories, where they crossed paths with other people.

—Bellevue, WA-based DataSphere Technologies raised a $10 million in a Series C financing round led by Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners to further expand into the local advertising market. The Web technology and ad sales company helps media organizations and businesses build websites, track audience behavior, and manage search and information discovery. DataSphere is also backed by Ignition Venture Partners and a number of media organizations, including Fisher Communications.

—Small-scale hydropower startup Hydrovolts, based out of the McKinstry Innovation Center in Seattle, received a $250,000 investment from U.S.-based civil engineering firm DLZ Corp. to develop a prototype 25-kilowatt hydrokinetic canal turbine. While the investment may seem small, it could lead to big business for the cleantech startup. If the prototype works well, DLZ says it intends to purchase another 400 just like it from Hydrovolts, worth an estimated $20 million.

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Bruce D’Ambrosio wants to make online content sharing easy. Eager to bridge the gap between content owners, and publishers, the 63-year-old serial entrepreneur and computer science professor at Oregon State University founded DigitalScirocco in 2009, and rolled the startup out of stealth mode in March. Since then D’Ambrosio, who serves as the company’s CEO, says the venture has only been growing. Fast.

The Seattle-based startup jumped into the digital content marketplace, positioning itself as a middleman between website owners, and media organizations. The idea is to make mainstream content published online more readily—and affordably—available for website owners, bloggers, and publishers who would like to repost the content on a secondary site. For example, if a local chef wants to publish a related article or photo from, say, The New York Times food section, on their blog or website, they would have to first contact either the Times, or a third-party media organization like the Associated Press or Getty Images, to negotiate a deal and buy the rights to republish the content.

This can be not only a long and difficult process, but an expensive one as well. That’s where DigitalScirocco comes in, providing an automated marketplace for website owners and content owners to connect. Using an online auction platform, websites can search for and purchase rights to content they want, at cheaper prices, while DigitalScirocco earns a cut of the sale for facilitating the transaction.

After being online for a few months under stealthy cover, DigitalScirocco tipped its hand, making its services publicly available five months ago. At the time “We were then in the ‘I know there is a market somewhere’ mode, and, I have to admit, a bit stuck looking under the streetlight,” D’Ambrosio told Xconomy via e-mail. But after carving out their first three partnerships—with global news organization Thomson Reuters, San Francisco-based technology and business news site VentureBeat, and city-specific entertainment information site BeDynamic, DigitalScirocco found new areas for expansion.

“We’ve now found several markets we can reach at a viable cost of sales and are ramping up sales efforts,” D’Ambrosio says.

And as of today, the growing company has teamed up with Atlanta, GA-based sports newswire service US Presswire, to build a sports photo news service targeted at small-market news organizations, bloggers, and personal websites. Through the service, DigitalScirocco and US Presswire will be able to automate and track delivery of recent and historical photos and edited captions to purchasing websites that have limited or no in-house editing resources. Conversely, these sites will have access to all of US Presswire’s new and archived photos almost immediately, with no first-use wait times that many media organizations employ.

“We are building an end-to-end workflow such that images can appear on our client websites within minutes after photographer submission of the image from the venue,” D’Ambrosio says.

The service was scheduled to go live on September 1, but has seen some last minute delays. It will allow website owners to select photo feeds to match individualized topics based on a variety … Next Page »

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[Corrected, see page 2] Publishing on the Web was always supposed to be a many-to-many affair, not a one-to-many lecture like so much of radio, TV, and newspaper content. But much of the burden of keeping the Web bidirectional falls on the familiar comment sections below most news articles and blog posts. And comments, in case you haven’t been following the blogosphere lately, are in poor health.

Too often, comment sections fill up with spam and anonymous backstabbing—to the point that some online publishers have given up on them, disabling comments entirely. Of course, many valuable comment threads are still generated around the Web every day, but they’re often frustratingly siloed and fragmented: a raging debate about an Xconomy article might be taking place on Slashdot or Y Combinator Hacker News, for example, and visitors to Xconomy itself would never know it.

Holding commenters more accountable for what they write, and connecting them into unified conversations, are two of the goals at Livefyre, a San Francisco startup that’s launching a private beta test of its real-time commenting platform today. On blogs that have turned on Livefyre, comments pop up on the page as soon as they’re submitted, without forcing users to reload an article page. That makes the comment areas of these blogs resemble instant-message logs or Twitter feeds—which isn’t an accident, as Livefyre’s system is built on XMPP, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, an open protocol originally designed for the IM world.

But in addition to being the only comment system built around instant messaging, Livefyre is also implementing a reputation and rating system designed to reward people who post high-quality comments and push trolls out of view. And on top of all that, Livefyre will optionally notify commenters who have signed up to use Livefyre-powered comment sections (which they can do using their Twitter or Facebook credentials) about conversations that might interest them elsewhere on the Web.

