The Web, as we’ve known it, is all about velocity. It wants you to move along. Click here! Go there! Watch this! As a result, it’s never been a great place to settle down and focus for the 30 minutes it might take you to read an 8,000-word article—the sort of long, in-depth non-fiction that made magazines like The Atlantic, Esquire, and The New Yorker famous.

But the Web is still a great medium for circulating such content, especially to readers who might never shell out for a newsstand, subscription, or digital copy of a magazine. And with the emergence of a new class of mobile and browser-based reading apps, there’s finally a more comfortable way for Internet users to enjoy this long-form writing. I’m talking about services like Instapaper, Readability, and Read It Later, which parse Web pages, zeroing in on just the article text and zapping all the ads and other clutter.

In a column tomorrow I’ll look at these apps one at a time and share some pointers about fun ways to use them. But today I want give you a deep-dive look at the newest addition to this category: an iPad app from Longform.org. If you’re an Instapaper user, you’ve no doubt heard of Longform. Brooklynites Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky originally founded the service to help commuters like themselves who wanted to fill up their Instapaper queues with good long reads—2,000 words and above—before hopping on the 2 train into Manhattan. (The company later added support for Readability and Read It Later.) Well, this Wednesday the company released a dedicated Longform app, which iPad owners can use to access not only the usual feed of articles chosen by Longform’s editors, but a more complete panoply of long-form articles pulled from the websites of 25 top-flight publications, such as The Awl, The Believer, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, and Wired.

The $4.99 app is simple, elegant, and attractive—all prerequisites, if you’re promising readers a more serene reading experience. What sets it apart from the other reading apps is the way it fetches a supply of long-form articles from the chosen publications, so users don’t have to. With apps like Instapaper, by contrast, you do the curating yourself: if you find an article on the Web that you want to read later, you click on a special Instapaper bookmarklet in your browser, and it shows up in the app. But before you can do that, of course, you have to get the bookmarklet from Instapaper’s website. That’s two steps too many for most readers, according to Lammer. “I know that to the tech press this sounds ridiculous,” Lammer says, “but Instapaper is too complicated for some people to use. We wanted to create something that … works more directly.”

I talked with Lammer yesterday to get the Longform.org origin story and to find out more about the genesis and mechanics of the new app. An edited version of our interview follows.

For me, the critical question in our conversation was about how quickly the reading habits of Web and mobile users are changing, and what the rising popularity of the de-cluttering apps will mean for the business of publishing on the Web. The easier it gets to obtain ad-free renditions of Web content, after all, the more carefully publishers are going to have to think about whether to put that content on the Web at all—meaning the reading apps could inadvertently help to kill the very industry they feed on. But Lammer argues that the Longform app and its cousin are currently adding to overall page views, not subtracting—and that in any case, where readers want to go, publishers must follow. Read on for the nitty-gritty.

Xconomy: What possessed you and Max Linsky to get into the curation business?

Aaron Lammer: We were both Instapaper users. For both of us, getting the iPhone and starting to read on it was a pretty formative experience. I have a background in publishing and Web stuff, and Max has a background in journalism. We realized that you can burn through an Instapaper queue pretty quickly if you are commuting 45 minutes each way every day. I think it’s really a New York story, because New York is one of the few places where people spend over an hour a day underground, without a connection.

Both of us were hoarding stories, and passing them around internally in a small group. And we eventually said, … Next Page »

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Two trends are driving the current job market: globalization, where everybody is becoming part of the economy, and innovation, which increases productivity and allows fewer people to do the same jobs. These two trends will not slow down during the next few decades. How should students train in college to build careers under these conditions?

The situation is similar to 150 years ago, when 98 perecent of people farmed. Now we need only 2 percent of the population to look after the farms. The other 96 percent are engaged in businesses that did not exist 150 years ago. Similarly, the globalization of the workforce and the concurrent productivity gains will take care of people’s current needs. New graduates over the next decades will be part of businesses that don’t exist today.

What are these new businesses? We know that the world faces several big challenges such as energy, sustainability, poverty, education and healthcare. We need to solve these problems, but no one is sure how they will lead to specific businesses. This is the challenge and the opportunity for new graduates.

