But now, both Mr. Karp, a 25-year-old New Yorker, and his company are heading into a risky new phase: Making the site profitable. For the first time, he is making plans to sell advertising and sponsorships to Tumblr’s network of bloggers and their followers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The company’s product, Posterous Spaces, will remain up and running. “We’ll give you ample notice before any changes or disruptions to the service and we’ll provide specific instructions for exporting your content to another service,” Posterous told users.

Most of Posterous’ employees joined Twitter, where they will be working on “several key initiatives.”

As of last September, Posterous told us it had 15 million monthly unique visitors, with three million of its users accessing its products solely through email.

Posterous had raised $10 million from backers included Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Jafco Ventures and Y Combinator.

But if you’re in a hurry, you might consider this no-nonsense guide from the U.S. Army, which has a couple dozen boards of its own (via the Atlantic).

As I’ve noted before, the first instinct when you see military institutions writing about Pinterest, or Twitter, or offering flowcharts that explain how to comment on blogs might be a giggle. But once you actually look at the stuff they’re writing, it seems much more reasonable.

Unrelated: I have had a weird twinge of nostalgia for the ’80s vintage “Be All That You Can Be” campaign. Maybe some kind of madeleine thing triggered by those Will Ferrell Old Milwaukee ads.

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

Well, actually, I wrote the first draft on one. It turns out that there isn’t a WordPress plugin for my Remington Noiseless Portable.

Anyway, back to why I love my typewriter.

Sure, sometimes it makes an extra letter or skips a space, and there’s no good way to deal with mistakes. But there is something very satisfying about being able to literally put words to paper.

You have to think before you write. It’s cruel or ironic or something that we have reached a point where our words can travel across the globe and yet it has never required less effort to put them down. Maybe if it was a little harder, we would choose our words more carefully and assess their impact more fully.

Plus, since manual typewriters are officially now “a thing,” maybe I am cool.

Well, probably not. But, at the very least, I had a good excuse to pull Remington Sedaris Turpen Fried off the shelf. If only rotary-dial phones would make a comeback, I will totally be set.

ZDNet has a great piece up on how many other tech writers are also enthralled with their manual typewriters, with several offering their love letters. I decided to add mine to the mix.

Now, to add a bit of tech to the piece, there are some cool options to merge the old world with the new, including the USB Typewriter. Available either as a do-it-yourself kit or as an already-crafted device, the USB Keyboard is a fully functional keyboard made out of a manual typewriter.

Is that a big deal? Depends on whom you ask.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who sussed this out yesterday, has two big problems with the notion.

The first is that in at least one case a blogger’s post linked to Google in seeming violation of Google’s policy against so-called “paid links.” Sullivan’s bigger beef is that the content of the posts themselves consists of a video ad and some barely sensical text — the kind of thing that Google is trying to flush out of its search results by tweaking its algorithms.

So what’s going on? I’ve asked Google reps for comment, but I’m still waiting for them to get back from vacation. [UPDATE - they have, see below] But Unruly Media, the London-based company which ran the campaign for Google, was happy to answer. (Yup – Google, which dominates both Web advertising and Web video, relies on an outsider to promote its Web video ads.)

There’s nothing wrong here, says Unruly CEO Scott Button, except for what appears to be a one-off technical mistake by a single blogger. Here’s his email response:

Yes, it’s a campaign we were running at the end of December.

There’s a good response by Andrew Girdwood here.

Andrew’s absolutely right — we don’t ask bloggers to link to the advertiser’s site. It’s just not part of our business model. We help advertisers distribute video content and that’s what we get paid for. All links from the video player itself are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings. Even though we don’t ask bloggers to link, we do advise them to use nofollow if they do link to the advertiser’s site. This is really important and they should do it to protect themselves as much as the advertiser.

As far as I’m aware, there was one link in one post that was not marked nofollow. This was corrected as soon as we became aware of it.

We’re always completely upfront and transparent with bloggers that we are running commercial campaigns and who we’re working for. We always require that bloggers disclose any commercial incentive to post video content. We always require that bloggers disclose even on related tweets that they might do off their own bats.

It’s also a key part of how we operate that we don’t tell bloggers what or how to write. It’s really important that opinions expressed and the tone of voice belong to the author not the advertiser. Occasionally that leads to human error, as here, so we’re always really happy to have these kinds of example flagged and will sort them out as quickly as we possibly can.

Note that Button doesn’t address Sullivan’s complaint that the text in the bloggers’ post is barely better than garbage. That stuff may not be elegant, but it does seem to work — Unruly says its ad network reaches 725 million people a month.

