Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I’m interviewing Jason Calacanis later on today (Friday 22nd) for a PodLeaders podcast.
I will be talking to him about Weblogs Inc., the Tesla and Mahalo, amongst other things.
If you have any questions you’d like me to put to Jason, please leave them in the comments of this post.
Matt reckons Verisign’s purchase of Weblogs.com means that the outlook for ping is poor:
Verisign, which does not have a particularly good history in the blogosphere, has purchased Weblogs.com. This leaves Ping-O-Matic as the only large-scale and independent ping relay service left.
With all the mergers and acquisitions going on at the minute, it is only natural to wonder what the value of your site/blog is. I see Tom Murphy recently mentioned that Boards.ie was offered $750,000 for the site back in the original dot.com bubble but they turned it down. I wonder what it would be worth now that we are in the dot blog bubble.
Well, part of that speculation has been made easier for us by Tristan Louis - he analysed the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal in great detail and came up with a valuation of $564.64 per inward link for a blog. I’m not sure if there is an easy way to tell how many inward links boards.ie has. Google reports 2910 - but that doesn’t account for the deeper links to the various fora and discussions. Still - even this conservative figure values Boards.ie at over $1.6m - nice one guys.
In my own case, Technorati reports 466 links into this site (from 118 sites). So that puts a value of $263,122 on this site! I tell you what, I’ll let it go for an even $250,000 
In all seriousness, influential blogger or not, there is no way that this site is worth that much. Valuations like that do nobody any favours (except perhaps Jason Calacanis). We are back in the dot com bubble days all over again. The bubble is going to burst with all the financial losses and pain that brings. Again. And technology is going to get an even worse name than it has had for the last 3-4 years.
How do we avert this second spectacular fall from grace? I have no idea - anyone who has any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
UPDATE:
I see Kevin Burton is thinking along the same lines.
Have you heard about RSS and wondered what exactly it is? Well in technospeak RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a family of XML file formats for web syndication. To put it more simply, the technology behind RSS allows internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds so that they are notified when there are updates to the site. RSS feeds are typically used by news websites (RTE, BBC, Reuters, CNN, etc.), weblogs (blogs) and more recently by search engines and other search services to provide a perpetual search.
To Subscribe to an RSS feed from a website you need the site’s RSS feed address (i.e. http://www.tomrafteryit.net/feed/) and an RSS feed reader. You can install a feed reader on your computer so that you have access to it on your desktop, or if you prefer you can use an online feed reader. If you are not comfortable installing software on your computer then an online feed reader might suit you best. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of commercial and free RSS feed readers. Google has recently launched an online feed reader called Google Reader, Yahoo! has one in its MyYahoo service and Microsoft has one on its Start.com site.
How do I know where a site’s feed is?
A sites RSS feed is typically linked to with a small orange button with white writing on it which might say one of the following: RSS, XML,Webfeed, Feed, or Subscribe.
Why would I want to use RSS?
RSS is a push technology, where the information you want is delivered directly to you - unlike browsing, where you have to go looking for the required data. Search engine RSS feeds are particularly powerful because they allow you to search for a term of interest (your company’s name, your competitor’s name, your market segment) and subscribe to an RSS feed for that search. This RSS feed will now constantly deliver new information on that search term as it arises on the internet. In the field of market intelligence, this is one of the most powerful tools ever seen.
If you’d like to know more about RSS or to see it in action, feel free to come along to the IT@Cork RSS Event on the 25th of October.
I see on Dave Winer’s blog that he has confirmed the rumour that he sold Weblogs.com to Versign - he neglected to say how much for! The rumour mill is putting a figure of ~$5m on it.
Couple that with the news that AOL are buying Weblobsinc.com for somewhere between $25-$40m, and the news of Nick Denton of Gawker Media’s deal with VNU and I’m starting to think, hey maybe there’s money in them thar blogs after all!
It feels like early 2000 all over again, or on the other hand, as BL says
for a couple million, I’d sell this blog. Serious inquiries only.
I see PaidContent.org and Reuters are reporting that AOL are about to buy Weblogs Inc. network for $25m!
Weblogs Inc was set up by Jason Calacanis two years ago as a network of blogs and includes under its umbrella titles such as Engadget and Autoblog. According to Calacanis, Weblogs Inc earns in excess of $1m annually in Google Adsense revenues.
Congrats to Jason, $25m for two years work is, by any standards, a good return!
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