New graduates who want to be players in the new economy will need a strong work ethic, rigor in their thought process, and entrepreneurial energy. In the old economy, individuals mastered a specific skill and practiced it over the course of a 50-year career. In the next 50 years, new graduates will probably change their field of practice every 10 years. They need a good work ethic to be able to learn new things. They need rigor in their thought process to learn to learn. They need to be flexible and be entrepreneurial to adapt to new businesses.

No matter what students study, whether it is technology, journalism, art, medicine, business, or law, they will have to be entrepreneurial to survive and prosper in the next 50 years. In universities they learn to solve problems. In addition to solving problems posed by others, students need to learn how to pick problems that they are passionate about solving. A big part of being an entrepreneur is to learn to pick problems that you want to solve.

I am a big believer that students should create experiential learning opportunities during their university years. They should treat the whole world and its problems as their laboratory, as opposed to confining themselves to their campuses. Picking a problem that they feel passionate about and finding a way to solve it builds confidence and gives students a taste of taking charge. New graduates have to be entrepreneurial and innovative in creating opportunities for themselves as opposed to waiting for others to do it for them.

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Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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I had a great time on the latest edition of the GeekWire podcast and radio show, the regular program produced by KIRO-FM featuring longtime Seattle technology journalists Todd Bishop and John Cook. We talked about the local tech beat, and what I’ve noticed as a reporter making the transition from my previous gig covering politics and government for the Associated Press.

Listen to the whole thing here, or check out the embedded player below, for this week’s edition of the “Name That Tech Tune” contest—the prize is a free ticket to Mobile Madness Northwest, our fantastic half-day forum on the future of mobile being held at F5 Networks in Seattle Dec. 6. Todd will be there too, as moderator of the session-ending panel created by our event partners at the WTIA.

In the podcast, we covered the eternal debate over whether Seattle’s innovation scene can climb the ladder and make a real play to be in the national consciousness for technology entrepreneurs. My take on this is that it’s happening, albeit kind of slowly, as big and small Silicon Valley companies open more Seattle offices and diversify the gene pool. But it seems like the region might also need to rely on the Valley as a supplementary source of investment dollars—just look at how much more VC money is raised in Boston to see what we’re missing out on.

And there was a bit of media-insider gossip too, as the three of us tackled an interesting recent incident where the AP was lightly smacking employees for tweeting the news before calling it in to the desk—in this case, for some reporters who were being arrested while covering Occupy Wall Street protests. I’m a little old-school on this one: I don’t think you should “scoop the wire” in that situation, since so many more people get information from that utility. But I get why people think that’s lame. And it’s a bad PR move to criticize your people who got arrested, of course.

Check it out, or head to the podcast page at KIRO-FM for downloads and more episodes.

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When the Economist‘s piece on Detroit (“The Parable of Detroit: So Cheap, There’s Hope“) landed in my inbox this morning, I dug in, curious. This is the Economist, after all, which typically puts its jaundiced British eye on American subjects and reports without bias or mercy. Ah, yes, I thought—here comes a super legit international media outfit to tell Detroit’s story correctly. And they did, sort of. But there are a few things irritating Detroiters about the way we’re covered by reporters that I’d like to air out.

First: Can we please, please, PLEASE stop holding Slow’s Bar-B-Q up as Detroit’s savior? It’s a restaurant, and if not for its location right next to the highway that carries suburbanites to and from the city, it would probably be like any other restaurant in Detroit, only with a better beer selection. I have absolutely nothing against the Cooley family (though, judging by this mock Twitter page, others in Detroit might) and I appreciate their efforts to improve the Corktown community. But the truth is, what they’re selling to their mostly white clientele is a “Detroit experience” that involves hardly any Detroit. Any given Sunday, Slow’s has a two-hour wait. Drive by: You can see for yourself how the men in Dockers clutch their wives protectively while their teenaged children creep tentatively toward the Michigan Central Station ruins to snap a few photographs. Then they eat, walk across the street to the security-patrolled parking lot, get in their cars, and go home.

I suppose it’s better than nothing, and considering how racial prejudice still haunts every single issue in this region, it may be the best we can hope for at the moment. But reporters should know better. I understand that all of us in the word-juggling business are being asked to do more with less, and that reporters often don’t have the resources to stay in town longer than a few hours. So, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I hearby offer any visiting journalist a spot on my “guest futon” if they want to stay a few days and truly cover the city. I live in a cramped Detroit apartment that I unfortunately share with cockroaches, but at least it’s authentic.