UPDATE: Google has offered a response, and it doesn’t sync with Button’s. Here’s a quote from a Google spokesperson:

“Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.”

And here’s more along those lines, via Essence Digital, another Google ad vendor, this time posted on a Google+ page:

“We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.”

All of this back-and-forth finger pointing might seem odd to the outside world, but it’s not uncommon in online ads, where money and marching orders pass through multiple points on their way from the original customer to the site that runs the ad.

Here’s the video ad, by the way. I guess I should disclose that Google is not paying me to post this:

That might make you think “Google Circles,” but what Posterous is doing is different, because there is no secret Spaces management dashboard, where only you know who gets placed in which category.

“Versus Google Circles we think we’re building for normal people,” said Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal in a recent interview. “We use the analogy of email [where you know who you're sending to and they know who they're receiving it from] — everything is symmetric groups.”

What could potentially be problematic for Posterous is that it’s not keeping its legacy products and branding around. Everyone who had a Posterous Site now has a Space, and everyone who had a Posterous Group now has a Space. But Agarwal said the aim is to keep everything more consistent and less confusing — and as such, a new iPhone app promises 100 percent of the functionality of the Web site, he said.

And as people have come to expect from Posterous, they’ll still be able to post by email and automatically post to other social networks. Posterous has 15 million uniques, and says three million of its users access its products solely through email.

Here’s another interesting wrinkle to the ongoing saga of AOL, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and his nascent venture firm, CrunchFund.

Since the controversy erupted last week, Arrington has reached out to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, as well as others in Silicon Valley, about buying back his popular tech news site.

Sources said Arrington needs funding to do so — irony alert! — and told them over the weekend that he planned to use his blogging bully pulpit to force AOL into giving up the site it bought for more than $25 million almost exactly a year ago.

But sources said — at this point — AOL is not inclined to sell the site, which has prompted Arrington to pen a blog post on TechCrunch, not-meant-as-a-joke-titled “Editorial Independence,” suggesting they do so.

Quelle surprise!

We’ve proposed two options to Aol.

1. Reaffirmation of the editorial independence promised at the time of acquisition. Given the current circumstances, that means autonomy from Huffington Post, unfettered editorial independence and a blanket right to editorial self determination. To put it simply, TechCrunch would stay with Aol but would be independent of the Huffington Post.

or

2. Sell TechCrunch back to the original shareholders.

Arrington used an image of the Spartans from, I think, the movie “300,” on the post. Memo to Mike: All the Spartans died in the end, however valiant. It goes without saying — this situation is not valiant and you are definitely not King Leonidas.

“It is at a stalemate, so this is the result,” said one person with knowledge of the pugnacious effort by Arrington to take back his baby.

Which, of course, he sold in the first place.

AOL has stated it will not allow Arrington to remain its editor or have “influence on coverage” while also doing a venture fund.

Thus, some of Arrington’s staffers, such as M.G. Siegler, have already been plowing the ground ahead of Arrington’s post.

Siegler, for example, penned a weepy diatribe about how unfair it all is and how different the site operates from slow-footed meanies at big media organizations such as the New York Times. The Times strafed Arrington in a David Carr column yesterday.

Wrote Siegler, in what can only be described as soap-opera fantastic: “TechCrunch is on the precipice. As soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows.”

Tune in tomorrow to see if AOL’s content chief and Arrington boss Arianna Huffington will use that gun in her pocket. Or will she use the razor-chiseled cheekbones of Armstrong to slice her new nemesis?

(Alls I can say to add to what I have already said, at this point: Good lord. But, wait, isn’t there a TechCrunch Disrupt conference next week to hawk and make it all about Arrington and not the entrepreneurs? This explains everything!)

While Siegler is trying to make it all sound as if it is so very unfair, since the site is presumably so very special, AllThingsD operates in a similar quick-edit way to TechCrunch — where I will underscore there are some terrific journalists.

But — because it is simply flat-out wrong on every possible scale — neither Walt Mossberg nor I would ever consider being editors of the site while also running a venture fund.

(In fact, it is now a standing rule at ATD that, if we ever did such an unthinkable thing — which of course we never would — our writers tell us we stink rather than praise us.)

Meanwhile, we’ll be busy breaking some actual tech news on this site, like here and here and here, while TechCrunch presumably faux-burns and AOL fiddles.

He just got $6 million more in funding, bringing the total for the tech news and research company to $15 million. Reed Elsevier Ventures is the newest investor, along with current ones, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures.

Malik, who founded GigaOM five years ago, is also a partner at True. He said he still owns a substantial stake in GigaOM after the funding, which apparently valued his company at $40 million.

