From Founders' Dream to Professional Leadership: AideRSS' Startup Journey

August 7, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • AideRSS, CarolLeaman, IlyaGrigorik, startup

Since launching in July 2007, AideRSS has been well reviewed, attracted venture capital and evolved from founders’ dream into a professionally managed company. During my recent visit to the offices of AideRSS, both Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Ilya Grigorik and recently-appointed CEO Carol Leaman sat down to talk with me about the company’s journey from an idea to a venture-funded enterprise.

As I reviewed the recordings of these interviews, I was struck by how different Ilya and Carol are. Ilya is the quintessential techno-enthusiast. His enthusiasm for the original idea and the pursuit of the next innovation is almost palpable. Carol is the rationalist. Polished. Bottom line oriented.

Two very different people. Yet, they complement one another. Hmmm. A smart pairing brought about by smart money?

Ilya:

“It all started as a personal project when I started blogging. I wanted to create an analytics engine for myself, defining my own metrics for how people interact with my content, how has one post performed better than another. … One evening it occurred to me that if I’m doing this to track my own performance, why can’t I apply the same idea to outside posts?”

“It’s an amazing experience to wake up in the morning and realizing that you started with something that was just an idea and something you worked on on weekends, and all of a sudden you have a company working around it.”

“We went from an idea to an actual Website launched in July ’07. It was an amazing launch. We received lots of attention from the online community. Everybody loved the idea. It was something that everybody needed. We had articles written in Japanese, Korean, Arabic, English. It was really an amazing experience to see all the feedback. Following up on that, we went out and raised some money to take the idea to the next level.”

Carol:

“What’s behind the system is highly complex, but people won’t use it unless it’s extremely simple” to use.

AideRSS received its first round of financing in December, only five months after launch and plans to raise a second round “in a few months.”

What’s the business model? AideRSS seems to be working toward a “freemium service with a variety of potential services.” AideRSS is still in the early stages of exploring this, but they “hope to launch by the end of the calendar year.”

More about AideRSS

Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

AideRSS' Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank

August 6, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • AideRSS, socialmedia

I visited the AideRSS team the week before the launch of PostRank.com. CEO Carol Leaman, co-founder and chief technologist Ilya Grigorik and Community Manager Melanie Baker took the time to sit down with me to chat.

In today’s interview, Ilya Grigorik explains PostRank and AideRSS’ approach to measuring engagement. Among the highlights:

Ilya defines engagement as “any interaction a user can have with a post or an article.” To measure engagement, AideRSS aggregates all the metadata it can find about each post: number of views, the number of times the page has been clicked, how many people have bookmarked the story, how many people people have blogged, twittered, shared it on Pownce or Ma.gnolia.
AideRSS uses the metadata it collects to compute an Engagement Score. In doing this, they assign different weights to different types of actions. Viewing a page would be considered a “lightweight” action. A click would be assigned greater weight. A comment requires a greater investment of time and thought. It would be assigned yet greater weight. AideRSS assigns less weight to a Twitter comment. An Engagement Score for a post is calculated using the weighted instances of all of the actions detected for that post. A higher Engagement Score signifies more attention from the community.
PostRank is an indicator of the relative Engagement Score of each post on a blog. Thematic PostRank is an indicator of the relative engagement score of a series of posts across a collection of content sources.
PostRank is dependent on context. Ranking articles against other articles in a specific blog will yield a different PostRank than ranking articles across a collection of blogs.
PostRank scores are computed based on a post’s performance compared to the previous performance of a blog. Thematic PostRank does the same thing for a collection of content from different sources.
AideRSS is continually tweaking its algorithms by adding sources like Twitter and Pownce and adjusting the weight assigned to various sources.

More on AideRSS:

AideRSS’ PostRank Measures Engagement

AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14

AideRSS' PostRank measures engagement

August 5, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • AideRSS, Engagement, Measurement, socialmedia, socialmediameasurement

Are you interested in a tool that will help you sort through the flood of new posts to find the most interesting and talked about content in your RSS subscriptions?

Are you a writer or content creator who wants to figure out which content others have become most engaged with?

Are you a corporate communicator or marketer who wants to understand which content and authors are having the greatest impact on issues and online conversations that matter to you?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, read on.