And if it’s authenticity you seek, then please let me show you around. The Economist‘s report seems to play … Next Page »

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Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of HubSpot and the author of the blog OnStartups, shared a post last week that really hit home. It was called “Dear Friend: Sorry: My Heart Says Yes, But My Schedule Says No.” Dharmesh explained that his e-mail inbox is perpetually overloaded with requests from people who want to meet with him to ask for an investment or to get his thoughts about their business ideas. The blog post consisted of a form letter gently explaining why, despite his best intentions, he can’t follow through on most of these requests. “One of my biggest weaknesses in life is that I too often say yes,” Dharmesh wrote. “I’ve learned the lesson that every time that I say yes to something new, I am effectively saying no to something else. And I’ve already said yes to too many things, and so have to say no to you.”

Boy, have I been there. I’m probably even worse than Dharmesh at saying no. That’s one of the main reasons why there are about three dozen full-length interviews with the CEOs of various companies sitting on my laptop, waiting to be turned into three dozen Xconomy feature stories—because I wasn’t able to say no when these companies invited me to meet with them.

The other main reason, of course, is that Bay Area entrepreneurs are just too darn innovative. They’re creating noteworthy products and companies far faster than I can write about them. That’s not my fault, but still, it’s embarrassing to have such a large story backlog.

This week I want take Dharmesh’s cue, and do something to get the backlog under control. I’m not going to compose a “Dear Friend” form letter, but I am going to explain some of the factors that go into my editorial choices, in the hope of helping entrepreneurs and PR professionals who are looking for coverage in Xconomy to understand 1) what my priorities are, 2) why it might take me a while to reply to your e-mail pitch, and 3) why I might have to say no.

I should preface all this by saying that I don’t want to come off as a complainer. For a technology writer, an oversupply of intriguing story leads is a good problem to have. I’m incredibly grateful for the way entrepreneurs and investors have welcomed Xconomy into the San Francisco/Silicon Valley innovation community since we set up shop here in June 2010. My interpretation of the “problem” is that readers are hungry for Xconomy’s style of biztech journalism—with its tendency toward longer, more magazine-style company profiles and news analyses. Our challenge now as a publication is to scale up, so that we can provide even more of this kind of coverage. Meanwhile, though, I need to do a better job of explaining what my sources and my readers should expect from me. That’s what today’s column is about.

One more caveat: I’m only writing about myself here. My colleagues in Xconomy’s other bureaus in Boston, Detroit, New York, San Diego, and Seattle are just as besieged with story ideas, and just as constrained by the fact that there are only 168 hours in a week. But they all have their own ways of sorting through story leads and managing deadlines. Nothing I say here is meant to deter you from contacting them with your story ideas if they are appropriate for other cities and our other writers’ specialties.

Where I Get Story Ideas

I’ll try to break this down into categories, with rough percentages. I’m talking about feature stories here, not the 1-paragraph news briefs we write about venture funding rounds and the like.

Breaking news—5 percent. This is a much lower figure than most other tech blogs aim for. But most of the time, I’m not trying to be the first to tell my readers something. I’m trying to help them see why it’s important.

Pitches from PR firms—30 percent. This is certainly the category that fills up my e-mail inbox the fastest, and takes the most time to manage. Sometimes, the pitches pertain to companies I’ve been wanting to write about anyway, so they lead to interviews, which lead to stories. Sometimes I’ve never heard of the company before, so I have to go off and do some research before I respond. I evaluate pitches based on a bunch of factors, as described in the next section.

Hanging out with entrepreneurs and investors—30 percent. I spend a lot of time talking with startup founders and executives of larger companies, whether in formal interviews or informal coffee, lunch, or cocktail meetings. I travel up and down Sand Hill Road a lot, meeting with … Next Page »

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My passion is for storytelling, and the stories that fascinate me most are about new technologies, how they’re brought into being, and how they’re changing everyday life. But there’s a wrinkle that’s been distracting me from doing my best work and getting it out to the readers who will appreciate it most. It’s called the news embargo. It’s a failed institution, yet some players in the news ecosystem refuse to let it go, causing journalists like myself untold grief. Well, I’ve had enough.