Livefyre, which will be free to individual bloggers and available for a fee to larger publishers, is introducing its service with support for blogs based on WordPress, Tumblr, or any other content management system that allows publishers to customize their templates by dropping in the snippet of JavaScript code needed to call the Livefyre service. The startup’s beta testing program is starting out small, with just five or so publishers using the system on the first day, but the technology will be rolled out to the several hundred publications on the company’s waiting list over the next two months, according to Jordan Kretchmer, Livefyre’s founder and CEO.

Livefyre didn’t actually start out as a commenting tool. Kretchmer—an ad-industry veteran who worked for Mullen Advertising in Boston and Butler Shine Stern in San Francisco—says he first started thinking about online conversations while doing a short stint as vice president of brand at the multiplatform news producer CurrentTV, in San Francisco.

“When I was at CurrentTV, I joined Twitter and started being more active in forums, and what jumped out at me was … Next Page »

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If you like to spend your spare time crawling the Internet for pictures of cute animals with silly captions or stories of others’ “fails” (i.e. moments of sheer misfortune caught on camera), odds are you’ve stumbled upon I Can Has Cheezburger. It’s grown into a network of 51 sites that have become the viral ‘it spot’ for online humor. The Seattle-based company has been growing fast—both in page views and employees—since it was founded just three years ago. I met up with Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh earlier this week to chat about the future of the online comedy network and all the new talent the company has been recruiting, including just-hired chief financial officer Pearl Chan.

Chan officially joined the team Wednesday after 18 months working as Cheezburger’s part-time CFO. She brings with her more than 20 years of experience with early stage Seattle tech startups, including Picnik, the hit photo editing service  recently acquired by Google. I had the opportunity to chat with Chan on Tuesday about how being a part-time CFO helped her get the job, the company’s secret to monetization, what makes the Cheezburger community so darn special, and how the company is going about becoming “anyone and everyone’s humor network.” Here are some of the highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: In my interview with Ben, he mentioned that you’ve been working with Cheezburger on a part-time basis for some time now. How did you first get involved with the company, and what was it about Cheezburger that made you want to come on board full-time?

Pearl Chan: The investors at Cheezburger-they are the who’s who as far as angel investors in Seattle…Cheezburger is funded by angel investors as opposed to a traditional venture capital firm. And there were a number of the angel investors that I already knew because I’ve worked with them in other capacities throughout my years in working in Seattle. And when Cheezburger got to a certain size, they needed some more strategic financial help. They [the angel investors] looked around and said, ‘well, who do we know that we could recommend?’ And that’s how my name came up.

At the time I got involved with the company—about a year and a half ago—the company was still fairly early stage. I mean, there were a lot of things that were still yet to be proven, but it was starting to get a lot of buzz and a lot of traction. And it is usually about that time that it’s good to take a look at getting some financial expertise, because prior to that there really wasn’t any internal financial expertise. We had some bookkeeping that was done internally, but not by a certified public accountant or anything.

And I was actually at that time working as a consultant, so I was a part-time CFO. And it’s interesting because there’s quite a need for that in Seattle. We have a very high amount of technology companies. Especially when they’re starting too, instead of funding themselves they take in external money—any kind of external money—from investors. And when you do that it’s important to show your investors and give them comfort that you’re taking good care of their money and doing all the right things with making decisions on how the money is being spent and how it’s being accounted for and that sort of thing. However, most of the companies at that size, they don’t have enough work for a full-time person because they haven’t been able to get big enough to do that. They still need that strategic level of expertise, so a part-time CFO was really ideal. And that’s how I got involved.

The first thing that I did [when she joined Cheezburger part-time] was kind of laid a lot of foundation groundwork on basic block-and-tackle financial stuff. But we had immediately—because the company got so much traction so quickly—we immediately went into some financial strategy-type … Next Page »

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Ben Huh is a very busy man. He’s only 32, yet he’s already spent much of the last few years soaking up the media spotlight due to the almost instant success of his network of humor blogs famous for its eccentric and misspelled name, I Can Has Cheezburger. In the three years since Huh purchased the main Cheezburger site, also known as LOLcats, from two entrepreneurs in Hawaii and built it into a treasure  trove of funny pictures of cute animals with the site’s signature misspelled captions plastered over them, the company has grown to become the largest humor network in the world with 340 million page views per month.

Cheezburger, formerly known as Pet Holdings, has been consistently topping the Seattle 2.0 startup index for the last year (and it’s still no. 1), has won a national webby award, and has been one of the few Seattle-area startups to continue hiring, even through the recession. The network now has over 50 sites, each dedicated to a particular niche of comedy. It would take a few paragraphs to list them all, but some of the more famed in the bunch include FAIL Blog, Babies Making Faces, There I Fixed It, Engrish Funny and Totally Looks Like.

