Feedburner, based right here in Chicago, got a nice write-up this morning in the Chicago Sun Times in a story by Brad Spirrison.

The angle of the story is on how the two new investors, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Brad Feld of Mobius Ventures - both started out as users of the service and naturally migrated to investors of capital of the business.

Money quote from Dick Costolo, CEO:

“There is no question that having the venture syndicate composed of people already using our product was a huge advantage,” Costolo said. “I have absolutely gotten my share of bug reports from all three of those parties.”

One other item of note: the first institutional investor in Feedburner was Matt McCall of Portage Venture Partners - a great VC based here in Chicago. You can find Matt (VC Confidential) , Fred (A VC) , and Brad (Feld Thoughts) all on our blogroll to the right.

At Participate Media, we are big fans of Feedburner and the management team. As publishers of web sites, our goal is to break down content into the smallest consumable elements and then provide readers, authors, and other media entities infinite ways to consume and syndicate and link to our content. Feedburner solves a slew of scalability, distribution, metrics, and monetization problems for us by providing (for free!) the infrastructure to distribute our content across a range of disparate partners.
As an example, on our new BuzzTracker website, currently in Beta, we will soon be offering any blog or web site the ability to take any of our topics (currently up to 175) and display a box for that topic on their web site using Feedburner’s BuzzBoost feature. What’s great about using Feedburner is all we need to do is create the feed (Note to Feedburner: we need parameterized feeds!) and turn it on. We don’t have to worry about server loads, impact on our scalability, support — it is just going to work. To us, this is just one of many examples of Feedburner making our job much easier - and all you need to do to make sure your infrastructure is ready is to be using a web 2.0 publishing platform such as Movable Type or WordPress.

Great job guys!

For me, these two deals between RealClearPolitics and Time and Fox (featured on PaidContent.org today) are part of a much larger story that I think has been overlooked for the most part: the mainstream media recognition and acceptance that in order to succeed in Web 2.0, you need to provide your readers with value-add to what surely will be further surfing on the internet.

This is a big deal — web 1.0 was about taking existing media business models and just making them electronic — as recently as a year ago I had a conversation with a top 10 newspaper GM who asked me, “why would I want to to link to anyone else’s site? I want people to stay on my site!” And the old way of doing business was I own my editors, I own my writers, and I want you to stay here!

I think what we’re seeing now is a slew of mainstream media organizations recognizing that a) people will surf to other sites whether you like it or not b) you have an opportunity as a brand to add more value to the experience if you can provide further filtering and help to these readers and c) if you don’t do it, your competitors will.
What’s cool about these two deals is how the mainstream media companies are actually using RealClearPolitics as an intelligent filter. In Time.com’s instance, Time is pursuing a very smart strategy of shining light on a collection of other blogs that augment their existing content, in addition to having some of their existing writers write blogs. In addition to RealClearPolitics, there is www.andrewsullivan.com, Mike Allen has a blog, etc.

In FoxNews.com’s instance, the FoxNews and RealClearPolitics (and ParticipateMedia) have worked together to create Opinion BuzzTracker that leverages the wisdom of the crowds of the top (think head of the tail) political blogs to determine the “most” important story of the day in politics.

In both cases, this is much more than a simple “click here to see related stories” feature — but rather these organizations putting their editorial footprint on a larger browsing experience.

And one of the points of BuzzTracker is that it is more than a completely automated service — there is editorial control on blog sources, search parameters, etc. that allows us to provide what we consider to be an intelligent filter for the blogososphere on those topics.

What do you think?

Last Thursday, RealClearPolitics.com announced a new partnership with FoxNews, whereby RealClearPolitics Opinion BuzzTracker is now hosted on a co-branded page on Fox News, here.

Today, RealClearPolitics announced a partnership with Time, Inc., whereby the RealClearPolitics Blog is hosted on a co-branded page with Time, Inc., here.

Howard Wolinsky of the Chicago Sun-Times covered both deals here.
We’re very excited about these deals for three reasons:

1) We get to expose our content to the much larger audiences reading both Time.com and FoxNews.com

2) We have extensive link backs to RCP in both hosted pages and hope to gain new readers to our other content as a result of these deals.

3) Both FoxNews.com and Time.com can monetize the pages significantly better than we can, given their ad sales forces and their aggregate reach.

So if you go back to our first principles of being a Publisher, we believe these deals will help us move each of the three levers: increasing net unique visitors and page views by trading in traffic to each of those pages in return for link back and increased SEO; and increasing RPM per page.

We’re also happy to see the BuzzTracker technology that we developed being valued by a mainstream media site — at BuzzTracker we’re tracking over 200 granular topics and growing. Check it out.
Your thoughts?