The decline and fall of the embargo system is, admittedly, an inside-the-sausage-factory issue. It’s the sort of thing readers of news shouldn’t have to think about. But it affects the way consumers learn about important technology news stories, which makes it relevant to every entrepreneur and startup. So allow me to dwell for a moment on why the embargo is dead, why it’s time for companies and the public relations community to face up to that fact, and what we might put in its place.

An embargo is a gentlemen’s agreement between a newsmaker and a news organization to keep a story secret until a specific date and time. One of the main purposes of such agreements is to give every reporter who agrees to an embargo an equal amount of time to research and write a well-informed story before the publication date. Of course, the newsmaker benefits too; when a volley of press stories appear all at once, it heightens the sense that the news must be important. (Whether this is always true is a different matter.)

Embargoes emerged as a common practice in an era when there were far fewer major media outlets, meaning it was much easier to keep secrets. But in a 24/7, Internet-driven media world where anyone can be a publisher and PR professionals are sharing embargoed news more and more widely, there’s a growing epidemic of accidental and deliberate embargo-breaking. In the world of infotech coverage, they get broken 10 to 25 percent of the time, by my personal count. When an embargo falls, every organization that agreed to the embargo gets burned. Except the one that broke it; they get a scoop, and more and more often, there’s no punishment attached.

Frustration over that situation has led a few organizations to attack the system. In 2008, notably, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington declared “Death to the Embargo” and said that henceforth his publication would work to undermine the system by agreeing to embargoes, then breaking them at random. They’ve done this with gusto, and Arrington’s campaign has worked. Embargo promises, at least in the business and technology space I cover, are now tissue-thin. If TechCrunch—now a division of AOL—doesn’t break the embargo on a given story, someone else emboldened by its example often will.

Yet technology companies and their public relations firms cling to the practice. Every day I get half a dozen or more offers of embargoed stories. And I have a new standard response for these offers: No thank you.

Let me say that again. I will no longer agree to embargoes. If you are a tech company or a PR person and you’re looking to share a story under embargo, don’t even bother to contact me before the embargo time. Just send me your announcement once it’s public. I’m not saying that I will never again cover a story that was originally shared with other reporters under embargo. I’m just saying that I’m not going to do a bunch of work in advance of an embargo only to get burned at the last minute by … Next Page »

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Interesting hiring news in the Seattle-area innovation community: Rebecca Lovell of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network is now chief business officer at GeekWire, the tech-news startup run by former TechFlash and Seattle P-I journalists John Cook and Todd Bishop. Lovell has been executive director of NWEN for just over two years, and worked as program director for the Alliance of Angels for nearly three years before that. Lovell is a fixture on the Seattle tech and startup scene, recently overseeing the “First Look” forum that showed off a diverse collection of startups to investors. Cook writes that Lovell will continue working part-time with NWEN as it searches for a new director. It’s more evidence of the fertile ground for online news companies in Seattle—GeekWire and Xconomy cover a lot of the same territory, and there are good examples of neighborhood news blogs, political sites, and the online-only P-I.

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It’s been less than a month since we launched Xconomy New York, and (to none of our surprise, really) we’re already finding there are more important innovation stories than even Arlene Weintraub, the intrepid editor of Xconomy New York, can tell on her own. So to all you reporters pounding the pavement in NYC’s tech and startup scene, here’s a nice opportunity for a steady (and substantial) freelance gig with one of the fastest growing biz/tech news networks in town.

We’ve said it before but it bears repeating: The ideal candidate will be a resourceful reporter, fearless interviewer, and swift writer with blogging and business news experience and the chops to produce breaking news stories and longer features and profiles on a daily schedule. The ability to work independently (but in close coordination with a world-class team) is key, a sense of humor is nonnegotiable, and experience with Web publishing tools and social media… Well, who doesn’t have that at this point?

If this sounds like you, write us at jobs@xconomy.com. Tell us what you’ve done, what you know about the New York innovation scene, and why you think you’d be a great fit with Xconomy. And don’t forget a resume and clips.

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Visits with some of Seattle’s big-name Silicon Valley invaders, details from some emerging startups, and new features for Microsoft’s underdog search engine are among the highlights in this wrap-up of the past week in Xconomy’s Seattle tech coverage.

—We stopped in for chats with leaders from both Facebook and Salesforce.com in the past week, checking in with those companies as they continue to scour the region in search of engineering talent.

