I commented on Fred’s post on Times Select and decided to turn my comment into a post. Fred expressed some frustration at TimesSelect, and how it is keeping important voices out of the debate. I agree, and actually think it is also a 1999 (and losing) strategy for a web publisher:

As I wrote in a post a few weeks ago, talking about Web 2.0 and what RealClearPolitics is about –

“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.”

News organizations are recognizing that there is tremendous value in linking to related stories around the internet to the story in question — in other words, to stories that Editors feel are particularly relevant, even if they were not written by their own authors.

Not only is the Times *not* linking to stories outside of the the NYTimes (compare to FoxNews and Time.com, both of whom are linking to RealClearPolitics.com, as one example) — which is really a bad decision in itself — but they are driving their own Times Select writers into irrelevance.

As many people believe the NY Times editors are the best in the world, why wouldn’t they showcase other sites, articles, etc. they deem worthy? And as many people believe NY Times writers are the best in the world, why not allow *other* editors/bloggers to showcase their work? We know that NY Times writers are already some of the most blogged writers out there — yet the very best in some highly highly blogged categories (politics, sports, etc.) are shut out.
It’s ironic because the NY Times Digital has been historically very innovative online — even having a Most Blogged section — yet they continue to cling to a web 1.0, vertically integrated model.

Many people also believe that TimesSelect was in some ways a reaction to WSJ’s success in building a subscription business online — yet to the WSJ’s credit, even they have links to releated stories around the blogosphere.
The world is moving away from the Times, as more and more people are looking for sites like RealClearPolitics.com and BuzzTracker.com to provide an “intelligent filter” of what is the best, on-topic articles out there.

Bottom line: readers expect you as a news organization to round-out the story; to provide context and further reading; to provide your *own* take on what’s worth it to read and not read. We will continue to see sites that provide extraordinary filtering (see RealClearPolitics) gain readers and advertisers, and sites that cling to the old way of doing things are missing tremendous growth opportunities.

We are extremely excited to welcome Bloomberg.com as an advertiser to the RealClearPolitics.com web site. We created a new, premium position for Bloomberg that is persistent on the left hand nav bar above the fold and we worked closely with Incognito Digital, Bloomberg’s agency, on the design.

Additionally, we have set the ad up so that it takes a RSS feed from the Bloomberg web site to provide updates to the advertisement, automatically. We think this actually makes this much more than a “traditional” advertisement in that it is giving our audience at RCP relevant, timely information that is a nice adjunct to the political content at the site.

For those of you who have been tracking the conversation of feed-based advertising (see http://www.buzztracker.com/category/rss_advertising to track )– and there is a great post today by Fred on this topic, this is another example of feed-based advertising. Like Fred, we believe that feed-based advertisements have been around for a while; that RSS-based ads specifically have been around for a while, and they are cool.
The import for us of RSS-based ads, as opposed to other feed technologies, is that we finally have standard that all web publishers are using (or will use) and since all advertisers on the web are also publishers, that all advertisers are using (or will use). The standard should enable a huge growth in RSS/feed based ads. This is important because we believe that ads that our served from publishers using this technologies should deliver better results to advertisers — they should deliver better click through rates. The ads should be more timely, they should be more targeted, and to Fred’s point, they should be able to be “self-selected” by publishers and users alike as relevant to their audience.

As you can see by our post below, Feedburner clearly has a huge leg up in understanding the economies of scale and drivers of this new market. Whomever benefits on the ad network side — as more and more publishers like us adopt this type of advertising on our sites, this is great news for Publishers, Advertisers alike (though probably not as good news for television, cable, and other forms of advertising).

What do you think?

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!