Greg spoke with Huh about the startup’s strategy, rapid expansion and sudden fame in the online world back in October, when Cheezburger had 26 sites, 21 employees and had just exceeded 1 billion cumulative page views. Now, just eight months later, Huh has built a small empire with 51 sites, and 45 employees spread across the world (including one in Poland). According to Huh, Cheezburger has no plans of slowing down.

The company, as it grows, has sought to bring in more seasoned managers to help Huh manage this opportunity. The latest addition to the team is Pearl Chan, who has signed on as Cheezburger’s new chief financial officer among a slew of other titles, including treasurer, controller, director of finance, strategic business analyst, and tax manager.

I swung by Cheezburger’s Lower Queen Anne headquarters yesterday to chat with Huh about the company-turned-Internet phenomenon’s fast start, milestones in its relatively young startup life, where it’s going, what position it will be hiring for next, and the new user-involved “creation of culture” that Huh says makes the company unique. The office had all the trademarks of a startup. The reception area consisted of a small coffee table with a few of Cheezburger’s books strewn across it, and simple wooden chairs, no receptionist. The main room was an open space filled with rows of folding tables lined with computers and editors sifting through the over 19,000 user submissions Cheezburger brings in on a daily basis. Here are the highlights of the conversation, edited for length and clarity as always.

Xconomy: You graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism. Were you planning on being a journalist?

Ben Huh: I was actually, but this was back in—1999 was when I graduated. That was like the heyday of newspaper valuation, so newspapers were going crazy. They were hiring. They were investing in dotcom stuff. They were merging and buying each other. It was pretty exciting. My role was actually on the presentation side/the design side and not so much the reporting. I did go to journalism school to be a reporter, and we didn’t have a visual program, but that’s what I ended up doing actually.

X: So you moved to Seattle in 2005, and in 2007 Andy Liu (also the board member) from BuddyTV helped you buy the original I Can Has Cheezburger site (officially launched in September 2007). How did you come across the site and what made you realize that you wanted to buy it up and eventually launch this massive humor network?

BH: My wife Emily, who also works here—she’s the editor—we started a pet blog because we had a dog—we have a dog—and we’d just moved here and we didn’t really know … Next Page »

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Maybe you’d like to have a sleek, attractive blog or website for yourself or your business. Maybe you’ve looked around at some of the free blogging or lifestreaming platforms like Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, TypePad, and WordPress.com and you’ve been underwhelmed by the cookie-cutter sameness of the sites you see there. If either of those things are true, today’s column is for you.

The free platforms used to be the only way for a beginning blogger to take advantage of Web publishing technology. But it’s now possible to set up a good-looking, full-featured, highly personalized blog, simply by buying a customizable site template and setting it up on an independent hosting service. It’s much easier and cheaper than it sounds. In fact, I did it last weekend, and I’m going to walk you through it.

First, though, a word about the pluses and minuses of the free platforms. I’ve used quite a few of them. What’s great about them, of course, is that they’re free, and that they let you set up an account and start blogging instantly. Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and TypePad all make it extremely easy to create posts—in most cases all you have to do is write an e-mail. And they let you post several kinds of material, including text, photos, videos, and audio.

What’s most dismaying to me about the free blogging platforms, though, is that all of their blogs tend to look alike, with a style that’s curiously Web 1.0. Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.com are the worst offenders: you can pick from a range of templates or “themes,” but most of them look like they’re straight out of 2004. Innovation is much more alive at Posterous and especially Tumblr, which allow more customization, but those platforms lack many of the extra features—such as integration with photo-sharing or messaging tools—that bloggers need to keep up with today’s social media explosion.

If you want a full-featured blog with a spiffy, up-to-date design, the truth is that you need professionally designed theme running on top of a powerful content management system like WordPress. The good news is that you can get these things quickly and easily. I saw a bumper sticker on I-93 yesterday that said “Websites designed for $500.” Buying a WordPress theme and setting it up on a hosting service yourself will cost you far less than that.

A quick but important distinction: WordPress is a free, customizable, open-source Web publishing software system, created by San Francisco-based Automattic, that anyone can download from WordPress.org and run on their own Web server (that’s what Xconomy does); WordPress.com is Automattic’s hosting service, where you can start a bare-bones WordPress blog and the company will host it on their servers for free. Xconomy, FYI, is built on a WordPress theme that we designed from scratch.

Last weekend I relaunched my personal blog, Travels with Rhody, using a “store-bought” WordPress theme and an independent hosting service. The whole process took less than 12 hours and cost me $70 (plus moderate hosting fees down the road). Here are the simple steps I followed.

1. I went shopping at WooThemes. Stumbling across this super-cool South African Web design company a few weeks ago was what started me thinking about replacing my old Tumblr blog. The specialty of the house at WooThemes is premium WordPress themes. They’ve got dozens to … Next Page »

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If you feel it’s time to share something online but can’t think of anything to say, it might be a sign that you’re dull. If you try too hard to craft a bon mot for your blog or some table talk for your Twitter stream, in other words, you might just be inflicting your insipidness on the rest of us.

