As reported today by The Deal (subscription required), Yahoo! announced that is has acquired MyBlogLog. If you don't know about MyBlogLog, it is this clever idea to create communities around blogs. It has changed the landscape of blogging from a one way street to more of a community where you actually can get a feel for who is in your audience and what links they are moving on to from your page. I currently use the free service and haven't had the time to fully investigate all the perks of the paid service, but it is obvious from the different faces that I see on this blog that there is some serious viral marketing at play here. I don't even consider it word of mouth - bloggers visit each others sites and see the little face widgets and decide to try it on their own. A few weeks later and there are thousands of users using the service - simply amazing!
While I personally do not measure that much of what is going on around this blog, I do enjoy seeing different faces appear on the blog. Occasionally, I will click on someone's photo and may glean a bit of information about the person. What I do find useful is the tabulating of which links on this blog are the most popular. This in combination with stats I can take from Typepad's traffic log, tell me that a lot of people who read this blog are interested in Hedge Funds. The last time I checked, every day there are about 50 newcomers who find this blog via a Google search on Hedge Funds. I am quite amazed at the interest in Hedge Funds - are these readers interested because they work in the industry, are looking to find good managers, or are simply Hedge Fund groupies? I don't have the time to take necessary steps to find out but if you are a reader of this blog, feel free to drop me a line anytime. If you want me to write about something in particular, let me know.
Anyways, the whisper number on this transaction is $10 million. Not bad for a company launched in July 2005. As the article points out, Yahoo! is clearly trying to get ahead of the curve by acquiring companies early, like they did with Flickr. It also highlights the fact that many startups are looking for M & A opportunities as they are searching for their next round of funding. What I might add is that I hear some of the founders are running several companies at once - so this example shows that "Parallel Entrepreneurs" that I previously posted about can achieve success.
Congratulations to Eric and his crew for their nice exit!
Being a hedge fund blog I cannot tell you why there is so much interest in my industry either. I have been going 3 months and get over 500 hits a day from google searches on hedge funds. I think we are the new dot com except we have been doing this for 15 years or more.
Posted by: finbar Taggit | January 11, 2007 at 12:53 AM