Tags: Mike Butcher, TechCrunch

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Tags: Graphing Social Patterns, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Rodney Rumford, Dave McClure

Tags: Graphing Social Patterns, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Rodney Rumford, Dave McClure

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Tags: Online speed dating, WooMe, TechCrunch40, Orgoo, Stephen Stokols, Michael Kantor

Tags: San Jose Mercury News, TechCrunch40, Flock, Shawn Hardin, publishing tools, social browser

Tags: HP, Joe Hewitt, Facebook, iPhone application

Tags: Michael Arrington, Steve Gillmor, TechCrunch, MeetUp9, Om Malik

Sam was known in the blogosphere for the good coverage he did at TechCrunch UK. After a public split with Mike Arrington , he began Vecosys, and now BlogNation.

Sam has worked in the IT industry for over 18 years for companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Gateway Computers and CMGi, in a variety of senior technical and marketing roles. Sam has also experienced the joy and pain of running his own start-ups. Recently, Sam has been working as a freelance consultant with companies such as MSN (UK) and BT, helping develop their Web 2.0 strategies.

When not blogging, consulting or presenting, Sam loves nothing better than spending time with his wife & young family, running, drinking fine wine with his friends or watching his beloved Liverpool FC.

Oh, just a quick note to let you know that the audio quality isn’t the best. To make it easy, I have transcribed the conversation below and it will be a good supplement to the podcast.

Photo courtesy: Library House

Transcript:

Kiruba : Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Sethi: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Kiruba: Congratulations on the launch of BlogNation. That’s a very ambitious project you have started.

Sam Sethi: Yeah. It has started on a post I wrote on my own blog “Go Big or Go Home” which really was related to the fact that most Europeans were told by Americans that we don’t have enough ambition. Alright. OK. Let’s see how ambitious we can get and if we can cover most of the world’s Web 2.0 news and that’s what BlogNation will do.

Kiruba: Alright. If a person in the US were to listen to this and one of the obvious questions that would be asking is, “Are there enough innovation happening outside of the US?”. What would be your answer?

Sam Sethi: The answer would be Yes and No. Let me explain. Yes, there is a lot of innovation happening outside of the USA, outside of the Silicon Valley. Companies like Jaiku,Vimeo, get on the American radar very early. The answer, ‘I don’t know’ is because of the language barrier. Up until now, I’m trying to understand what’s happening in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Brazil, Japan, China. Its just impossible for us if we don’t know the language. BlogNation will be moving into 22 countries…there is a lot of activity in the Web 2.0 space and we’ll get to understand them better.

Kiruba: In countries like India and UK, obviously there is no problem because English is the main language but like you just said, in China, Bulgaria, Germany, a lot of blogging and coverage of technology happens in the local language. How are you going to overcome this barrier?

Sam Sethi: OK. What we have done is that BlogNation will be written in English only. We will rope in 22 very good bloggers from around the globe who live in their country, who are native speaking and who can write very good English. The idea is that they will write about what is going on in their country in English and hopefully we can use one common language on the Internet to appreciate what is going on in each country and learn quicker about the new startups rather than wait four to five months to learn about them.

Kiruba: OK. Let’s go back in history. Now, Sam Sethi as a person came into prominence for a lot of bloggers because you were with TechCrunch UK and you did some real good work. So what happened after that and how did BlogNation came into being?

Sam Sethi: OK. TechCrunch UK was really a project with myself and several friends in London who organize events to try and realize how we can make the UK start up scene much more available around the world. We started on a project called unplugged London and we realized that it would be much simpler teaming up with Mike Arrington. Post Mike Arrington and Post TechCrunch, we started a blog called Vecosys which really was a knee jerk reaction to me leaving TechCrunch.

In the three months that we wrote Vecosys we realized that its not sustainable unless you build it big. Really, we were covering too small a market and not getting any revenues in.

BlogNation was born as a project that would be built from the ground up having an advertising network. The company Index is an important feature of the site. The company Index is really a lesson learnt in blogging. If you write ten posts they would appear on the homepage but once it drops off the homepage, its gone. The Company Index of BlogNation is a link between the post and the company. Every time there is an article written, it would be added to the company Index. Basically if you look at a particular company in the Index, you can access all articles relating to the company. If there’s one or more articles about the company, you will be able to see the history of the posts. So a great way to track a particular company, read news about the past and the current. BlogNation is a professional version of what we were doing at Vecosys.

Kiruba: Alright. Now, the scale of BlogNation is quite ambitious with 20 plus countries in the plans. So how are you funding the entire project.

Sam Sethi: The project is currently self funded and angel funded. We hope that we encourage startups who haven’t advertised before. So a lot of startups I know say they haven’t advertised on Google or Yahoo or other social networking sites because the advertising is very expensive. We are looking at providing a simple targeted advertising for entrepreneurs for a very reasonable CPM rate to encourage them. The other revenues will come from larger companies who fund BlogNation. More revenues will come from other activities that we be doing which I will be talking about later.

Kiruba: Alright. When you say other activities, would events also be in your business model just like how Rafat Ali is doing.

Sam Sethi: Events is certainly in the business model. When you have got 22 editors covering news around the world covering news, you have a very strong view of whats happening around the world and what technology we feel we will be able to attract people. Today, its just in the plans.

Kiruba: BlogNation typifies a startup company. And for a lot of startup companies the biggest hurdle they face is ‘How do I make myself known to a lot of people?” which is marketing basically. So, how are you planning to take care of that?