GigaOM–which is better known for its popular tech news and analysis blog–will use the money to turbocharge its premium subscription service, called GigaOM Pro. That service charges $199 a year for deep-dive reports in areas including mobile, clean tech and cloud computing.

Here’s my video chitchat with Malik:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110526/video-om-talks-about-6-million-giga-funding/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110428/liveblogging-microsoft-3q-earnings-office-tastic-and-kinect-able/ http://allthingsd.com/20110428/liveblogging-microsoft-3q-earnings-office-tastic-and-kinect-able/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:48:13 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43296

You’d think there would be a party in Redmond, Wash., today, as software giant Microsoft soundly beat Wall Street expectations in its third-quarter earnings released earlier today.

Microsoft said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2011, which was up 13 percent from a year ago. Net income was $5.23 billion, or 61 cents per share, a rise of 31 percent and 36 percent, respectively.

The surge was led by sales of Office, Kinect and Xbox and a stronger economy.

But there are shadows, too, as results were dragged down by weaker revenues for its flagship Windows unit.

The report comes as Microsoft’s stock continues to lag, declining 14 percent for the year.

Buzz kill!

BoomTown livedblogged the call for Wall Street analysts:

2:30 pm PT: Peter Klein, Microsoft’s CFO, who sounds super peppy, outlined the strong quarter, especially for its Office products.

He also mentioned some glitches, such as Microsoft’s still-struggling efforts to increase revenue per search (RPS) in its longtime search and online advertising partnership with Yahoo and the slower growth of the PC sector upon which the software giant’s Windows relies.

PC should stand for “possibly crappy,” but good-boy Klein did not say so.

Investor relations dude Bill Koefoed also read through the news, sounding at times like a sports announcer on a cable television network.

“Quuuuaaadrupled…,” he intoned about one part of Microsoft’s business.

This all went on for a while, since Microsoft has a lot of divisions. Servers & Tools. Online Services. Entertainment and Devices. Fashion & Cute Tops.

Okay, not that one, but a girl can dream.

It was all fun and games until Koefoed got to the Yahoo problem, which Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had used as a cudgel in her earnings report recently.

Yes, it is a bummer. But soon it was back to the happy land of Xbox!

Klein said he was pleased with the results in a jaunty manner, which made me desperately wish Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer led the call.

Because he’s always one obnoxious query away from a volcanic popping off.

Which is why I love those Yahoo calls and Bartz.

Buzz kill!

2:54 pm PT: That was fast–the call was quickly into questions.

The first is about COGS–cost of goods sold–and how it impacts gross margins.

Klein said the expenses were volume driven. I’d explain, but then I would fall asleep.

The next question was about stock buybacks.

That might get the stock up. Yeah, said Klein, they’ll keep doing that–not that it has helped much on the share price front.

More and more questions, about the PC market, the issues at Yahoo (let’s get that RPS up!), the Windows Phone 7 business.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit bored and started reading a riveting Business Insider interview with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on his myriad conflicts of interest related to his tech investing while also blogging as a news guy.

Whatever you think about him, that dude is good copy.

Wait, back to growth rates for Office!

It’s going great, said Klein (hey, maybe Arrington will invest!).

The call wraps up on news of an upcoming investor conference, being held near Disney World.

Oooh, party time!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110428/liveblogging-microsoft-3q-earnings-office-tastic-and-kinect-able/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-boomtown-versus-texas-hipsters-and-cheddar-cheese-cats-at-sxsw/ http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-boomtown-versus-texas-hipsters-and-cheddar-cheese-cats-at-sxsw/#comments Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:18:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41575

As it turned out, BoomTown did not succumb to hipster poisoning on my sojourn this past weekend to Austin, Texas and the famous South by Southwest festival.

The annual gathering, which has interactive, music and film elements, started last week and is still going strong–fueled, as far as I can tell, by beer, blogging, empanadas and excessive start-up hype.

Actually, it was a good time had by me, despite assertions from some longtime attendees that SXSW had somehow jumped the shark.

I personally saw no shark-jumping, but there certainly were a lot of free t-shirts and fake tattoos.

Here is a video of a variety of scenes from the weekend, from all over SXSW, from our very own All Things Digital party (I now can retire, since I had a drink named after me) to encountering a giant cheddar cheese sculpture of cats.

Yes, it was that kind of SXSW.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-boomtown-versus-texas-hipsters-and-cheddar-cheese-cats-at-sxsw/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/ http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:01:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41315 AOL will officially close its $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post today, according to several sources close to the situation.

The culmination of the deal–which has already been approved by regulators–is set to be announced by the New York-based company this morning, only one month after it was struck.