In a sit-down with Facebook Seattle office lead Ari Steinberg we learned that Facebook has topped its original target of about 30 people and sees no need to slow hiring. Steinberg also said that the Seattle office’s engineers were quickly making a name for themselves back at headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, and in particular were taking a leading role in an update of the social networking powerhouse’s chat feature.

—Salesforce.com officially opened its Seattle office with a downtown charity volunteering event that included Mayor Mike McGinn—an actual Salesforce customer both in his official duties and on the campaign trail (sorry, Microsoft).

Woodson Martin, a senior vice president of the San Francisco-based cloud computing company, indicated that a recent lawsuit challenging a former Microsoftie’s hiring wouldn’t slow down Salesforce’s expansion. He also got in a signature dig against Redmond, saying that engineers “want to be out on the cutting edge and innovating, and not maintaining the status quo.”

—In startup-land, we checked out ShipSweet, a company from serial entrepreneur Ron Wiener of Venture Mechanics. ShipSweet is among the firms out there trying to crack some of the byzantine … Next Page »

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goat-choker (n.) An article of inordinate and suffocating length, produced to gratify the vanity of the author and the aspirations of the publication. (John McIntyre)

I regularly write articles that, by Web standards, are obscenely long. My November article on ShopWell was 6,500 words long, and my series last week on Google’s mobile ambitions ran to almost 7,000 words. Granted, it was broken up into three parts, but the longest section was still 2,600 words, or five Xconomy pages. Which is about five times the length of your average piece in TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, and the other popular tech blogs.

I wrote 7,000 words about Google because that’s how much space the material demanded. But sometimes I feel like a hypocrite, because the truth is that I don’t like to read long posts on the Web. If I come across an important article that’s more than two pages long (about 1,000 words), I click my browser’s Read Later button. That sends the piece off to Instapaper, a free Web service that reformats text for easy reading on an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or Kindle e-reader.

For me, Instapaper is a real lifesaver. I love curling up with my iPad or Kindle and reading for hours. An article might look like a goat-choker on a Web page—but when it’s shorn of all the distractions of the desktop and the Web and presented on one of Instapaper’s nice, white, folio-style pages, it becomes easily digestible.

But that begs the question: why am I still writing long pieces for the Web? I don’t have the excuse that I used to have, when I worked for magazines like Science and Technology Review—i.e., that my pieces were just the digital reflections of works originally prepared for print.

I guess I’m going on faith. The faith that at least a few readers will be interested enough to click “next page” all the way to the end of a five-page article. Our data shows that there are such people, though not as many as I’d really like. The glass-half-full view is that at least some of my readers are fanatically loyal, sticking with me all the way to the end. The Google article is pretty heavy going, and it seems ungrateful to wish that more people were this attentive.

Then there’s the glass-half-empty view—the one that says it’s futile to make such high demands on readers when there’s such a big supply of short, snackable content just a click or two away. A print magazine on a newsstand might be competing with a few hundred other magazines, at worst, for the prospective buyer’s attention. Blogs must contend with the entire Web, where there are well over a trillion unique URLs, and where short-form content rules. (There’s a reason the average YouTube video is under three minutes long.) On top of all that, I can verify from my own experience that—as The New York Review of Books put it in a 2009 essay—”readers themselves seem allergic to reading extended pieces on computer screens.”

So we have a huge point of friction: The Web is the most flexible, immediate, and pervasive medium ever invented for spreading the written word. By extension, it ought to be a great medium for long-form writing. Yet it’s often a headache, literally, to consume those words on the screen of a personal computer. So people don’t.

Maybe what’s needed to reduce the friction and rejuvenate long-form journalism online is a more flexible way to send written information across the last one or two feet—or, as Web geeks might put it, a way to decouple the network layer from the presentation layer. I’m encouraged here by news that Dave Winer, the RSS and podcasting pioneer, is working on … Next Page »

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I’ve got Frank Sinatra on endless mental replay today and I’ll tell you why: I’m looking for a stellar journalist to start spreading the news about innovation in New York, New York. (Look, nobody’s groaning louder than me about that one.  Let’s move on…)

My Xconomy colleagues and I are fascinated by the stories emerging from New York’s startup and venture capital scene, its burgeoning life sciences sector, and, of course, its formidable digital media and finance industries. We’re looking for a journalist on the ground to help us tell those stories and more.