A Time Saver for Readers

Since AideRSS first launched just over a year ago, I’ve used it to identify online content that others have also found interesting and engaging. AideRSS provides a simple calculation of what they call PostRank which analyzes the frequency and type of interaction with online content and provides a relative score of how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. By sorting the posts by PostRank, I can easily spot those that seem to be generating the highest levels of engagement.

On days when I’ve let the posts in my FeedReader accumulate, I can spend more than an hour scanning them all (more time than I should invest), delete them all (What if I miss something that really matters to me?) or I can filter them with AideRSS so that I can review only those with the highest PostRank. I’ve installed AideRSS’ Firefox Extension for Google Reader to incorporate PostRank right into my RSS aggregator. A great time saver.

Measuring Engagement

From the outset, I was impressed by AideRSS’ approach to measuring what’s important in social media. It struck me that AideRSS-Co-founder Ilya Grigorik’s PostRank algorithm was a smart way to begin to measure engagement. When AideRSS launched, it wasn’t important whether Ilya had the definitive algorithm. What was important was that he was working toward a holistic calculation that incorporated both offsite and onsite interaction.

AideRSS’ CEO, Carol Leaman, participated in the Toronto Roundtable on Social Media Measurement this past spring. During the day, she made some thoughtful contributions, both in the things she suggested and, equally importantly, the questions she asked. As I listened to her, it was clear that the folks at AideRSS were also thinking through their place in the social media metrics and measurement puzzle.

I didn’t have to wait very long to see what Carol, Ilya and the AideRSS team were working on.

PostRank: A New Standard?

A couple weeks ago, AideRSS launched PostRank on a its own site, PostRank.com. The site highlights PostRank’s utility for measuring online engagement. It also offers a set of APIs to encourage developers to incorporate PostRank in their own Web Apps. At the same time PostRank.com was launched, AideRSS also introduced Thematic PostRank to enable the PostRank calculation to be applied to any collection of content assembled from a variety of feeds and sources (not just blogs, but Twitter and others services.)

AideRSS is attempting to promote PostRank as a standard measurement of online engagement. And to date, the AideRSS approach to measuring engagement is the best I’ve found.

Have you used AideRSS or PostRank? What do you think of them?

More on AideRSS and PostRank

TechVibes: AideRSS -Now it Gets Interesting

Video of AideRSS co-founders Ilya Grigorik and Kevin Thomason demonstrating AideRSS at DemoCampToronto14.

WordCamp is coming to Toronto

July 24, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • Conferences, WordCamp, WordPress

If you’re a blogger, if you’re interested in a day of good discussion about social media, or if you want to know more about the best blogging platform around, you’ll want to attend WordCamp Toronto on October 4 and 5.

WordCamp brings together bloggers, designers, developers, podcasters and all kinds of social media enthusiasts to learn, share, talk and explore the potential of social media and the WordPress publishing platform.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has been booked to speak at the conference. Matt has said, “WordCamps are my favorite events to go to because there’s something about the core WordPress community that attracts smart folks with good philosophies that are fun to hang out with.”

Other speakers already confirmed include Brendan Sera-Shriar, Mike Ellis, David Peralty and Michael O’Connor Clarke (Yes, that Michael OCC, my co-worker at Thornley Fallis.)

The preliminary list of session topics includes:

WordPress Talk
Business Blogging
Blogging for Boomers
Podcasting
30 Tips to Make Your Blog Better
Social Media for Dummies
Running Your Blog Like a Pro
Vidcasting
Entertainment Blogging: A Panel Discussion

The organizing group for WordCamp Toronto is being led by Mathieu Yuill and Melissa Feeney. The even is being hosted at the Centennial College Student Association‘s Student Centre at Centennial’s Progress Campus. (Disclosure: the CCSA is a client of 76design.)

Thornley Fallis and 76design have settled on WordPress as the best all round publishing platform available today. And because we’ve benefitted from the work others put into developing it, we’ve tried to give back by developing two free plug-ins, FriendsRoll and TopLinks, that we hope bloggers will use to revitalize their blogrolls.

I’m keen to attend WordCamp Toronto. Not only because the blog posts and Twitter stream from other WordCamps have suggested to me that I’ll be able to mix with a particularly smart group of participants, but also because I’m hoping we can get some feedback on FriendsRoll and TopLinks from this social media savvy crowd.

If you want to attend, WordCamp Toronto, you can register at Eventbrite. I hope I’ll see you there.