And–in a clear sign of the shift in its focus toward a more editorially driven direction under the now-official content head Arianna Huffington (pictured here)–sources said the closing will be accompanied by the announcement of the hiring of a half-dozen journalists to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group unit.

Among the new reporters are some more high-profile grabs from other media giants, including The Daily’s Jon Ward. He has been the Washington bureau chief for New Corp.’s high-profile online newspaper, which only recently launched.

Also set to join AOL is Yahoo’s senior media writer Michael Calderone.

Interestingly, along with more experienced editorial staff, sources said the announcement will also include new hires via the Huffington Post’s Jefferson Program for Young Journalists.

Sources said the new hires are only the beginning of a series of them, as the impact of the leadership of Huffington becomes clearer.

Along with the news and opinion site, the well-known media personality is now in charge of all of AOL’s varied content properties, including its locally aimed Patch.

Huffington, with obviously strong support from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, has been talking a lot in a plethora of interviews since the deal was announced a few weeks ago about the importance of creating a new media organization focused on original reporting.

In a way, AOL is now competing with big news sites such as those on Yahoo, as well as smaller niche content and also mainstream entities.

Even before the deal was struck with AOL, the Huffington Post had been heading down that path of pulling in mainstream journalists. Last year, it hired former New York Times economics writer Peter Goodman and former Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, among others.

The formula? Adding the strong journalism reputation of these reporters to the eclectic mix of socializing, blogging, celebritizing and aggressive aggregating that the site has used to garner huge amounts of traffic in recent years.

As I had previously written, the AOL Way–the same for a strategy document about content on the site–is now the Arianna Way.

Here are Huffington and Armstrong talking about such issues in in an exclusive video interview BoomTown did with them just before they announced the deal on Super Bowl Sunday about a month ago:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110307/aol-deal-closes-today-as-more-high-profile-huffington-post-journalism-hires-signal-new-direction/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/posterous-goes-bare-shows-us-all-its-stats/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/posterous-goes-bare-shows-us-all-its-stats/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 07:15:45 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3688 I like to write about actual numbers, but start-ups are usually reluctant to give them up, preferring to blab about growth percentages and fuzzy feel-good milestones.

The lightweight blogging company Posterous volunteered to open its books recently, coughing up every product stat NetworkEffect asked for during a recent visit to the company’s oversized San Francisco Mission District office situated below a yoga studio whose clientele is way more clompy-footed than I might have thought.

The Posterous team, led by CEO Sachin Agarwal, was pimping its new groups product, launched Dec. 15, that’s kind of like a nice-looking Web interface for an email product like Yahoo Groups, turning messages into blog posts and smoothing photos and other attachments into easily viewable form. Used mostly for private communication (like a neighborhood group or a small business team), the groups tool supports users who participate by email without opening a Posterous account.

First of all, Posterous Groups is still quite small: Posterous has 12.3 million total blogs, and only 134,000 of them are groups. About 3,000 groups are created per day, or about 20 percent of total daily sign-ups.

Overall, Posterous has 9.2 million monthly visitors on its own site and on custom domains, according to Quantcast, which measures the service directly with its permission. That’s up from 6 million in September, but still quite a bit less than competitors like Tumblr and WordPress, which have 59.6 million and 517 million people, respectively.

The new groups product sends a ton of email (with user permission, and with the help of SendGrid): 230,000 messages per day. Half of Posterous group distribution is over email rather than the Web, and 30 percent of users are not registered.

As I mentioned earlier, most groups–76 percent–are private. And a quarter are for corporate groups–an alternative to business collaboration tools like Yammer. Business groups have an average of 15 people, while family groups have about 10.

As for revenue numbers? Negligible. The company is only starting Google AdSense revenue sharing and talking about business accounts.

Posterous has raised about $5 million in funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital and Y Combinator.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/posterous-goes-bare-shows-us-all-its-stats/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/starting-a-blog-and-sleep-versus-shut-down/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/starting-a-blog-and-sleep-versus-shut-down/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:20:02 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/?p=851 Q:

I’ll be starting a two-year assignment with the Peace Corps in the near future. I would like to start a blog where I can record my daily activities for my friends and family to read. Do you have any suggestions?

A:

There are numerous free blogging services that offer templates, simple tools and a free address your friends and family can use to view your reports. Two that I have used and can suggest are Blogger, owned by Google, at blogger.com; and the independent WordPress, at wordpress.com.

Q:

In terms of battery life, does it make any practical difference if I leave my common programs on my MacBook Pro running when dormant versus shutting them down when I’m not using them and then firing them up as needed?

A:

I asked Apple about this, and the company said an open, but idle, application on a Mac notebook generally won’t use any or many processor resources, which means almost no impact on battery life, even if it performs periodic background actions like fetching mail.