The ideal candidate will be a resourceful reporter, fearless interviewer, and swift writer with blogging and business news experience and the chops to produce breaking news stories and longer features and profiles on a daily schedule. The ability to work independently (but in close coordination with a world-class team) is key, a sense of humor is nonnegotiable, and experience with Web publishing tools and social media will score you some serious bonus points.

If this sounds like you, write us at jobs@xconomy.com. Tell us about yourself, your knowledge of the New York innovation scene, and why you think you’d be a great fit with Xconomy—and don’t forget a resume and clips. Compensation is competitive and commensurate with experience.

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It’s time for Xconomy to expand its Bay Area coverage. We’ve been on the ground here since June, writing about innovation and entrepreneurship in all corners of the high-tech economy, including software and the Web, biotech and drug development, energy and cleantech, and angel and venture investing. Now we want to take it the next level—and we need a great journalist to help us do it.

We won’t mince words—our requirements are substantial. The ideal candidate will be able to dig up great story ideas, understand complex technology ideas and business models, handle interviews with high-powered entrepreneurs and investors, and write quickly. Experience with blogging and other forms of online communication and social media is a must, as is the stamina to produce breaking news stories and longer features and profiles on a daily basis.

Xconomy is a distributed organization but we work together closely, so we’re looking for someone who has both a great team attitude and the ability to work independently. A sense of humor helps. We cover a lot of fields with a small staff, so this is a great job for a journalist who has experience with a variety of beats and enjoys learning new ones.

Check out the detailed job listing at MediaBistro and in Xconomy’s own Jobs section, and if you think you fit the bill, write to us at jobs@xconomy.com. Tell us about yourself, your knowledge of the San Francisco and Silicon Valley innovation scene, and why you think you’d be a great fit with Xconomy—and don’t forget to include a resume and clips.

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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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It’s safe to say that the face of the media has gone through some major changes recently—with the onset of blogging and digital media, practically anyone with a camera phone and sharp texting skills can become a citizen journalist. Even the oldest names in traditional media are going social, with many publications signing up for social networking accounts from Facebook and Twitter, to Digg, Foursquare, and whatever new craze breaks out next.

Today Seattle-based startup Intersect came out of stealth mode, rolling out a platform for storytelling that incorporates elements from both new and social media. Headed up by Peter Rinearson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former VP at Microsoft, the new venture—something of a community journalism site—aims to reinvent the way people share stories online.

Poynter Online published an in-depth interview with Intersect’s director of editorial outreach, Mònica Guzmàn, who left SeattlePI.com and her popular creation there, the Big Blog, in May to join the 20-person startup.

“Intersect brings together two elements — storylines and intersections of place and time — in ways we hope will make storytelling more collaborative and engaging,” Guzmàn told Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore.

Intersect users create a personal page, where, much like Facebook and other social networks, they can upload a bio, photos, and status updates or information about what they’re doing—what the team calls “storylines.” These stories have time and place incorporated in them, creating a visual map of a person’s life through storylines. Others can then navigate a person by scrolling through their storyline—an online timeline of their life.

“In real life, our memories don’t scroll off a page and disappear, and our past can connect us as much as our present. When you pin your story to a place as well as a time, you make it easier for people to find out where their path has crossed with yours — whether it was at a meetup yesterday in Seattle or at summer camp in Maryland in 1985. You can also post stories about the places you intend to be in the future — like concerts or conferences — so the people you might meet there can learn more about you,” Guzmàn told Poynter.

The company, founded in 2007, has raised more than $3 million in angel financing, according to TechFlash, and plans to drive revenue through online advertising.

To find out more about Intersect, watch the video below, and check out Poynter’s interview with Guzmàn and TechFlash’s interview with Intersect’s chief marketing and business development officer Monica Harrington.

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Everyone loves a cute picture of a kitten with a funny (and often, misspelled) caption over it. Everyone other than the Associated Press, that is.

Seattle’s famous (or infamous depending on your point of view) I Can Has Cheezburger network has made a name for itself as a place where the absurdly adorable meets funny. The slew of 50 plus humor sites —from LOLcats to FAIL Blog—generate a combined 340 million page views a month, and draw in nearly 20,000 user submissions on a daily basis. It has become a focal point for comedy blogging around the world.