Sam Sethi: Like any startup we need other bloggers around the world to connect to us. We need people to talk about us. We need to provide quality relevant content which makes people want to come back to us and make BlogNation their destination site throughout the day or once a week or whatever is their frequency. I don’t think there is a quick way. I think we will take six months to build a good traffic or maybe longer.

We have very good people in our team who are well connected. The combination of writing well and sponsoring and reporting events around the world, linking to people, talking about interested things. Overtime, if we are the right thing, people will come to us.

Kiruba: Awesome. Your plans for the next year. One year down the line where do you anticipate BlogNation will be?

Sam Sethi: I would hope it is the river of news homepage which is all the world stories, will become the destination choice. Our page views, we have some figures in mind, which will make us one of the top blogs in the world hopefully. Outside of that we have a couple of other plans in mind. One is to create a TechMeme for the rest of the world. Again I feel, TechMeme is a US centric blog and cover mostly the valley and when they don’t have enough to cover, they occasionally look outside. I’d like to cover everything outside of the US . And we would be supporting a community of entrepreneurs.

Kiruba: Awesome. We were talking about Sam Sethi, the business guy. Let’s talk about Sam Sethi, the person. Tell us about your personal interests other than business. I know that now BlogNation would take more of your time but in your spare time what would you like doing.

Sam Sethi: I’m a family man with two children. So, that takes care of more of the free time. I like sports, running, rugby, football . I like socializing with friends..the thing that most family people tend to do. I don’t think I’m any different.

My interest before blogging was to learn all about learning, about what new and exciting things in technology is all about. I have a technical background. So, my natural extension is get into writing about exciting companies.

Kiruba: Alright. Fantastic. Sam, here’s wishing the very best for BlogNation.

Sam Sethi: Thank you.

Kiruba: Thank you, very much.

Tags: Sam Sethi, entrepreneur, BlogNation, Web 2.0, TechCrunch UK, Mike Arrington, Vecosys

Content is king in the Top 100 blogging world and all of these blogs mentioned have great content — but to stay at the top, they also have to have great search engine optimization.

Neil claims he doubled TechCrunch’s Technorati ranking after just six weeks (Updated 7/16/2007) Neil claims he doubled TechCrunch’s Technorati search traffic in a few weeks, by providing better linking and leveraging sites. Patel gives other tips for success to Marketing Voices.

Tags: Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calcanis, TechCrunch, Neil Patel, ACS Consulting, search engine, optimization

Tags: Jay Pullur, Pramati Technologies, Dekoh, TechCrunch

Tags: Steve Gillmor, Jason Calacanis, Mike Arrington, Tech Crunch 20

Click here for transcript.

Tags: Sam Sethi, geeks, London, tech startups

Click here for transcript.

Tags: Mike Arrington, TechCrunch, BlueDot

Tags: Apple, iPod

Tags: Yahoo Inc.

Tags: Google, eBay

No word on how and when the company intends to make money, and with social bookmarking still nascent, Yahoo better start giving del.icio.us a bigger push. The measurement question is a whole other issue that deserves some real debate as Mike Arrington and Matt Marshall have initiated. Until Alexa, Comscore, and friends can figure that out I expect that we’ll continue to see conflicting stats.

Here are the actors in this Billion Dollar Baby:

“Our partnership with Google underscores News Corp’s continued evolution to become a powerful force in the digital media marketplace. To have come this far and gained this much momentum in just over a year is truly remarkable,” said Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation. “This is an exciting time in our history as a forward thinking media company and this is just the first of many steps we plan to take with Google. We look forward to expanding our relationship into many new areas over years to come.”

“We believe that our innovative technologies will be of real benefit to Fox Interactive Media’s growing number of users,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “MySpace.com is a widely acknowledged leader in user-generated content and incorporating search and advertising furthers our mission of making the world’s information universally accessible and useful.”

“This deal is the next step in our evolution as a significant interactive player,” said Ross Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media. “Forming a strategic partnership with one of the most innovative companies in the world to expand our business together, monetize our platforms effectively and leverage our combined scale will provide substantial growth for our businesses.”

“This agreement demonstrates our commitment to bring the same innovation to monetizing user-generated content that we brought to search advertising,” said Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development of Google. “We look forward to other opportunities to partner with News Corp. to the benefit of its community.”

Danny Sullivan, the original authority on “Search” reports the following …

“I’m at our Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose at the moment, so I don’t have time to do a long post on the news, which I’m still digesting. I’ve taken a number of phone calls on it already, so I’ll provided what I’ve given to some other reporters who have asked.

Big win for Google? Sure. Lots of traditional players are worried about MySpace, even if the site itself isn’t earning that much now, from what I understand. This gets Google in, keeps Yahoo and Microsoft out, and might be a cheap payment to protect Google’s front in the social networking wars. In other words, even if Google doesn’t make a net profit off of MySpace, the intangibles could be worth the cost. The closer ties also give Google deeper insight into the MySpace traffic, since it will soon see everyone going to these pages. That will be very helpful for Google if it wants to do a renewed social networking effort of its own.

Big loss for Microsoft and Yahoo? Maybe, maybe not. If social networking is hot, both of them — unlike Google — have very healthy communities in several international markets. In fact, that potentially could have been an issue in trying to win MySpace. Revenue-wise, Yahoo indirectly provides ads to MySpace, but current revenue doesn’t appear to be substantial, plus Yahoo already would have been giving a big chunk of this to whomever is the unknown middleman. ”

Look for more from John Battle - he wrote the book about Google called Search. Of course there will be something from Mike Arrington from Techcrunch.com