Exceptions would be programs that do heavy-duty things in the background, like rendering videos. The company strongly advises making sure the laptop is in sleep mode when not in use, and keeping the screen at the lowest brightness level that works for you.

Also, you can check how much demand a program is placing on the processor by running the Activity Monitor, located in the Utilities folder in Applications.

Q:

Why would a GSM phone run in 3G-mode only on AT&T and not on T-Mobile?

A:

It’s true that both carriers use the same basic technology, called GSM. But, in some cases, phones (like the AT&T iPhone) are locked so that, unless you do serious hacking, you can use them on only one of the two networks.

In other cases, it might have to do with the frequencies used by a carrier. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequencies for their 3G networks, and a phone might simply be built to support only the 3G frequencies used by one of the carriers and not the other.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/starting-a-blog-and-sleep-versus-shut-down/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101019/atd-welcomes-ina-fried-as-our-new-mobile-reporter/ http://allthingsd.com/20101019/atd-welcomes-ina-fried-as-our-new-mobile-reporter/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:59:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=35888

Here at All Things Digital, we’ve always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging.

So, we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter and blogger, covering the critically important mobile beat. She is pictured here.

Her new beat will range from wireless carriers like AT&T; to handset makers, such as Nokia and Research in Motion; to the smartphone kingpins, Google and Apple.

And if Facebook ever does make a phone, Ina will surely have the scoop.

Mobile is a beat that reaches across companies and is at the dead center of Web 3.0.

Ina is one of several new journalists we will be announcing over the next week, part of an expansion of the ATD universe. That includes a recently announced new conference series, beginning with D: Dive Into Mobile.

There is much more to come, but let’s focus on the stylings of Ina first.

As most people know, she has been at CNET for the past 10 years, most recently covering Microsoft as a senior writer.

And although she hasn’t been focused solely on mobile, Ina has been covering the area since 2000, when folks like Kyocera were trying to shove a Palm Pilot and a phone together, most recently doing a behind-the-scenes series for CNET on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

During her time at the tech news site, she also covered Apple for four years and led CNET’s coverage of the Hewlett-Packard-Compaq merger, as well as covering all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the Audrey (I have no idea what that is, but Walt Mossberg does).

Before that, she covered the chip industry for financial wire service Bridge News and also worked at the Orange Country Register and Orange County Business Journal.

She’s a graduate of Miami University (she reminds me that’s the one in Ohio not Florida, pointing out they are better at ice hockey than football.)

Beyond breaking all kinds of stories on the Microsoft beat, Ina has closely followed Bill Gates in his shift from software titan to global philanthropist, interviewing him frequently and tagging along on his college speaking tour earlier this year. (Last week she published separate interviews with Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the same day.)

Ina also traveled to Brazil and Colombia to explore the impact of computing in emerging markets.

She’s a former vice president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and has won a number of journalism awards, including some that she says would be seriously dangerous during an earthquake.

For example, she was named three times as one of the top 30 financial journalists under 30 by TJFR and has also been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and Western Publishers Association, among others.

A huge softball fanatic, part of the reason she won’t start at ATD until late November is that her women’s softball team is headed to the gay softball World Series in Las Vegas (I wonder if Audrey is going).

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with Ina by following her on Twitter at Twitter.com/inafried.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/atd-welcomes-ina-fried-as-our-new-mobile-reporter/feed/ 23 http://allthingsd.com/20101019/ina-fried-hired-at-allthingsd/ http://allthingsd.com/20101019/ina-fried-hired-at-allthingsd/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 01:59:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/20101019/ina-fried-hired-at-allthingsd/

Here at All Things Digital, we’ve always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging.

So, we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter and blogger, covering the critically important mobile beat. She is pictured here.

Her new beat will range from wireless carriers like AT&T; to handset makers, such as Nokia and Research in Motion; to the smartphone kingpins, Google and Apple.

And if Facebook ever does make a phone, Ina will surely have the scoop.

Mobile is a beat that reaches across companies and is at the dead center of Web 3.0.

Ina is one of several new journalists we will be announcing over the next week, part of an expansion of the ATD universe. That includes a recently announced new conference series, beginning with D: Dive Into Mobile.

There is much more to come, but let’s focus on the stylings of Ina first.

As most people know, she has been at CNET for the past 10 years, most recently covering Microsoft as a senior writer.

And although she hasn’t been focused solely on mobile, Ina has been covering the area since 2000, when folks like Kyocera were trying to shove a Palm Pilot and a phone together, most recently doing a behind-the-scenes series for CNET on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

During her time at the tech news site, she also covered Apple for four years and led CNET’s coverage of the Hewlett-Packard-Compaq merger, as well as covering all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the Audrey (I have no idea what that is, but Walt Mossberg does).