Overlay.tv: It's about creating community in video

July 22, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • overlay.tv, RobLane, socialmediabreakfast

When Overlay.tv launched in Beta on February 15, it was widely and positively viewed as a potential building block in the future of online video and advertising.

I’m told that Overlay.tv is making good progress toward a full release. As I write this, a new Beta is days away from release. And the folks at Overlay.tv are saying that release will be a minor step and won’t last long.

Rob Lane, the CEO of Overlay.tv, has been notching up the profile of Overlay.tv in advance of its release, with recent appearances at Social Media Breakfasts in both Boston and Ottawa.

I’ve created a four minute video of the parts of Rob’s presentation in Ottawa in which he describes overlay.tv, how it can be used to add relevant content and product information to any video.

Some of the things he said that caught my attention:

“If you look at video today, essentially it’s a passive experience. You put a video up. You sit there. You watch it. You may turn away and do something else. … What we’re trying to do at Overlay is to create a deeper interaction. And that interaction can be everything from hot spots to conversation in video to building community around video itself … It’s all about transforming what is a passive lean-back experience into an engaged experience.”

“If you create a video that people are interested in, they are more likely to want to interact with that video. … [Your choice of overlays is] all about relevance. [to the content of the video]”

“It’s about creating community in video.”

If you’re interested in knowing more about Overlay.tv, I’d recommend that you follow @roblane and @bitpakkit (a.k.a. Ben Watson, Overlay.tv’s Vice President of Marketing) on Twitter. Both Rob and Ben maintain an active presence on Twitter. Overlay.tv does have a blog. However, it has not been updated since April 25. (Come on guys. I’m sure you have lots of great content you could share. How about an “overlay of the day” to start with? 😉 )

Also, Mark Blevis blogs and podcasts his take on Rob Lane’s appearance at Social Media Breakfast Ottawa

Travellers will like PlanetEye

July 15, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • PlanetEye, Tools, travel

A Twitter from Mark Evans , Director of Community at PlanetEye told me that the service has launched in Beta. I clicked over to register and try it out.

When you first arrive on the PlanetEye home page, a Search bar is front and centre on the page. I’m planning a trip to Paris, France, so, I typed in Paris and that took me to the Paris page.

I found that PlanetEye gives me three main ways to find and view information about Paris:

a map as the central navigation feature with hotspots that can show photos, hotels, restaurants or attractions. Microsoft is an investor in PlanetEye and the site cleverly and effectively uses Microsoft Virtual Earth for its map-based features.
a City Guide view that presents the same information in a text-based page organized under headers such as Top Hotels and Top Attractions .
the Local Expert page which presents a blog by a PlanetEye rep featuring reviews of restaurants and tips about things to do when visiting the city. In the case of Paris, the Local Expert is a Canadian, Jolayne Attwood , who has been living in Paris for about a year. Her blog posts review the type of out of the way restaurant that you’d hope that a local resident would tell you about. She also offers pointers to seasonal festivals and exhibitions at galleries. All in all, I enjoyed reading her take on Paris and this feature alone will draw me back to PlanetEye as I plan my trip.

Once I’ve found information, PlanetEye also offers a way that I can organize and save it for future use. Once I’ve registered on the site, I can create personalized pages which PlanetEye calls Travel Packs . I can save any type of information I find on the site in a Travel Pack – hotels, photos, reviews, etc. And I can make my Travel Pack private or public. By making it public, I can share my experience with other travellers, adding to the richness and usefulness of the site.

I also can upload my own content and geotag it. Geotagging is easy. PlanetEye lets you simply drag and drop photos you have uploaded onto the location on the map where you took them and then it assigns coordinates to them. You can see a photo that I uploaded and mapped to the location of Universal City Walk in Orlando, Florida. It took me less than three minutes to upload my first photo. Easy and quick.

I’ve created my first two Travel Packs for Paris and also for Orlando, where I’ll be going to attend BlogOrlando . The site helped me to find a hotel I wanted in the area I wanted to stay. When I decided it was time to book the hotel, the site took me to a Travelocity Partner booking page with its standard interface. I’ve begun bookmarking information on my Travel Packs and I’ll be watching to see if other travellers post content over time.

I’m going to add PlanetEye to the other travel sites I use regularly: Dopplr to share travel destinations with friends and to connect with them when I’m on the road and Travelocity (a longtime Thornley Fallis client) to book air, hotels and car reservations.