In just three short years, the Cheezburger name has become so popular, in fact, that earlier this month it inked a content partnership with big time Seattle-based global media organization Getty Images (the terms of which were not disclosed), and is currently in talks with Corbis Images. The former allows the sites to take images from Getty’s catalogue put them to their users to doodle and caption, before reposting on Cheezburger’s celebrity-centric ROFL Razzi and political Pundit Kitchen sites. But recent talks between Cheezburger and the AP regarding a similar partnership ended abruptly when the wire service backed out of the deal last week, citing concerns over its “journalistic integrity,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cheezburger founder and CEO Ben Huh was hoping to strike a deal that would allow the humor site access to AP photos, specifically celebrity and political images, that would then, in true Cheezburger fashion, be re-captioned with user-generated comments—much like the deal with Getty.

“I approached AP. We wanted to allow our editors and moderators to post timely and funny photos and allow future use of the pictures for our users,” Huh told Xconomy in an e-mail Thursday.

Huh has frequently spoken to the press about his thoughts on the changing media marketplace—and how Cheezburger’s success is a testament to the fact that there isn’t just one hard and fast way to be a leading publisher on the Web. The company’s immensely popular network of sites have been profitable since its first quarter of operations, and two of the five Cheezburger books have made The New York Times best sellers list. And while some more traditional news organizations run by professional reporters and editors may be more reluctant to associate with an organization that seems to be all about laughs, and nothing serious, Huh says the comedy focus doesn’t make the network any less popular, or relevant, in today’s culture.

When I spoke with Huh back in June, around the time Cheezburger hired its first full-time CFO Pearl Chan, he told me that he sees the network steering into a new space—infotainment. He also predicted that, while Cheezburger will probably never cover hard news, the network could easily expand into other facets of Web publishing beyond comedy. But at this point, that isn’t enough for the AP.

“They felt that allowing any user to add captions may violate their journalistic integrity,” Huh says.

While Sue Cross, the AP’s senior vice president of partner relations, acknowledged the shift within the news media to digital use in the LA Times piece, this did not change the non-profit organization’s position regarding Cheezburger.

“The AP, it’s fair to say, is less print-centric, and more digital- and mobile-focused,” Cross told the Times. But when approached for comment, AP manager of media relations Jack Stokes said the organization had nothing to add beyond what Cross said in her interview with the LA Times.

And while Huh told the LA Times he had not expected to make money from the proposed AP deal, he told Xconomy that he “absolutely” plans to seek out future partnerships of this nature with other media organizations. As for the measurable benefits of the current Getty Images deal for … Next Page »

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It’s been just four months since we launched Xconomy Detroit to bring our unique coverage of life sciences, information technology, energy, transportation, robotics, venture capital, and other high-tech arenas to bear on Michigan’s innovation scene—but already we want more! We have found a ton of stories of technology and innovation that still need telling, and we want to expand our coverage to do our job even better. If you are a great journalist who’s especially interested in the business of technology and innovation, you could be part of it. We are looking for one great full-time writer-editor, and/or one or even two part-time reporters.

Specifically, we’re seeking enthusiastic, creative, versatile, knowledgeable journalists with top-notch writing skills. The ideal candidates will be resourceful researchers, fearless interviewers, and swift writers with blogging and business news experience and the chops to produce breaking news stories and longer features and profiles on a daily schedule. A great team attitude and the ability to work independently (but in close coordination with the team) are key, a sense of humor is nonnegotiable, and a facility for Web publishing tools and social media will score you some serious bonus points.

If this sounds like you, write us at jobs@xconomy.com. Tell us about yourself, your knowledge of the Michigan innovation scene, and why you think you’d be a great fit with Xconomy—and don’t forget a resume and clips.

You would be joining a truly fantastic team that includes some of the world’s best innovation journalists covering some of the nation’s most fascinating innovation hubs: Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and, of course, Detroit. You can learn more about Xconomy and our team here.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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I’m extremely pleased to report that selected articles from Xconomy San Francisco are now appearing at The Bay Citizen, San Francisco’s nonprofit online news source. Under a partnership agreement worked out this month, The Bay Citizen will republish several Xconomy stories every week, bringing additional technology and business perspectives to to the startup publication’s already strong focus on local politics, arts, culture, and community.

