Loic Le Meur Blog

Calling 500 000 pages views a month bloggers

Jason Calacanis goes shopping for 500 000 + page views a month bloggers.

An interview of Nick Denton in the Independent

Nick Denton:

"The one common theme is to take an obsession, say a gadget obsession, and feed it - produce more content than the people could ever dream of having or consuming."

Interview. Thanks, Chryde.

Podcasting is getting bigger

I like Wikipedia's definition of Podcasting. I got equipped during last week-end.

Wikipedia:

"Podcasting is different than broadcasting and webcasting in that it "casts" audio not by a mechanism of centrally pushing audio out to listeners, but by the mechanism of the (distributed) listeners pulling (downloading) the audio files automatically. Podcasters publish (or "podcast") audio files, even in the likeness of radio shows, but it is the individual listener who initiates the "cast" through their subscription and automatic download of the audio program."

Azeem launches two vertical blogs

I was recently talking about it, nanopublishing is growing. Azeem Azhar, a former manager/consultant for 20Six, has launched two vertical blogs, on Movable Type:

• Honourable Friend, focusing on UK politics
• Wanda Lust, on tourism

Many other blog launches in 2005 planned. Bravo, Azeem !

Nanopublishing is probably the next opportunity

Nanopublishing soars: Gawker Media continues its growth and WeblogsInc has just announced new hires and a goal of 100 vertical blogs on-line before the end of the year. As always, there are many intiatives in the US, few in Europe, few that are not in English. It is understandable as it is much longer to generate enough revenues for a small team on a French or a German vertical blog, but I am sure the opportunities are very interesting too.

So, when will Europe finally wake up on nanopublishing too ? I have met three VCs in Europe recently and they all complain that there are not enough entrepreneurs with new projects these days.

An excellent Interview of Jimmy Wales, founder of WikiPedia

Via the Creative Commons Weblog, Slashdot has an excellent interview of the amazing founder of WikiPedia, Jimmy Wales

The online collaborative encyclopedia WikiPedia has already more traffic than its commercial competitor Britannica. Here are some quotes:

[I] "Was wondering if you view the Wikipedia as a competitor or an additional tool compared to a World Book or an Encyclopedia Britannica?

Jimmy Wales:
I would view them as a competitor, except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within 5 years.
[...]
It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.
[...]
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
[...]
I have every confidence that we'll be just fine. The thing is: everyone loves Wikipedia. When I asked the world for $20,000 last January, we raised nearly $50,000 in less than a week."

The founder of Oh My News says "blogging is quite different"

"Blogging is quite different," says Min. "One reason why people write for us is that they can get huge numbers of eyeballs, sometimes 100,000 clicks for a single story, if it makes the top [of the page]. If you want to make your name, this is the place!"

I disagree. I think bloggers can get the same type of audience on one single story too, if they just get a link from a highly visited blog. Nanopublishing will help.

Dan points us to this interview of the founder of Oh My News.

I just started reading the new "We the media" blog about Dan's book. Thanks for choosing MT, Dan.

14 Million page views for a few blogs, congrats Nick...

Nick Denton, who is the publisher of Gawker, Gizmodo, Fleshbot and other vertical weblogs publishes a graph of the stats growth of the weblogs. Amazing. 14 Million page views a month.

Nick reports lots of traffic coming to see the story about a Cameron Diaz soft S&M video...