John Battelle announced he is testing ads for his new Federated Media publishing network on SearchBlog. John already has a number of heavy hitting influencers joining his network, including Om Malik, MetaFilter, & Boing Boing.

What makes Federated Media different than most blog networks is that John believes the ads and content should be kept separate. I am not trying to say that others are doing a bunch of advertorials, but John wants to gather a group of the best technology bloggers to sell influencer ad space. Unlike other blogging networks I believe he is partnering with the bloggers to sell their ads, instead of trying to own the blogging websites and hire the writers.

You can run into scalability problems during economic downturns if you hire hundreds of writers and create the associated corporate infrastructure.

John was a co-founder of WIRED & founded The Industry Standard. He was recently profiled in ClickZ & IWantMedia. No too long ago my friend Philipp interviewed him as well. If you can’t get enough John Battelle in your diet you may also want to see the guest lecture he recently gave at Berkeley 🙂

Seeing how many subscribers helps you know what type of reach you have, but a subscriber is just a number. As a person who has used a number of feed readers (Firefox Sage, Bloglines, FeedDemon, & Google Reader), and as a person who has over 100 blogs in his reader, I have come to realize that the number of subscribers does not matter much. Sometimes I read all 100 + blogs I subscribe to, but most of the time I just check out my favorite channels.

When new subscribers join that is great, but I think most people with feed readers do not cull their feeds often (based on personal experience and chatting with a few friends). Many subscribers may not be readers.

What really matters is the number of people who think your content is interesting enough to reference it. Blogs are viral, and your true reach is not your number of subscribers, but a combination of the following:

• the reach of your best subscribers
• how likely they are to help you spread your story
• how easy your story is to spread / how interesting your story is

Most competitive channels are going to have a few original voices and a bunch of echoing channels. So long as your blog is good enough to be considered one of the original channels, and so long as some of the other original channels occassionally reference your blog then that is all that matters.

You do not need to compete cross industry, you only need to be well known within your industry to gain exceptional exposure.

As far as the echo chamber effect goes, some of the echoing channels will be real people, and some of them will be driven by algorithms.

I tend to shy away from using FeedBurner or other similar products because I want people directly connecting to my site. That way, if some of the people are a bit lazy and link to a feed, or if some of the bots automatically link to a feed URL I still still want those links helping boost my overall site popularity score.

Bloglines will give you a number of subscribers there. It will only be a sample of your total subscribers, but unless you are selling direct ads in your feeds the exact number of readers does not matter much, and some of the best readers will not want to subscribe to anything with ads in it. If your blog has huge exposure then feed management might save you some bandwidth, but generally I love getting just about all the link popularity I can get.

Interesting to see a name which was so established, and then ripped to pieces, and then he jumps right into the web fray again.

Is this apology authentic? It sure sounds the bit, but then again he is linking off to his research in that post. Research that will soon be sold as a high end service. Either way I find it fascinating that he mentioned his past and has the comments open. He is certainly a bit more courageous than most are.

Many people bet their financial stability on his over optimistic predictions. Then, he states:

the SEC alleged that some remarks that I and my colleagues made in emails were inconsistent with professional opinions in our published research, and charged me with civil securities fraud

I will not presume guilt on his behalf, but I think his blog is definitely one to watch. A great salesman. His authentic sounding voice will once again give him great power in the internet stock space.

Doubt I’ll be bidding on any stocks he promotes. I’ve been too busy buying stuff on eBay. 🙂