Or it could mean that you just need a little inspiration.

The folks at Lafayette, CA-based Plinky, a Web startup led by ex-Googler Jason Shellen, have chosen the latter, more charitable interpretation. On January 22, they went public with an online “content encouragement” service designed to supply the dusty nuclei for little snowflakes of confession, insight, or humor.

Every day, Plinky supplies a “prompt”—a provocative question or challenge—and then helps users craft multimedia-enhanced answers that are posted both on the Plinky site and on the social-media services of the user’s choosing. (Currently, Plinky can send posts to Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad, WordPress, and Xanga.) The prompt for February 16, for example, was “Name a book that changed your mind or opened your eyes.” The question elicited as many different answers as there were answerers, from Naked Lunch, the 1959 novel by William S. Burroughs, to Harold and the Purple Crayon, the classic children’s book by Crockett Johnson; Plinky illustrated the answers with a picture of each book’s cover, grabbed from Amazon.com.

Other prompts lead to answers that might contain Google maps, Flickr photos, or Amazon CD covers. The service is designed, in other words, to take advantage of the Web 2.0-style open interfaces that allow data such as product thumbnails to be shared and repackaged across many sites. It also encourages conversation, by allowing people to subscribe to and comment upon other users’ answers—the same way they might on Facebook or Twitter, but with a prefabricated topic. “People want to connect through content,” Shellen told me by phone last week. (Our full interview appears below.)

Shellen was famous even before he joined Google for being part of the team at San Francisco-based Pyra Labs that built Blogger, the first popular blogging platform. (Another Pyra/Google alum, Evan Williams, went on to co-found Twitter.) So it’s no surprise that Shellen’s seven-employee startup has pulled in seed money from big-name investors like Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners. In fact, Polaris general partner Sim Simeonov, who first tipped me off about Plinky, is the company’s interim chief technology officer.

Shellen says the company will go after more venture money soon. And it’s safe to say that the Plinky you see right now will evolve over time. For one thing, the company hasn’t rolled out any services, beyond the occasional advertisement, that it can actually charge money for. And Shellen says users are already clamoring for more frequent and more varied prompts—it wouldn’t be too hard to generate prompts  just for sports fans or political junkies, for example.

I’ve been playing around with Plinky for a few days; you can see my collected answers here and at my personal blog. I’m not one of those people has a shortage of things to say, so I’m probably not at the center of Plinky’s targeted user base. But even so, I find the tool far more inviting than Twitter or Facebook, and I’m sure it’s already becoming a hotspot for many interesting online conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise. As Shellen and his developers find more ways to integrate Plinky with existing publishing platforms, it will doubtless become even more useful. Personally, I think I would be more likely to use Plinky regularly if I could view and answer each day’s Plinky prompt directly from my Tumblr or WordPress dashboard, from my desktop Twitter client (Twhirl), or from an app on my iPhone.

Some of those capabilities may be on the way—but to hear Shellen tell it, the company is even more excited about finding ways to mine the information that users share over Plinky. As the user base grows, the answers could coalesce into a vast, ongoing consumer survey that supplements review sites like Yelp or Angie’s List. Looking for a good place to meet an old friend for a drink? Just check out the answers to yesterday’s prompt.

Here’s the (edited) text of my interview with Shellen.

Wade Roush: How did the idea for Plinky come about?

Jason Shellen: When I left Google I had a bunch of ideas percolating. Initially I thought I was going to take the approach of something like IdeaLab—raise a little money and get an incubator going, since the amount of money needed to start a company these days is so much smaller. But as is usual with these things, one idea captivated me. It was this idea that you could encourage people to create content in a more directed fashion—that you could end up with a win-win where the content looks better, is easier to create, is a little bit more inspired, and that potentially there would be a business model.

I was on the Blogger team before we sold the company to Google, in a business development and product strategy role. We really struggled with how to make the tool understandable to people, because at the time people didn’t even know what blogging was. Once we had the resources at Google to explain really well what blogging was, people started signing up in droves. But many of them were no longer blogging—they were doing something else like sharing stories, posting photographs. They weren’t blogging for blogging’s sake—they had very directed activities in mind. But there were still enough people signing up every day and then facing this big white text box and realizing they didn’t know what they were going to write. That really got me thinking.

You can look at any of the blogging or social networking services and they’ll tell you that the abandon rate is pretty high. You need some reason to contribute. I really felt like the tools needed some attention again. Blogging software is great, but maybe there can be something that other services can add as a layer, making use of all the great APIs [application programming interfaces] out there—not trying to start another Blogger or WordPress. But we do see that with things like Tumblr and Twitter and a lot of Facebook applications, people do want to connect through content, and they want to be inspired and challenged in new and different ways.

WR: So how would you describe what Plinky does, at its core?