Now, with PlanetEye, I think I’ve found an easy to use way to pull together my videos, photos, favourite places and experiences for specific destinations, to share these with friends and family and to plan trips. Kind of like having flickr, youTube, a guidebook and a travel diary all in one place.

…

What other people are saying about PlanetEye:

ReadWriteWeb: PlanetEye: A One Stop Travel Destination

Mashable: PlanetEye, Blowing Other Travel Sites Out of the Water?

SensoryMetrics: PlanetEye Versus Travelpod

UberGizmo: PlanetEye: Plan Your Trip Using Virtual Exploration

FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCamp Ottawa

March 30, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • DemoCamp, DemoCampOttawa, FriendsRoll, TopLinks

Steve Lounsbury, Julie Haché and I will be presenting FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCampOttawa8. This will be our first public presentation of these plug ins. So, we’re hoping for some good feedback on both the concept and how we could improve the implementation.

The other presentations include: chide.it, LoyaltyMatch, GlobeEx Pro, Trade Wars Rising, DevShop and FaveQuest. Thanks are due to Ian Graham and the other organizers who are making it possible for the Ottawa tech/startup community to gather and celebrate innovation.

If you’re in Ottawa on the evening of March 31, come out to DemoCamp and join in the discussion.

Read More about FriendsRoll and TopLinks:

The BlogRoll Reinvented – FriendsRoll and TopLinks

Launching FriendsRoll and TopLinks

FriendsRoll and TopLinks Case Study Part 1

The Blogroll reinvented – FriendsRoll & TopLinks

March 7, 2008 • Joseph Thornley • Blogroll FriendsRoll, TopLinks

Today, we are launching FriendsRoll and TopLinks, two new WordPress plugins that I hope will give new life to blogrolls. You’ll see the very first intallation of these in the sidebar of this blog.

TopLinks

There’s been a lot of good discussion about whether the blogroll has lost its utility.

Personally, when I find a new site that I like, I review the author’s blogroll. And I’ve frequently discovered some great new sites this way.

But I also have to admit that my own blogroll was dreadfully out of date. I just didn’t remember to update it often enough. And so, it didn’t really reflect my most current reading list or recommendations.

So, what to do about this? How could we reinvent the blogroll so that it would continue to have the utility of helping us discover sites recommended by others while making it painless to keep these lists up to date?

Our answer: TopLinks. TopLinks replaces the manually edited blogroll with a widget that automatically generates a list of the Blogs and sites that I most often link to.

In doing this, it not only solves the problem of keeping my list up to date, but it also provides an extra indicator of whose thinking I most closely follow and most frequently cite in my own posts.

(Think about the potential for having this data openly posted on blogs. We will be able to analyse and use it to construct social graphs of the blogosphere, gaining insight into communities of thought and influence.)

FriendsRoll
At the same time, I wondered about another issue. The explosive growth of social networks like Facebook is powered, in my opinion, by people’s desire to connect with others.

I’m a member of Facebook. But it seems to me that it’s best for making connections with others and signalling affinity to causes. But for great content, I still look to blogs. That’s where the serious writers have continued to post their content and where the discussion has flowed most freely. Moreover, this occurs in the open, outside of any walled garden, where all this great content is available to anyone who can use Search.

So, the question: How can we provide readers with a means of signalling that they read and trust an author and consider themselves to be part of his or her community?

Our answer: Friendsroll. FriendsRoll enables your readers to sign up to appear on your list of Friends. Any data they provide will stay with the blogger, not reside on some external site. So the relationship is directly between us. No third party involved.

Get them together or separately
I think Friendsroll and Toplinks work best together. But you can install them individually or together.

Both plugins can be downloaded from the Friendsroll site. Try them out – let us know what you think.

Thanks to some very talented people

I’m very lucky to work with some truly talented developers and designers at 76design. Thanks to the great 76design team who worked on this: Julie Haché, Shawn McCann, Brett Tackaberry, Steve Palmer and the project’s leader, Steve Lounsbury. And thanks to to Tod Maffin, who may recall that this idea originally emerged in a discussion that we had in Vancouver last summer.

All that’s missing is you

Oh, by the way. This is a real Social Media project. The plug-ins can be downloaded and used for free. And the promotion budget to let people know about this is $0.

So, I’m hoping that if you like the concept of Friendsroll and Toplinks, you’ll post about them and encourage others to try them out and give us their feedback on them. Only through being used and talked about will we be able to improve on this first effort.