Before that, she covered the chip industry for financial wire service Bridge News and also worked at the Orange Country Register and Orange County Business Journal.

She’s a graduate of Miami University (she reminds me that’s the one in Ohio not Florida, pointing out they are better at ice hockey than football.)

Beyond breaking all kinds of stories on the Microsoft beat, Ina has closely followed Bill Gates in his shift from software titan to global philanthropist, interviewing him frequently and tagging along on his college speaking tour earlier this year. (Last week she published separate interviews with Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the same day.)

Ina also traveled to Brazil and Colombia to explore the impact of computing in emerging markets.

She’s a former vice president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and has won a number of journalism awards, including some that she says would be seriously dangerous during an earthquake.

For example, she was named three times as one of the top 30 financial journalists under 30 by TJFR and has also been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists and Western Publishers Association, among others.

A huge softball fanatic, part of the reason she won’t start at ATD until late November is that her women’s softball team is headed to the gay softball World Series in Las Vegas (I wonder if Audrey is going).

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with Ina by following her on Twitter at Twitter.com/inafried.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/ina-fried-hired-at-allthingsd/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100820/jive-ceo-and-kleiner-moneybags-talk-about-socializing-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20100820/jive-ceo-and-kleiner-moneybags-talk-about-socializing-business/#comments Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:54:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32557

In my ongoing quest to follow the money, BoomTown showed up at the Palo Alto, Calif., offices of Jive Software last week to talk about its recent $30 million funding from Kleiner Perkins.

Its existing venture investor, Sequoia Capital, was also in the round, which brings the grand total of dough to $57 million, all dedicated to making Jive the leader in bringing social tools to the enterprise.

It’s probably too lazy to say Jive’s goal is to be the Facebook for businesses, but that just about sums it up–offering software for social collaboration in the workplace.

That includes communications, blogging, polls, sharing and other typical kinds of social networking features, trying to give workers what they already have easy access to in their personal lives.

That includes tapping outside sources people use–including a recent integration of LinkedIn profiles and Twitter tweets.

That’s no small business, but it is also one that is rife with all kinds of competitors, big and small, all trying to solve the problem in different ways.

It’s a big marketplace to win, of course, which is why Jive brought in CEO Tony Zingale earlier this year, part of a move toward an IPO.

He is a longtime tech exec, most recently as head of Mercury Interactive, which sold to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) for $4.5 billion.

Zingale, who has moved Jive’s HQ from Portland, Ore., to Silicon Valley, has been trying to juice business, which is now 3,000 customers and 15 million users, and is aiming for $100 million in revenue run rate this year.

Zingale talked about all this and more in the video interview below, along with Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who has joined the Jive board.

Here it is:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100820/jive-ceo-and-kleiner-moneybags-talk-about-socializing-business/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100405/boomtown-turns-twit-again-and-talks-about-the-apple-ipad-launch-paywalls-and-whither-embargoes/ http://allthingsd.com/20100405/boomtown-turns-twit-again-and-talks-about-the-apple-ipad-launch-paywalls-and-whither-embargoes/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:00:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26191

BoomTown just made it through the snow-choked Donner Pass in the Sierras of Northern California, so excuse my laxity in posting this episode of “This Week in Tech,” the very fine Leo Laporte-helmed online chitchat show done on Sundays.

I appeared in this one, which, though posted in the middle of last week, was from the Sunday before, and included fellow guests John C. Dvorak, Ryan Block and Owen Stone.

It has a lot going on, including predictions about the Apple (AAPL) iPad launch, online content paywalls by News Corp. (NWS) and a lively debate related to the Twitter fracas I was involved in over inaccurate tweets about embargo-breaking, which turned into an interesting discussion on media in the blogging age.

Here’s the full video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100405/boomtown-turns-twit-again-and-talks-about-the-apple-ipad-launch-paywalls-and-whither-embargoes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100405/gowallas-josh-williams-talks-about-phony-geo-location-wars-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20100405/gowallas-josh-williams-talks-about-phony-geo-location-wars-and-more/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:23:23 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26179

Last week, BoomTown had a very dulcet tea-fueled meeting with Josh Williams, the affable CEO and co-founder of Gowalla, one of the leading location-based mobile status-updating start-ups that seem to have sprouted up everywhere.

And while a lot of hyperactive blogging is being done in this still very nascent arena about how an all-out geolocation war is going on, it’s mostly just the smoke from overfunding going on in the hopes of finding the next Facebook-Twitter nexus.