JS: The core of it is the prompts—that spark that drives you to create. But just as important is the fact that you’re not confronted with a big white text area. For instance, today’s prompt is “Share the longest road trip you’ve ever taken.” Now, the standalone prompt idea has been tried before. Six Apart has a question of the day, for example. But we decided to take a novel approach and … Next Page »

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Smith Energy, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of wind, solar, and energy storage projects, today launched a news and opinion blog called Build Baby Build. The blog is focused mainly on helping community members organize distributed generation projects such as wind farms. “Time and time again, important renewable energy projects fail because of a small but well-organized opposition,” the blog’s co-editor, Jeff Rosenberg, said in a statement. “It’s a lot harder to organize in support of something than it is to organize against it, but that’s just what we need to do.”

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This past summer, I had a great time at the Y Combinator Demo Day, schmoozing with guests and watching some altogether fascinating demos from the incubator’s latest batch of startup companies. One of those that made my list of favorite demos was Posterous, which today announced a $750,000 funding round from a group of high profile investors that include Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj, Eric Hahn, former CTO of Netscape, Guy Kawasaki, and New England’s own Mitch Kapor. Posterous also announced a cool new product: group blogs.

Posterous’ shtick is “dead simple blogging.” Its software automatically converts anything you e-mail into your Posterous account—be it a video clip, text snippet, photos, PowerPoint, Word document, or virtually any other type of attachment—into a downloadable blog post. As Michael Arrington wrote in TechCrunch today: “Just start emailing text and files (images, video, whatever) to post@posterous.com and you’ve got a site where it all goes. And they’ve steadily added features. You can, for example, repost all the stuff you email in to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or wherever.”

I caught up with Garry Tan, one of the Posterous co-founders, this morning around 8 am EST, when he was just about to go to sleep in San Francisco, where the company has moved. Tan says they’d been up all night with the launch (at midnight West Coast time), Arrington’s interview, and so on. “Just a regular night,” he quips.

Tan says that Dharmaraj and Hahn led the new round, Posterous’s first aside from the typical small Y Combinator infusion. Also joining was XG Ventures, an angel group formed by a bunch of ex-Googlers, as well as the likes of Bill Lee, Tim Ferriss (of “Four-Hour Workweek” fame), David Sloo, Aydin Senkut, Peter Barrett, Kapor and Kawasaki (who’s involved in a blog-aggregation venture called AllTop). Another New England investor is Bill Warner, who founded Avid Technology.

Tan had nothing but good things to say about his Y Combinator experience here in Cambridge this summer. “A really amazing experience. Definitely prepared us well for raising money and iterating on the product and growing the user base,” he told me. Compete lists Posterous as having about 130,000 unique visitors per month already. “That’s U.S.” Tan points out, though he would not confirm any numbers.

The group blogs feature announced today takes Posterous’s ease of use to a wider context—your friends, family, softball team (in my case, it would be fantasy team), and the like. “You don’t even have to create an account for people,” says Tan. “All you have to do is enter their email address, which is one field.”

For example, my family site might be buderisite.posterous.com. So family members would e-mail whatever they wanted posted to post@buderisite.posterous.com. “It really is as easy as telling your mom to e-mail this thing, and you could have a family blog,” says Tan. (Posterous isn’t the first blogging tool to take a retro, back-to-basics approach—that’s also the pitch at Tumblr, which raised a $4.5 million B round two weeks ago led by Boston’s Spark Capital.)

If you want to learn more about Posterous’ new group blogging feature, here is the company’s own post about it, with examples.

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Boston’s Spark Capital and New York’s Union Square Ventures are the lead co-investors in a $4.5 million Series B financing round for Tumblr, a tiny New York-based startup that offers a stripped down, extremely user-friendly “microblogging” platform.

The investment, announced this morning, is a huge boost over the startup’s $775,000 initial financing, led last year by Spark and Union Square. Up to now, the core team at Tumblr has consisted of just three people, counting its 22-year-old founder, programmer-entrepreneur David Karp. But the investment has already allowed the company to hire a real executive team, starting with its new president John Maloney, a veteran of CNET and UrbanBaby.com.

While there are plenty of free or low-cost blogging platforms such as WordPress, LiveJournal, and Vox, Tumblr has set itself apart by making it easy for users to create short, media-rich posts, often simply by uploading a single quote, link, photograph, song, or video. There’s also a social-networking element to the system: from the main Tumblr dashboard (pictured here), users can browse new posts from their Tumblr friends, and can re-blog the posts they like. (Full disclosure: I’ve been using Tumblr for my own personal blog since late 2007.)

Before founding Tumblr, Karp worked with Maloney for three years at UrbanBaby, a New York-focused discussion site for parents of young children that’s part of CBS’s CNET division. “John’s focus on operations and business frees me to lead product development and scale our platform,” Karp said in a statement. The company plans to launch premium services next year that will start bringing in revenue.

