It makes perfect sense for businesses to get into the business of blogging, and lots of them do. Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere reported there are 7.4 million active blogs (active being at least one new post in the last 120 days), and 12% of their respondents identified themselves as corporate bloggers. And the blogosphere continues to grow in leaps and bounds. As I submit this post, Wordpress’s running ticker reports a staggering 201,242 active blogs on its platform alone. (When I started writing this post, that number was 194,795.) If Technorati’s 12% holds true with this group, it suggests OneSpot joined about 24,000 other businesses when we launched our Wordpress-powered blog last month.

Blogging is relatively inexpensive to set up and maintain, so it is no surprise that business blogging has increased during this economic downturn. You don’t have to buy any software to get started, it takes minutes to implement, and the tools are so easy that anyone can learn to use them. Multiple authors can write posts for the same blog, so companies can maintain decent post frequency by distributing the task across members of a team. Add a targeted content aggregation service that allows for your own commentary and selection, and a steady stream of relevant content for your audience takes little time and won’t break the bank.

But the fact that it’s cheap and relatively easy isn’t the reason that businesses blog. Whether you’re building a media property, selling products and services online, or simply trying to market your brand, blogging can be a very effective way to grow your business. MerchantCircle, a U.S. social network of local business owners, showed a 190% increase in blogging between January 2008 to January 2009, totalling 15,676 blogs written by merchants on their network. In their study, they also discovered that merchants who wrote one blog received 30% more traffic to their website. Sharon LB of Sharon’s Marketing Missive has put together a great Small Business Blogging Basics guide to help businesses enter the blogosphere. She suggests three reasons that businesses should blog: increase SEO, establish thought leadership and relate to your customers.

So how does a crazy-busy business blogger (who, by the way, didn’t need another ‘quick task’ on her to-do list) have any hope of succeeding? Lots of folks have lots of ideas about this, but in my opinion it comes down to 3 things:

• Focus on your customer, not your wares. The great business blogs do more than list product announcements and press releases. They show how well a business understands its customers. Whole Foods excels at this. One of my favorite Whole Foods posts this week has Scott Simons showing me how to cook and prepare a halibut with roasted tomato, garlic and olive relish. The picture and the video make my mouth water, and I learn something new about how to cook one of my favorite kinds of fish. And in the midst of a recent salmonella peanut recall, they also blog about every recalled product that is sold in any of their stores to ensure the safety and well-being of their customers. Their blog does more than push groceries — it teaches me things I want to know.

• Give them something useful. I appreciate blogs that post ‘really good stuff’ that helps me in my personal and professional life. Bazaarvoice does a great job with their blog overall, but this week’s post about their research with JupiterResearch and Rich Relevance will be particularly useful to retailers and manufacturers who are trying to win business in a tough economy. It makes a great case for their solutions by giving its readers new information that will help them address current business challenges.



• Have a unique perspective. The blogs that I spend the most time on are the ones that have a clear and unique point of view. Huffington Post is the standard in this category, but my latest favorite example of a unique blogging perspective is Jessica Hagy’s Indexed. As a reader, her blog makes you want to buy her book because her stuff is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Her distinctive content also makes me read more/return more when I should be doing other things.

The OneSpot team is relatively new to the blogosphere. But we know that maintaining a quality blog will help us serve and understand our customers more, be a place to deliver ‘good stuff’ to online publishers of all shapes and sizes, and provide a platform to express our own perspective about the importance of content curation for every business.

Take a minute to share some of your favorite business blogs with us — we’d love to learn from you.

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Everyone, including myself, is running on all cylinders these days, trying to frequently post the best possible content for our sites. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have another able body to work with and take some of the pressure off, allowing time to make sure each original piece is the best it could possibly be?

Most of the time, to get more stories, you need more people, more journalists. Major media publishers know how much a reporter costs. Perhaps the editors are not as aware, but the accounting team certainly knows how much it costs to support a single writer. I read this great post on ZDNet called “Let’s talk about the economics of great journalism” outlining how expensive a reporter can be.