Indeed, Austin, Texas-based Gowalla has raised over $10 million from such high-profile investors as Ron Conway, as well as from top-notch Silicon Valley venture firms, while its main rival, Foursquare, is now deciding which VC pocket it will pick at what insane valuation.

Both are attracting a lot of attention and consumers interested in the fad and eager to try out their innovative services.

Still, even if it all comes to naught financially, the combination of mobile, location, status and social networking is actually intriguing to both investors and, for now, consumers–even if Gowalla ends up getting bought by a larger fish such as Facebook someday soon.

As to business plans? Everything from loyalty plans to advertising to couponing is mentioned, but let’s be honest: None of these start-ups has any real idea of what will stick.

Until they figure it out, here’s a video interview I did with Williams, who talks about the competition, the differences among the various services, where it’s all headed (and how the Gowalla name was, yes, made up):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100405/gowallas-josh-williams-talks-about-phony-geo-location-wars-and-more/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100331/tweets-google-maps-help-solve-mystery-of-portland-explosion/ http://allthingsd.com/20100331/tweets-google-maps-help-solve-mystery-of-portland-explosion/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:00:51 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=23323 On Sunday night, a loud boom shook parts of Portland, Ore.–and drove residents onto Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet to figure out the cause.

On Twitter, people used the hashtag #pdxboom to relay news about the noise. And in a sign of the potential for using social media in emergencies, one resident soon set up a Google (GOOG) map that residents could use to indicate how loud the sound was in their area. Marshall Kirkpatrick at tech blog ReadWriteWeb has the story here and writes that “in just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park.”

The Portland police cited “local blogging information” as one of the factors that led investigators to return to the area, where they found evidence of a large pipe bomb.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100331/tweets-google-maps-help-solve-mystery-of-portland-explosion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100329/please-enjoy-sneaky-gays-from-glee-as-boomtown-sneaks-away-for-the-week/ http://allthingsd.com/20100329/please-enjoy-sneaky-gays-from-glee-as-boomtown-sneaks-away-for-the-week/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:21:07 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26133

In the interests of not keeling over from blogging exhaustion–one of my sons actually just called me a raccoon, due to the black circles under my eyes–BoomTown is taking a week off to, well, sleep.

While I am gone, the crack All Things Digital team will keep you up to speed on a wide range of tech news, all of which will be drowned out by the rollout on Saturday of the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Oh, we’ll cover that too, of course.

In any case, as counterprogramming, please enjoy this very funny new video from “Glee,” one of many to get fans excited about the return of the television hit on April 13.

It is an event I am looking forward to as much as the iPad–so, maybe I will watch the new episodes on my new tablet to reach a state of glee.

This video features the sublime Jane Lynch, who plays nefarious cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, in one of her local-TV “Sue’s Corner” rants–this time, against non-swishy gays. It’s aptly called: “Sneaky Gays.”

(Full disclosure: Lynch and I are friends, but I’d find her hysterical even if she were my sworn enemy.)

Here’s the video–I”ll be back post-Easter and post-iPad mania on April 5:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100329/please-enjoy-sneaky-gays-from-glee-as-boomtown-sneaks-away-for-the-week/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100308/all-things-digiphobic-walt-and-kara-as-cartoon-vampires/ http://allthingsd.com/20100308/all-things-digiphobic-walt-and-kara-as-cartoon-vampires/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:38:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25120 Well, I did call myself a “sparkly vampire” recently, due to my late-night blogging hours, but now it’s in a cartoon.

I am not quite sure what to make of the comic by Newsvetter’s Andrew Fowler, who also created Guhmshoo cartoons, but it is definitely worth checking out.

So, here is “All Things Digiphobic,” which you can click on to make larger:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100308/all-things-digiphobic-walt-and-kara-as-cartoon-vampires/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100224/media-consultant-michael-wolf-not-that-michael-wolff-is-a-media-consultant-again/ http://allthingsd.com/20100224/media-consultant-michael-wolf-not-that-michael-wolff-is-a-media-consultant-again/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:01:30 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16703 It must be “hang out your shingle week” for big media vets.

First, CBS (CBS) digital dealmaker Quincy Smith and crew formally unveiled Code Advisors, the M&A shop they’ve been assembling for nearly a year. Now comes Michael Wolf, last seen in the halls of MTV Networks, where he was COO for a bit more than a year.

That was all the way back in 2007, but Wolf’s contract with Viacom (VIA) kept him more or less tied up until 2010. Now he’s opening up his own shop: Activate, a boutique media and tech consulting firm.