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The Kraft Group in Foxborough, MA—which not only owns the New England Patriots but invests heavily in technology ventures such as the Matchmine recommendation engine and the Patriots’ own media-rich website—is the lead investor in a $4.6 million Series A funding round announced yesterday for New York-based social media site BlogTalkRadio.

BlogTalkRadio’s Web-based software allows users to conduct their own free, live, call-in talk shows. The shows are also automatically archived and published as podcasts. The company says that 3.2 million people listened to its shows in May, and that users launch 400 new shows every day.

“This round of financing further validates BlogTalkRadio as a powerful, new platform,” Alan Levy, CEO and co-founder of BlogTalkRadio, said in a statement. “Given the broad number of opportunities our platform presents to marketers and advertisers, and those who are already using BlogTalkRadio, such as Sun Microsystems, Hachette Book Group, J. Wiley and Sons, Intel and the Department of Defense, we believe this is the right time to strengthen our capital base.”

Former hedge fund manager Scott Sipprelle and other private investor joined the financing round, which the company says it will use to hire sales and marketing staff, strengthen brand awareness, and develop new content.

In a post yesterday, New York Times blogger Brad Stone used BlogTalkRadio’s own platform to interview Levy. “What blogs have done to newspapers and magazines, I think companies like BlogTalkRadio can do to talk radio,” Levy told Stone.

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The Cluetrain Manifesto, the classic book on how the Internet has changed the way consumers relate to corporations, was published in 1999. The word “blog” appears nowhere in it. (While the term “weblog” had been coined a couple of years earlier, it wasn’t until late 1999 that the short form “blog” caught on as a noun and a verb.) But if you had to boil down the “95 Theses” offered to corporate marketers by Cluetrain authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinberger, the summary might be: “Get a blog, and keep it real.”

Consider some of these gems from the manifesto:

• “Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.”
• “Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.”
• “Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.”
• “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.”
• “If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.”
• “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”

The idea that companies need to communicate with their existing customers and potential customers in authentic, human voices—crystallized so clearly in Cluetrain—has now had plenty of time to sink in. At many firms, the natural response has been to launch a CEO blog, and/or to allow lower-level employees with the blogging bug to publish their own views. And here in Boston, quite a few corporate execs have come out to play.

A few of these writers still don’t get it—they want to hawk all that’s good about their company or its products. They don’t communicate when they screw up, and they sound too much like their own PR firms. But there are also some who seem to take to the medium naturally—who understand that a blog is more like a conversation than a lecture.

Some of the best business bloggers find ways to focus consistently but not nauseatingly on their own companies, using their blogs largely to give readers a look under the hood. In this category, one of the most worthwhile local weblogs is Chuck’s Blog, written by EMC vice president of technology alliances Chuck Hollis. In his frequent, very conversational posts, Hollis shares revealing insights into EMC’s short- and long-term corporate strategies—blogging recently, for example, about the company’s intentions in the cloud computing space.

Other local executive bloggers write more about their industries than about their own organizations—Paul Levy and John Halamka, the CEO and CIO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, respectively, are prime examples, frequently writing about the big issues that affect healthcare. And still others write about whatever new product or service happens to catch their fancy, even if it’s from a competing company. Here, The Next Big Thing from Don Dodge of Microsoft’s Cambridge outpost is one of the grooviest local examples.

Though the Boston Business Journal declared in a March article that “The Corporate Blog’s Dying Off,” there’s little real evidence of a dropoff in executive blogging. It’s true, as the article pointed out, that blogging takes more time and commitment than many executives have to give. But if anything, with mainstream media readership and viewership continuing to drop, it’s clear that companies have to engage with their markets through other channels, including the blogosphere. That’s especially true in the high-tech world, whose customers dwell largely online and have learned from high-profile corporate bloggers like Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble to look for human faces inside the companies shaping the computer and Internet industries.

“Blogs allow corporate bloggers to converse with their audience directly,” writes Arlington, MA-based marketer John Cass in his 2007 book Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging. “Such online conversation can demonstrate a company’s ideas, abilities, and, in the final analysis, brand to customers and the world.”

[Click to the next page for our list of Boston-area executive bloggers.] … Next Page »

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Xconomy is all about hyperlocal coverage of the innovation community in greater Boston and New England. But we also know that our readers have many interests that reach far beyond our geography. For the most part, we leave writing about such matters to others. But, starting today, we are making an exception—and that exception is Wade.

Today marks the debut of World Wide Wade, a weekly, largely consumer-oriented column by Xconomy chief correspondent Wade Roush. As many of you know and have already remarked, there are few people anywhere more knowledgeable about new technology happenings than Wade. So we decided to tap this local resource in a new way.

The column will appear each Friday and will highlight new consumer technologies, such as Web services and electronic gadgets, that are making our lives more interesting.

I feel sure you’ll enjoy it. Welcome to Wade’s world.