The fully loaded cost of a great reporter doing great work, then, falls somewhere in the $180,000 range:

$180K. I know that’s more than I make. Granted, this is likely a celebrity journalist with a recognizable name and multiple awards. Most local journalists might rake in around $40-60K (not including benefits). So let’s say that you hire a journalist (and don’t pay them benefits… we’re in a recession, after all). He/she cranks out an average 2 high quality stories a day for you, or 730 stories a year. This means that each story costs you around $50-80. Wouldn’t you like to get paid that much for each blog post (or maybe you do… email me!)

So hiring another body to get more stories is probably out of the question (unless you are a millionaire blogger… again, email me!) Syndicated content is now an option, as it is much less expensive than an employee. You might catch some dollar deals, and some articles may cost hundreds or thousands (depending on your topic), but let’s use the NYTimes a la carte price for the sake of argument: $3.95 per story. At only 2 articles per day, you pay over $2800 per year. A bargain compared to adding a reporter, but it seems a little high for 2 articles per day.

Then there is OneSpot. Content aggregation overall will get you more articles, but not the same quality you would get from hiring a reporter or selecting syndicated content yourself. OneSpot is content curation, which allows you to have that element of hand selection and editorial voice, but with lots of stories. Your site gets titles and summaries of targeted stories that link to the original story. As Chris Brogan, ChrisBrogan.com, says:

“Links tell Google what is important… enough pointers from lots of sites saying similar things [improves SEO].”

You become a part of your Web community, not just a site that copies and pastes a story (more on linking in a later post). You can also have interactive discussion pages that encourage audience participation. You can even add your own comments to spark discussion and add your voice. Plus, you save time scouring the Web for stories. Depending on your topic, you may average 50 articles a day. That’s over 18,000 articles a year. At the current price point, that makes each article less than 10 cents. I think that sounds more reasonable. Then again, I’m not a millionaire blogger…

In the first part of this post, I began the discussion of a new style of media: sites that have some original content, but primarily picked and linked to the best content from around the web for their audience.

1. The primary goal of any site is to serve its audience.
2. Curation is the aggregation, filtering, and prioritization of content for a targeted audience, with context and editorial voice.
3. It’s extremely hard to make the best content on the Web.
4. Great content is subjective and will be evaluated by your audience.
5. There’s not much use in creating the 4th best piece of content on something.

Now that you have had time to think over the first 5 rules, the remainder of the “top 10″:

6. If you can’t create the best content for your audience, link to someone who does. It’s all about what serves your audience best. Restated, this is Jarvis’ New Rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. Scott Karp calls this link journalism. If you focus on what your audience would be most interested in — regardless of whether or not you created it — and succeed, nobody can possibly compete with you.
7. Curation is usually more efficient than creation. Creating great original content is typically time-consuming, expensive, and requires expert knowledge of your audience. Finding content for your audience and adding editorial voice is often just as useful (if not more), and takes a fraction of the time.
8. It’s not cost-effective to build a definitive site without curation. It’s just too expensive to create the volume of content yourself that you need to keep your audience coming back frequently and spending lots of time on your site. Unless you have the resources to hire an entire staff of writers, it is difficult, if not impossible to build the library of content needed to become authoritative source on your topic, driving traffic and keeping readers on your site. You need frequency and time on site to make money in the new, lower-revenue world of the Web.
9. Curation is not gatekeeping. Gatekeeping assumes that your audience needs you to decide what’s best for them; that they have no choice but to rely on you for information. Curation assumes that your audience trusts you to find what will interest them; that you’re a reliable and time-saving representative of their interests.
10. Curation on the Web requires technology. A huge amount of manual labor will go a long way — successful curated sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, created by OneSpot advisor Peter Rojas, were started by dedicated expert editors manually combing through thousands of articles each day to find the best of the Web for their audience — but any approach powered by a lone editor or any small team of humans is bound to miss something when faced with the sheer scale of the Web. As Clay Shirky says: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure (thanks to Clay for pointing me to the IDC stats in the last post). OneSpot is one of the first platforms specifically built to address this problem, but there are many existing individual tools that are useful as well.
11. The eleventh rule has yet to be written. Please add your suggestions in the comments below.