Everyone knows that the news business is changing fast in the Internet age, and that journalists are having to adapt to find new ways to reach readers. But that doesn’t change the definition of good journalism, which you will find in abundance at The Bay Citizen. Through their coverage of pressing stories like the state budget crisis, the San Francisco mayor’s race, medical marijuana, and the Mehserle case, the publication’s lean and mean staff of 15 editors, writers, reporters, and interns are showing why journalism still matters to local communities. The team is loaded with people who have deep institutional knowledge of California and of journalism, learned at places like The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, NPR, and Salon.

I had lunch last week with The Bay Citizen’s founding editor-in-chief, Jonathan Weber. He’s well known in journalistic circles, and around the Bay Area technology community, as the former editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard, and before that as Silicon Valley correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Weber sketched out the backstory at The Bay Citizen, which came together this spring after a year-long study of the local journalism scene commissioned by San Francisco investor and philanthropist Warren Hellman.

Hellman is the co-founder of private equity firm Hellman & Friedman and also co-founded Hellman, Ferri Investment Associates, which changed its name in 1982 to Matrix Partners. His fear was that layoffs at The San Francisco Chronicle and other traditional publications would undermine community awareness of civic and cultural news. To address the problem, the Hellman Family Foundation contributed $5 million this January to create a new public service journalism organization.

That organization, originally known as the Bay Area News Project, raised a matching $5 million from a large group of foundations and individual donors, and opened its virtual doors on May 26 under the name The Bay Citizen. In addition to its online reporting, the publication provides about four pages of news per week for the Bay Area edition of The New York Times, and is involved in an educational partnership with the Graduate School of Journalism University of California at Berkeley.

A number of local independent publishers syndicate their stories in The Bay Citizen, including Berkeleyside, More Marin, Richmond Confidential, SF Streetsblog, and Tablehopper. Xconomy—which already has a number of syndication agreements with publications such as The Boston Globe, Motley Fool, The San Diego Union-Tribune, SeattlePI.com, and The Seattle Times—is proud to join the list of Bay Citizen partners. The Bay Citizen republished its first Xconomy story on Thursday: The MacGyver of Silicon Valley, my story about Jason Hartlove, the turnaround CEO at Palo Alto-based Nanosys.

At the risk of making this story sound like a press release, I asked Weber to say why the partnership with Xconomy makes sense from his perspective. “Xconomy’s coverage of technology and Silicon Valley is a great addition to the Bay Citizen, and a great complement to our staff coverage of major civic issues around the Bay Area,” Weber said. “We’re delighted to be working with them.” Likewise, Jonathan!

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Since Monday, if you’ve paid close attention, you might have noticed a goofy-sounding phrase in your Boston Herald or San Diego Union-Tribune: “Boocoo Auctions.” It comes from a Royal Oak, MI, based company called Ranger Data Technologies and is part of an ambitious plan to take lost advertising revenue back from Craigslist and eBay.

But, as President and COO Tony Marsella puts it, this is no cocktail-napkin dot-com idea. It comes from seasoned veterans of the newspaper industry. The CEO, George Willard Sr., has 41 years in the industry, from his days as a pressman in the early ’60s to his founding of the Mirror chain of Detroit suburban weeklies in the ’90s. His son, George Willard Jr., senior vice president of operations, has worked in newspapers for 14 years, and Marsella is a 30-year veteran of newspaper classified ad sales.

“So, this isn’t a website that was created by a bunch of software guys in a garage to try and then sell it to the newspaper business,” Marsella says.

“One of the reasons that we were able to amass this network of media companies is the fact that we all have a real solid understanding of what the newspaper business is, where it is, and what we thought, and continue to think, are solutions to help newspapers drive more revenue.”

The “network” so far is more than 280 newspapers or broadcast outlets that have licensed more than 6,000 Zip codes from Ranger Data, or about 20 percent of the nation’s nearly 30,000 Zip codes. The media sites buy the exclusive rights to Boocoo auction customers in those Zip codes. The auctions are promoted in the physical newspaper, but the transactions, themselves, happen online. Transactional revenue from every consumer in that Zip code who purchases an item or service is split between Ranger Data and the newspaper.

Boocoo.com had a soft launch on May 31 with just families, friends, and employees of participating newspapers. Only they could place items up for bid. The service launched nationwide on Monday. Among Boocoo’s partners are the Cox Newspaper chain—which includes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Palm Beach Post, and a number of dailies in Ohio—the San Diego Union-Tribune, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, and others.

This long reach into local markets, for starters, is why Boocoo believes it has an edge … Next Page »

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