Today’s column

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The party was pretty geeky—people were actually sitting around writing code. Mike Hirshland, who’d played football at Harvard (earning him an Honorable Mention on Xconomy’s VC Varsity roster), was having a hard time finding a beer. That’s when he gazed around the small San Francisco apartment and saw the laptop sitting on a counter—and on its screen was a clicker tallying downloads of the latest version of WordPress’s blogging software. “This thing was whizzing around like a race car,” Hirshland relates. “It was amazing.”

A click went off in Hirshland’s brain, too. In a cartoon, $$$ signs might have slot-machined in his eyeballs. Inventors have their Eureka moments, and so do investors like Hirshland, who’s a partner at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, MA. “That’s when I knew I somehow needed to find a way to invest with Matt,” he says.

Matt was Matt Mullenweg, the then-20-year-old whiz kid behind WordPress, a nascent open-source blogging platform—and the party was being held to celebrate an early release of the software. This was the spring of 2005. And, as the saying goes, it was the beginning (well, near beginning) of a beautiful friendship.

If you’ve been following the blogosphere at all, you’ll know WordPress has been phenomenally successful. The WordPress.com service now hosts more than 2 million blogs and last year claimed some 100 million unique users per month. With 42 million of those “uniques” coming from the United States each month, WordPress.com also claims to be the 12th-ranked site in the nation, ahead of Wikipedia and Facebook—and that doesn’t count the teeming multitudes of other blogs (including Xconomy) that use the software but are hosted elsewhere.

In January, ramping up to monetize the business, WordPress’s parent company, San Francisco-based Automattic, took in an eye-popping $29.5 million in financing, led by Hirshland and Polaris, and including strategic investor The New York Times Company. In the world of blogging, it doesn’t get any hotter—or better financed—than WordPress and Automattic.

This, then, is a story of how the not-so-hip Boston venture community claimed a front row seat at a trend-setting West Coast startup. It’s the sort of thing that isn’t supposed to happen. After all, when it comes to recognizing revolutionary Internet plays, Beantown investors are either a) hopelessly myopic and clueless, b) still saddled by Yankee conservatism, c) too gray to understand the Web, or most likely, d) all of the above. It’s also the story of a very smart 20-year-old who ran a business very, very cautiously and almost cashed it in and sold everything—until at the eleventh hour he decided to take the plunge and go after creating something really huge. Thinking big is another thing East Coast VCs aren’t supposed to be good at helping entrepreneurs do. But guess who helped push things in that direction? (By the way, if Hirshland’s bet helps us stop talking about Facebook, I’ll enshrine him in the VC Varsity Hall of Fame.)

Matt and Mike met in San Francisco back around Christmas of 2004. Hirshland was hanging out with folks like early superstar blogger Om Malik and Tony Conrad, now the CEO of Sphere, trying to figure out what blogging was all about and whether guys like him should be interested in it. As Hirshland relates, Malik and Conrad introduced him to Mullenweg, noting that the young developer was this super-smart guy doing interesting things.

“It doesn’t take too long to figure out that there’s something special going on,” says Hirshland, who has written on his own WordPress blog about some of what I’m describing. Beyond his great musicianship … Next Page »

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Boston-area bloggers met up to celebrate their craft and watch Game 2 of the World Series (or rather, the endless pre-game show) last night in The Pour House’s basement “dungeon” on Boylston Street. It was the second annual Boston Blogtoberfest, expertly organized by local Web designer Jenny Frazier. From culture pundits to experts on identify-theft protection, this was the place for bloggers to be.

Judging from the variety of volume of conversations I overheard or engaged in, the Boston area is home to a healthy population of smart, young, funny, enthusiastic bloggers. One is Frazier herself, a multitalented twenty-something entrepreneur who writes a really fun blog and is a super photographer and an expert self-marketer—she was even handing out cool little campaign-like pins with her personal “JF” logo.

Many of the people I met at Blogtoberbest (Xconomy helped to sponsor the event, along with about 12 other local blogs and businesses) have technology-related day jobs and not-so-secret alter egos as compasses to online and offline culture. A case in point is Jonathan Feeley, a marketing associate at Digitas who runs a personal blog about Web 2.0 culture called Digital Interactif. Feeley told me that he blogs because it’s the only way he knows to take charge of the overwhelming flow of important interesting information he finds on the Web. Then there was Nathan Burke, “Web Community Evangelist” for Matchmine (profiled here in September), who publishes Blogstring, a clever, colorful group blog that covers social media, public relations, and startups in the Boston area.

I even met two bloggers intent on drawing the best from the worst. George Jenkins, who runs a blog called I’ve Been Mugged, is a former Lotus Development employee (pre-IBM takeover) who learned in May that IBM had lost data tapes containing personal information on him and thousands of other current and former employees. In his blog Jenkins draws important lessons for readers from his own experiences trying to protect himself from identity theft. Then there was Michael Krigsman, who writes a blog for ZDNet entitled Rearranging the Deck Chairs: IT Project Failures. Krigsman told me that in his experience, most failed software or computing projects fail for one of three reasons (or all three at once): greed, arrogance, and ignorance. I understood the arrogance and ignorance parts—people often launch grand projects that they have no idea how to execute—but the greed part wasn’t so familiar to me. Krigsman explained that the third-party consultants usually brought in on software projects actually benefit financially from failure, as late-running or over-budget projects usually result in extensions of their contracts.