Curation on the web is still relatively new and evolving, as is OneSpot — I encourage you to participate in the discussion.

In my previous post, I described OneSpot as a recommendation engine for Web content. While that description is technically true, it is far from complete, just as describing Amazon.com and Netflix as merely product and movie recommendation engines would do neither of those fine companies justice.

So to more fully round out my previous description and expand the general understanding of what OneSpot is (and why it’s cool) I humbly submit a metaphor: OneSpot is an amplifier for good taste. That’s right. An amplifier. For good taste. I guess this bears some explanation.

I previously drew a comparison between OneSpot, Amazon.com and Netflix as a shorthand way of explaining recommendation engines. I don’t want to overstrain that comparison, but indulge me while I go back to that well one more time to elaborate on something that differentiates OneSpot. I promise to get back around to explaining how this relates to good taste and amplifiers.

While Amazon.com and Netflix use their customers’ feedback to shape the recommendations they make, OneSpot uses its customers’ feedback AND the Web to recommend the best content from around the Web. That’s right: we use the Web itself to help us select the best content from the Web.

This works because the content on the Web, for the most part, is created by people. Real live human beings with feelings, opinions and distinct points of view. Whether this person is a beat reporter on deadline at a major newspaper, an amateur blogger, or an old high school buddy on Facebook, these people are not just creating content but sharing content. They share content by linking to it. And as a rule, they tend to only link to content that they find interesting, or more precisely they tend to link to things that they think their audience will find interesting. The key is that a link represents, for the most part, a human judgment that the thing being linked to is worthy of attention.

The hard part, of course, is not just recognizing that links are valuable, but figuring out how to best use this valuable data. Solving that problem is the “secret sauce” that makes OneSpot tick, and where we spend a lot of our time and effort.

Now, back to that amplifier metaphor. I mentioned we use our customers’ feedback AND the Web to make recommendations. The way this works is our customers act as editors, giving our system examples of good and bad content. These editorial decisions tell our system something about what sort of content is interesting, from the perspective of the editor. Given a limited number of editorial decisions, and using link data from the web and a dash of OneSpot’s “secret sauce”, we can extrapolate and apply the same editorial perspective across a vast and ever-growing sea of Web content. In effect, given a sample of editorial opinion we are able to amplify that editorial perspective and apply it to the World Wide Web. Cool, huh?

It’s hard for me to roll out the OneSpot-as-amplifier metaphor and write about ranking the web without getting, well, a little heady. It reminds me of my favorite scene from a very funny movie, This is Spinal Tap, when Nigel Tufnel is showing off the band’s equipment and proudly points out that the volume knobs on their amplifiers don’t stop at 10 like most amplifiers: “these go to 11!”

OneSpot friends, family, and visitors from around the Web — welcome to our site, possibly for the first time.

I’m thrilled to announce that OneSpot has closed a $4.2M Series A round of financing, led by Silver Creek Ventures. Existing investors also participated, including Mike Maples (former Executive VP of Worldwide Products at Microsoft) and Pat Horner (cofounder and former President/COO of Perot Systems).

This is great validation of the vision behind OneSpot: that the new values of Web media are to help audiences solve the overwhelming information overload on today’s Internet and to embrace the linked nature of hypertext and the incredible depth, quality, and variety of content out on the Web today; that a human editorial voice can provide perspective, context, and commentary to make the Web manageable and understandable; that technology is necessary for human editors to effectively discover, curate, and share the best content from around the Web for their audience; and that anyone with passion and an understanding of their audience can build a connection with them.

