Ross Mayfield's Weblog

6A sells LJ to SUP

TechCrunch reports that Six Apart sold LiveJournal to SUP (pronounced "soup").  LJ is a dominant blogging platform for Russians and the diaspora and was previously licensed to SUP.

“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaing brands going forward” he added.

I've watched SUP since its inception with Andrew Paulson at the helm.  They have made tremendous progress to become the leading portal in Russia.  All good soup except one of my better friends and a SUP executive, Edward Shenderovich, currently spends way too much time in Moscow. 

Here's the LJ 100-day plan going forward.  Om Malik quotes Edward on why:

We believe it’s a good business.  In the world now dominated by social networks, the role of a “community platform” holds a very special place.  We have some ideas about new functionality, new partnerships, and some interesting monetization opportunities.  We are very excited about the progress we had made in Russia in the last 6 months and look forward to replicate some of our success worldwide.

Topix Portends Media Acquisitions

Topix went beyond aggregation today by launching the ability for local news readers to post or comment upon stories.  CEO Rich Skrenta describes the business model transformation where they took more risk to turn SEO attention into participation -- sharing control to create value.

I wont nitpick on how apt the Wikipedia analogy is, or agree that algorithms love vacuums.  Topix is taking a unique approach to offload the burden of moderating zipcode contributions that could work and scale.  Rafat Ali comments:

I have talked in the past about Topix’s “rut of low visibility”, and this is a risky yet ambitious attempt to redefine the site. Competition is heavy; managing and evaluating user contributions, and keeping signal-to-noise ratio high will be a challenge, but Topix intends to use a mix of human plus software intelligence for it.

You may know that Topix gobbled up some great funding from strategic media investors, one of the smarter moves I've seen made by the industry on the wane.  You see, Topix is doing what newspapers should be doing.

While the economics of print have predicted the death of it for decades, and the recent decimation of classified revenue has print in a panic -- newspapers have only made token moves in defense.  Setting up RSS feeds and a blog or two won't bail you out.  And they are missing the larger opportunity.

Invest in social media where coverage is too costly. This is the simple rule of thumb to turn threat into opportunity for media companies.  If you are a national newspaper, enable local communities to cultivate news.  If you are a local paper, feed on the local interest in national news.  Focused only on print, have users generate the TV studio.  This is a period to pilot expansion into new areas.

Popular attention is on portals buying social media startups.  Partially because they get the technology and promise, but also because they are disrupting established media over time.  Media companies probably only focused on if they could buy or build Craigslist with great disappointment.  Those cash reserves and great brands are standing still.

How long will it be until one of Topix' strategic investors scoops them up?  Until the Washington Post buys Technorati?  Until McClatchy (KnightRidder rollup) clutches SixApart?  The Tribune (did a buyout today) gives tribute to memeorandum? McGraw-Hill edits Wikia?  AP sends a wire to Digg?

Adobe Buys Macromedia, Two Platform Strategy

Adobe acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock; see Om, Jeff, Rafat, Tim, Reuters, Cnet and NY Times,   

What's interesting about this deal is how the combined company has two web platforms, .pdf and Flash, and neither are web friendly.  Both provide slick presentation, but to the detriment of open hypertext.  If they can integrate as a company, Adobe should be well positioned to compete against Microsoft.  Adobe CEO:

"By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software - along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform."

This is also the first time a company with a significant portion of their employees blogging has been acquired. So far, Mike Chambers is the only one to post, acknowledging regulatory hurdle of overlapping product lines and he is excited at the prospect of having more resources behind Flash.  Will be interesting to see what Marc has to say.

UPDATE: Kevin Lynch, Jason Kottke's roundup and Marc Canter wants the name back.