With the explosion of prosumer media (a.k.a. user-generated content) businesses like Six Apart, Bloglines, and Topix.net have built their success on the blogging boom and the new ways people use the internet to produce, find, and share information. The panelists in this lively discussion share their companies' stories, including thoughts on how Microsoft and Google can be their competitors and partners simultaneously.
They discuss the forms that internet conversations will take in 3, 5 or 10 years time and offer insights into the impact of prosumer media on traditonal publishing, differentiating between publishing on a large scale and communicating more privately. Looking at the challenges of the future, Mena, Mark, and Rich suggest how communicating through the internet will become more nuanced, touching on the roles that audio, video, and spam will each play.
Funding, monetization, business models, acquisitions, and revenue strategies round out the discussion, as the audience interrogates the three panelists on how they got their companies to where they are today. A key insight from the discussion as a whole may be that innovation is not only crucial for the technology offering of a company, but also for its business side.
Mena Trott is co-founder and president of Six Apart, the creators of the TypePad service and Movable Type software, two of the leading tools for publishing weblogs. In addition to her role helping lead management and business efforts at Six Apart, Trott enjoys making the products aesthetically pleasing as well as functionally intuitive. Named one of Fast Company's "Fast 50 for 2004," Trott has been involved in the weblogging space since she first began publishing to her own weblog, dollarshort.org in early 2001. She speaks regularly at industry conferences--notably Supernova, South by Southwest, AdTech and DEMO 2004--and writes frequently about weblogging and Six Apart at Mena's Corner. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and co-founder of Six Apart, Ben Trott.
Mark Fletcher is founder and CEO of Bloglines, the world's most popular free internet service for searching, subscribing, publishing, and sharing news feeds and blogs. Fletcher is a serial entrepreneur who began his start-up career as a senior engineer at Diba, an information appliance technology company acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1997. Following Diba, Fletcher founded and was CEO of ONElist/eGroups, an email community service which grew over 24 months to 17 million members and 800,000 unique email groups before it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2000. The ONElist/eGroups service continues to successfully operate today as Yahoo! Groups. Fletcher holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.
Rich Skrenta brings to Topix.net a background in both business management and technical expertise. In his last position, Skrenta held a variety of senior roles at Netscape/America Online, including director of Engineering for Netscape Search, AOL Music, and AOL Shopping. Skrenta joined Netscape/AOL upon its purchase of NewHoo/The Open Directory Project, where he was co-founder & CEO. The Open Directory is the largest human-edited directory of the Web, currently used by Google, AOL, and other major web portals. Prior to that, Skrenta led an engineering group at Sun Microsystems implementing network security and encryption products. Skrenta also operated a successful small online gaming company from 1994-2001. Skrenta has a BA degree from Northwestern University.
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