That’s a return to form for Wolf, who made his reputation as a tech-savvy media consultant at both Booz Allen and McKinsey (for a time capsule that’s also 100 percent up to date, see Kurt Andersen’s 1997 New Yorker profile of Wolf). He says he’s self-funding the operation, and won’t need to take on investors, as he already has paying clients (whom he won’t name).

He also has a co-worker: Anil Dash, the longtime veteran of blogging software pioneer Six Apart, who is now a director at Expert Labs. Dash says he’ll keep his job at the nonprofit, which is a sort of tech/good government mashup, and split his time between that and Wolf’s shop.

And yes, just because people still mix them up–Wolf is not Michael Wolff, the bomb-throwing media agitator/aggregator. That’s this guy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100224/media-consultant-michael-wolf-not-that-michael-wolff-is-a-media-consultant-again/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100208/turning-the-tables-carol-bartz-grills-boomtown-in-the-yahoo-cafeteria-over-easy-with-a-side-of-disclosure/ http://allthingsd.com/20100208/turning-the-tables-carol-bartz-grills-boomtown-in-the-yahoo-cafeteria-over-easy-with-a-side-of-disclosure/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:16:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24168

Today, BoomTown gassed up the Mini Cooper and motored down to the Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ of Yahoo, this time with a tiny bit of trepidation.

Okay, not that much, but some!

Why? Because Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz had invited me to be the first in a new speaker series, “Yahoo From the ‘Outside In,’” for employees at the Internet giant, due to my intense–some might say obsessive–interest in the company.

The twist: Bartz herself conducted the interview with me in front of about 600 Yahoos gathered in the company’s URL’s Café, the main cafeteria at Yahoo.

As it turned out, she was pretty good at playing the journalist, asking about a range of things, including how I get my sources (I never kiss and tell), what I would do if I ran Yahoo (run it right into another wall, I am sure) and what Yahoo should focus on (content, content and content–also mobile!).

The Yahoos had some good, and tough, questions for me too, including about my sometimes snarky tone in posts, my personal relationship with a Google exec (see my copious disclosure here) and my thoughts on the future of content (bright for Yahoo, not so much for newspapers).

We also talked about a variety of tech companies, such as Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Facebook, Twitter and Amazon (AMZN).

And, as Yahoos have tweeted, I did say I had a “man-crush” on Bartz (but only after she claimed I had a regular one) and described myself as a “sparkly vampire” when asked about my late-night blogging habits.

Overall, I think these kinds of encounters are a good thing, especially since they allow each side–if there are sides–to understand perspectives better.

It is easy for the press to be too glib and reactionary to a lot of stuff we cover and much harder to be fair and get it right.

But, as I told the Yahoos who wondered why the media in general were so down on the company at times, I am not there to make them feel better about their company. Instead, I am there to try to write accurately about what’s going on inside the iconic and pioneering Silicon Valley company–hopefully, some innovation–for better or worse.

While I have asked Yahoo for a video of the interview Bartz did of me that I can embed, here’s one I made of my visit–which includes a chat with Bartz, a forced BoomTown chant by Yahoos and a glimpse of the true power behind the Yahoo throne, Bartz’s longtime assistant Judy Flores (pictured here)–as well as the internal memo I was leaked by many, many Yahoos before my event (May, it’s moot now!):

From: Yahoo Communications
Date: February 1, 2010 12:36:33 PM PST
Subject: Special Event with Carol Bartz and Kara Swisher on Monday, February 8th
Reply-To: Yahoo Communications

Yahoo! from the “Outside In”: Special Event with Carol Bartz and Kara Swisher on Monday, February 8th

Searching for a new perspective? We’re excited to announce “Outside In,” a new speaker series aimed at putting Yahoos in the very same room with technology luminaries and experts.

Our debut event will be hosted by Carol Bartz and will feature Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor of All Things Digital, a website devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet, and media. Kara also hosts the Boomtown blog and is co-producer of D: All Things Digital, the successful high-tech and media conference.

Kara started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 1997. Prior to that, Kara worked as a reporter at the Washington Post. She is also the author of “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web,” and the sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future”.

This exciting session will be Yahoo!’s opportunity to turn the tables on Kara and ask her questions about the industry, media, Yahoo! and our competitors, so don’t miss it! There will also be a portion of the hour dedicated to Q&A with Yahoos.

A video of this session will be posted on Backyard shortly after the event.

Details

Monday, February 8th
10:00 – 11:00 a.m. PST
URL’s Café, Building C, Sunnyvale

Note: URL’s will be closing at 9:45 a.m. on Monday for this event.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100208/turning-the-tables-carol-bartz-grills-boomtown-in-the-yahoo-cafeteria-over-easy-with-a-side-of-disclosure/feed/ 11