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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

As Traffic Booms, Is HuffPo Ready to Make Some Real Dough?

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For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

Here’s a chat I had with new President and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman about how he is aiming to do just that.

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Monday, May 11, 2009

A Techtastically Busy Week: A Grab Bag of Digital Stuff to Consider

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It’s another packed week for tech, especially in Silicon Valley, where the kibitzing never ends and the econalypse is almost completely ignored.

As if you did not have enough to do, what with all that pointless tweeting, here are some choices for those who want a little analog action, including watching me annoy Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, who is also trying to become California’s next Attorney General.

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Monday, April 27, 2009

MySpace Musical Chairs: Jason Hirschhorn Also In as Chief Product Officer

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MySpace has officially announced the appointment of entrepreneur and former AOL exec Mike Jones as COO, as BoomTown had reported earlier today.

But the social-networking site also named former Sling Media top exec Jason Hirschhorn as chief product officer in what has become a series of senior management moves at MySpace.

Both Hirschhorn and Jones will report to newly named CEO Owen Van Natta, the former COO of Facebook, who replaced MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe last week.

Once the trio get their bearings, many sources indicate that News Corp., owner of MySpace, has given Van Natta and his key execs free reign to remake the unit from top to bottom.

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Friday, April 24, 2009

Yahoo Hires Adobe Vet Lamkin to Run Communications and Communities Unit as Dietzen Moves to Strategy Post

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More musical chairs at Yahoo, which BoomTown predicted recently, as top execs at the company move in and out of jobs, and new ones from the outside move in.

Perhaps the most important change to occur is the replacement this week of SVP Scott Dietzen–who had been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo–by former Adobe Systems exec Bryan Lamkin, several sources said.

And there’s even more…

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Monday, December 1, 2008

Huffington Post Nabs $25 Million in Funding–Here’s a BoomTown Interview With Oak Investment’s Fred Harman

The Huffington Post, co-founded by Arianna Huffington, will announce this morning that it has raised $25 million, in a single investment from Oak Investment Partners.

The large round, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blogging site a valuation of “just south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site,” said Harman in an interview with BoomTown last night.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

Kara Visits London (to See the Queen Again)

Actually, although BoomTown is staying right around the corner from Buckingham Palace in Mayfair, I am in London on my way to the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam later this week, where I will be interviewing some digital leaders onstage.

We’re still working on rolling out a version of our D: All Things Digital conference in Europe next fall, so it’s important to get a sense of what is going on here in the digital sector and, of course, what is not.

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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

AlleyCorp’s Kevin Ryan Speaks!

With the sale of paidContent to the Guardian Media Group and the talks TechCrunch has been in with AOL, there certainly is a lot of hubbub around tech blogging sites of late.

One of the more interesting sites that has gone up over the last year has been Silicon Alley Insider, which is headlined by former Internet analyst Henry Blodget (yes, that Henry Blodget).

But perhaps most compelling is that the site is backed by Web 1.0 entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, former CEO of DoubleClick, who has nested SAI inside a networks of new Web efforts at AlleyCorp.

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Friday, July 11, 2008

PaidContent’s Rafat Ali Speaks! So, Here’s Who’s Next…

Earlier today, BoomTown broke the stunning-for-blogs news that ContentNext, owner of the popular online digital media news site paidContent, was being bought by the Guardian Media Group for about $30 million in an earn-out acquisition.

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

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Guardian Media Group Buys paidContent for $30 Million

In what will be yet another new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group will announce this morning that it will buy the digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

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Thursday, June 19, 2008

Welcome to ATD, Therese–and a Belated Welcome to Eric

As readers of AllThingsD.com might have noticed, we added columnist Therese Poletti to the main rail of the site today.

Her twice-weekly column, Tech Tales, which appears on MarketWatch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will also be published here too.

Poletti joins Eric Savitz of Barron’s, whose posts on his Tech Trader Daily blog about tech stocks have been appearing on the front of ATD several times a day for the past month.

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Monday, May 12, 2008

AllThingsD: All Things (Re-)Designed!

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Today, we debut our new redesign of the home screen of AllThingsD.com.

It is, in fact, our second redesign since we launched the site in late April of 2007, although it is a much more drastic redesign, with a lot more elements added.

Why did we do it? No, we are not hyperactive (OK, we are, but we are taking medication for that).

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Thursday, May 8, 2008

GodTube: 9 Rules for Dating My Daughter

This is an amazingly hip and funny video from the Sermon Series on Families at North Point Church of Springfield, Mo., posted on GodTube.

GodTube, which describes itself as a Christian video-driven social-networking site, “where users find inspiration, interact, chat, share and upload” Christian video, has about 2 million users per month.
GodTube also lets churches stream [...]

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Thursday, May 1, 2008

Jeff Weiner Ignores BoomTown at EconSM (and Says Other Stuff Too)

Here’s a few video clips of Yahoo’s Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of its Network division, onstage at paidContent’s Economics of Social Media conference on Tuesday.
In the first, he egregiously ignores BoomTown’s subtle (as a hammer!) way of asking about the Microsoft (MSFT) situation.
In the second, Weiner talks about Yahoo’s (YHOO) social-networking strategy (translation: this [...]

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Kara Visits EconSM (and Lives Large With Jason Calacanis)!

Yesterday, I traveled to Los Angeles for paidContent’s second Economics of Social Media conference, which opened last night and is being held all day today at the Skirball Cultural Center.
This morning, I am interviewing Steve Wadsworth, who helms Walt Disney’s (DIS) Internet businesses.
And after sating myself with as much Club Penguin info as possible, I [...]

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Monday, April 28, 2008

MicroHoo: Should They Stay or Should They Go?

Should they stay or should they go now?
If they go there will be trouble. And if they stay it will be double.
In other words, BoomTown’s got nothing!
I am traveling this morning to Los Angeles for paidContent’s Economics of Social Media conference, where I will interview Walt Disney Internet Group President Steve Wadsworth onstage tomorrow.
But [...]

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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