It’s been nearly 15 years since I launched my first Website, the Houston Chronicle’s chron.com, and I’ve seen Web media mature over the years from what was mainly an electronic copy of offline media to something that takes full advantage of the strengths of the new medium. For some time it has been possible to build a site that did a reasonable job of making sense of a large part of the Web for your audience — but only through superhuman effort and a large dedicated team of editors — and it was bound to miss something. OneSpot’s goal is to make the tools to curate the Web accessible to a much larger audience.

There are so many people to thank that helped us get to this point, not the least of which are:

• Our customers, who gave us confidence that we were on the right track;
• Our team, particularly our CTO Mason Hale, who left 8 years as Chief Technologist at frogdesign to follow my dream and make it his own before there was any money at all to pay for it;
• Our angel investors, who believed in the idea before there was much to show for it;
• Our formal and informal advisors, including Brett Hurt (who has joined our Board of Directors), Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg, Ron McCoy, Peter Rojas, Steve Vandegrift, Steve Waters, and many more;
• Our families, who put up with late nights and long hours — and will bear with us through many more;
• And to John Adler and the team at Silver Creek Ventures, who have already added immense value and will continue to do so in the years ahead.

To keep up with OneSpot and find out how you can get access yourself, apply for a free trial, sign up for our email newsletter, read our blog or RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter (onespot).

For more details, please see our press release.

For a city with a metro-area population of over 1 million, Austin is still very much a small town. If you’ve lived and worked here for a decade or more, it seems anywhere you go you are bound to meet someone who either knows you or knows someone who knows you. This is especially true in Austin’s technology industry sub-culture, where many people have at one time or another worked at one of the small handful of bedrock companies that serve as the hubs in Austin’s many-spoked high-tech ecosystem.

“OneSpot is fundamentally a recommendation engine for web content. If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon.com or browsed movies on Netflix you’ve seen something similar.”

And so, whether I’m grabbing a coffee at Genuine Joe’s or breakfast at Taco Deli or taking in a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse, it is not uncommon at all to run into someone I know but haven’t seen in years. The conversation invariably turns from “What are you up to these days?” to “So… what is OneSpot… exactly?”

In these situations a mouthful of marketing mumbo-jumbo might suffice but it certainly does not satisfy. These situations require a more precise, direct and unvarnished answer. No drone-speak thank you, just give me the straight skinny. Why is it cool? Why should I care?

My answer is that OneSpot is fundamentally a recommendation engine for web content. If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon.com or browsed movies on Netflix you’ve seen something similar. People who bought the item you just added to your cart, also bought these other items. Given that you rated this movie 5 stars, we think you’ll enjoy these other movies. You get the idea. The fundamental concept is the same, it sometimes goes by the name “collaborative filtering.”

“Thousands and thousands of new web pages are published every hour, and it’s our job to sift through that torrent of content and to quickly, efficiently and intelligently mine those rare gems that our customers and their audiences will find interesting.”

The difference in OneSpot’s case is scale. Now, with all due respect, Amazon and Netflix are both dealing with huge volumes of data. But where Netflix is recommending movies and Amazon is recommending products, OneSpot is recommending web pages, and there are many, many times more pages on the web than there are movies on Netflix or products in Amazon’s expansive catalog. Thousands and thousands of new web pages are published every hour, and it’s our job to sift through that torrent of content and to quickly, efficiently and intelligently mine those rare gems that our customers and their audiences will find interesting.

Of course, a recommendation engine alone does not make a business, and that’s not the whole story of OneSpot. Stay tuned for more on that topic. But seen through my CTO prism and targeted to the typically technically-inclined person I’m likely to be chatting with, this answer succinctly describes the technology running at the core of OneSpot, why it’s challenging, and why it’s cool.