The evening was capped by drawings for a range of fabulous prizes. Xconomy’s crack CTO, Andrew Koyfman, would have won the evening’s grand prize, a $100 gift certificate from Shoebuy. But by the time his name was drawn, he had already left The Pour House to meet some friends from San Francisco, and somebody else got the footwear. Now we’re just calling him Shoeless Joe Koyfman.

Frazier has posted pictures of the event on her Flickr feed.

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Would Henry David Thoreau have been a blogger? I think he might have been. And if he’d had a cell phone and a voice blogging service like Utterz—launched today by Maynard, MA, startup RPM Communications—he could have blogged all of Walden right from his little cabin in the woods.

Thoreau is on my brain because I’m finishing this column on my MacBook from the shore of Walden Pond, a hundred yards from the site of said cabin. I can hear the MBTA commuter train rumbling past in the distance. The same rail line was active when Thoreau lived here from 1845 to 1847. Obviously, there weren’t any MacBooks, electrical plugs, or batteries around here in Thoreau’s day. But imagining that he’d had a way to record his own spoken thoughts and get them out to the world instantaneously (at www.walden.org, of course), I bet he would have loved it.

That’s what Utterz does, and after a few days of pre-launch testing I’m already taking a liking to it. As someone who blogs both professionally and personally, I know that I’m sometimes moved to sit down with my laptop and write something serious and contemplative. Other times I’d just like to post something short and spontaneous, without even bothering to find a computer or an Internet connection where I can log into my blogging service (WordPress for Xconomy, TypePad for my personal blog). With Utterz, I can simply call up 712-432-MOOO (432-6666) and talk for as long as I want. The service will automatically post the audio clip to the blog or social-networking site of my choice, in the form of a widget that can be embedded as a sidebar or directly in a post. (Click here for a widget with some sample Utterz I recorded here at Walden Woods.)

While the voice blogging feature is the centerpiece of Utterz, it can also handle text, video, and photos. When you register with Utterz you program it with your cell phone number and e-mail address. Then if you mail a photo from your phone to go@utterz.com, it will automatically match it with your most recent audio clip and display them together. All of this works seamlessly. A phone call or e-mail is literally all that’s needed to broadcast what you’re thinking or seeing to the world.

“We’re leveraging your cell phone to let you create, access, and manage content on the Web and share it with friends and with your social networks from anywhere, at any time, regardless of your carrier or your type of phone,” says Michael Bayer, CEO of RPM. Today’s a big day for Bayer’s company, which also announced that it has closed a $4 million series A funding round, led by Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures.

The company makes money by collecting a small fee from cellular carriers each time a customer calls 712-432-MOOO. “It’s good for the carriers because it’s minutes used,” says Morgenthaler partner Greg Blonder. “And if you wind up using more minutes than you would normally, you might buy the next plan up.”

Will Utterz catch on? It’s hard to say. Tools for mobile blogging, or “moblogging,” have been around for years. TypePad and other blogging platforms, for example, offer users the ability to post directly to their blogs via e-mail. Audioblogger, launched in 2003, was one of the first services that let you call a phone number and make an MP3 recording that would then be posted to your blog, where visitors could listen to your recording online or download the file. Audioblogger was discontinued in 2006, but other sites such as Gabcast, Hipcast, Gcast, and Jott offer similar capabilities.

Yet most blogs are still 99 percent text, perhaps with a few pictures thrown in. Given that most everyone who blogs probably also owns a perfectly good moblogging device (i.e., a cell phone), there are only two obvious explanations for why audio moblogging hasn’t really taken off as a sub-genre.

One is that people view blogs as a primarily text-based medium, and that they don’t have a burning desire to create or consume audio posts. This explanation could turn out to be the right one. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell without first eliminating the other potential explanation, which is that the existing tools for getting an audio clip onto a blog are too clumsy and complex.

Utterz should provide a good test of the second explanation. It’s so easy to use that if it doesn’t take off, that will be a pretty good indication that the companies offering audio blogging tools have miscalculated, and that there just isn’t much of a demand for this particular service. But I’m betting that it will succeed, at least among the subset of people who keep or read blogs but also enjoy more personal and immediate forms of communication such as instant messaging, SMS text messaging, Twitter, and picture-mail on cellular carriers like Verizon and Sprint.

Thoreau may have gone to the woods to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” but he was no hermit, and I think he would have found something to like about the Internet. If we’re lucky, some modern Thoreau is blogging (or Uttering) right now from the slums of Kolkata or the slopes of Kilimanjaro.

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