I founded OneSpot because it was becoming clear to me that a new style of media was needed to thrive and grow in the unique environment of the Web. This new style of publishing embraces the abundance of content out on the Web and uses it to serve their readers better. The best sites that follow this model create some original content, but primarily curate: they select and link to their favorite content from around the Web. They then improve the experience by adding summarization, context, commentary, and community. New brands like Engadget, BoingBoing, Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics and familiar names like Business Week’s Business Exchange and the Washington Post’s Political Browser are well-known examples of this model.

OneSpot’s mission is to enable this new paradigm, by making it easy for publishers to curate the Web for their audience. Doing this well isn’t easy — given the huge volume of great content to choose from — but we’ve helped major sites such as The Wall Street Journal Online and SFGate.com enter this new world efficiently and scalably, without losing the editorial control or the quality associated with their brands.

Along the way, we’ve learned a number of things about this style of media. Here are some of them — I’ll elaborate on them in upcoming posts.

1. The primary goal of any site is to serve its audience. Traditionally, publishing involved editors figuring out what content their audience was interested in and hiring someone to create it. On the Web, readers always seek the best content, regardless of where they have to go to find it. In this free market, it’s in every site’s best interest to provide a place for their audience to find a single spot for them to find the best targeted content in one place, regardless of where it comes from. When a site serves its audience well, it can become an authoritative source for its audience, fostering loyalty and increasing influence in its web community.

Curation	Creation
Reduces information overload	Increases information overload
Selection	Text
Summarization	Audio
Context	Video
Commentary	Multimedia
Perspective	Copy editing
Editorial voice	Reporting

2. “Curation” is the aggregation, filtering, and prioritization of content for a targeted audience, with context and editorial voice. From the Latin curator meaning “to care.” “Curation” traditionally has referred to “organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts“, but is a good description of this new way to add media value. This means not just collecting large amounts of content in one place — what many refer to as “aggregation” — but organizing: selecting and ordering the best content that fits in with a given site. Just as an art gallery has an experienced, skilled curator to ensure its patrons experience the best of arts’ offerings, so too can a site select stories and posts to ensure a great experience for its readers while still providing a distinct, unique perspective. Care for the material displayed, whether on walls, pedestals or URLs, encourages a strong following.



3. It’s extremely hard to create the best content on the Web. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. IDG predicts a jaw-dropping 1.8 zettabytes of digital information by 2011 (a zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes). Consumers now can choose from all of the content on the Web — if they can find it. The amount of competition for attention is immense, and increasing as the barriers to creating content are lowered by new technologies. Creating great content was hard enough when consumers had a limited number of choices — now it’s much harder and it will only get more difficult.

4. Great content is subjective and will be evaluated by your audience. For most topics there are thousands of sites readers can visit. What makes one site different from another is the site owner, the editor. Context, commentary, perspective, and personality provide the meaning that connects content to your audience — what has traditionally been called editorial voice. This voice is as important as the content itself. It makes the difference between a regularly read, frequently bookmarked site and an occasional Google search find.

5. There’s not much use in creating the 4th best piece of content on something. Or even — in some cases — the second best. The market of the Web is very efficient: unique content has value, most does not. Consumers have little reason to choose something that’s not the best from their perspective. But too often, publishers focus on posting frequency rather than posting quality. Since no publisher has infinite time or resources, it’s often better to create an original post once a day that will come in 1st, than to come in 4th multiple times. Readers will find 1st place pieces — through search, or through links from other sites — lower quality will get ignored. You can’t always create the best content at high frequency, so take advantage of the huge volume of the Web to drive volume — focus on finding the best with technology, then curating it and supplementing your great original content.

I’ll elaborate on these ideas and more in a later post. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Bonus reading: terrific additional perspectives on curation:

• Some additional definition of curation from Mindy McAdams
• The Growth of the Curation Economy from 2009 — 5 Trends That Will Change Media, by Steve Rosenbaum at Magnify.net
• How To Use Curation To Make Your Blog Better: Lessons From Postsecret, from Rohit Bhargav
• The Age of the Editor, a speech by Virginia Postrel at The State and Fate of Publishing conference from 1994