Tomorrow Marks Rocky Mountain News' Final Day

After months of speculation.And during a week where Hearst made similar waves with the San Francisco Chronicle. And just a few weeks from its 150th anniversary...

Scripps has announced that tomorrow will be the final printing of the The Rocky Mountain News:

The unfortunate question is who will be next? The local news here is that it may will be the San Francisco Chronicle. To put their troubles in perspective - they supposedly lost over $50m last in 2008 (the Rocky Mountain News lost $16m).

Of note, the big "Permanent Clearance" ads on the homepage and throughout the site (for Dillards) are unfortunately ironic and a further sign of the times.

Read more on RockyMountainNews.com. Gakwer also puts this in perspective alongside the New York Times and Tribune Co woes.

Perez Hilton Hits 14,000,000 Pageviews Yesterday. Wow.

You might not be interested in celebrity news and gossip...You might not consider it important or meaningful... But to the web, it is significant and marks a major move in the Digital Media space.

I've written about Perez Hilton many times before and the values / perils of being a one-man brand.

But by doing 14,000,000 pageviews yesterday... Perez has clearly showed those are not issues for PerezHilton.com and his business. 14m pageviews is a staggering number for what is basically a one-man shop and blog. Those numbers cement him as a major online brand and space (obvious even a year ago). Consider that 14m pageviews is ahead of Huffington Post (max was 7.7m / day in last month) and on the heels of Wordpress.com (max was 20.8m in last month).

It is also worth noting that all three sites (PerezHilton.com, Wordpress.com and HuffingtonPost.com) are directly measured by Quantcast.

Perez Hilton's daily traffic measured against Huffington Post (to show scale):

Perez Hilton's daily traffic measured against Wordpress.com's:

Perez Hilton's Monthly Uniques

Perez Hilton's Monthly Pageviews:

Potential Entrepreneurs: 20 Questions to Ask

Kelly K. Spors of the Wall Street Journal listed 10 questions for potential entrepreneurs to ask themselves and assess whether they are cut out for the job (particularly in this economic climate).

Her list of 10 questions is below and it's interesting how to focuses almost entirely on personality traits... when I would argue that is half of it. Obviously the other component is the idea and vision... I've included my secondary questions below her's:

1. Are you willing and able to bear great financial risk? 1A. Do you have financial backing to fund the vision and team for at least twelve months?

2. Are you willing to sacrifice your lifestyle for potentially many years? 2A. Are you able to manage your time effectively and wear multiple operating hats?

3. Is your significant other on board? 3A. Do you have a board or advisors who you consult with and seek guidance from?

4. Do you like all aspects of running a business? 4A. Which aspects do you dislike and which are you weakest at? Do you have partners and/or advisors to compensate?

5. Are you comfortable making decisions on the fly with no playbook? 5A. Have you created a playbook to sit alongside your business model?

6. What's your track record of executing your ideas? 6A. What's the track record of execution among other players in this space?

7. How persuasive and well-spoken are you? 7A. What's the need that you are trying to solve? Who's the community you are trying to serve? Can you craft a concise definition for both?

8. Do you have a concept you're passionate about? 8A. Equally important... Is it a concept that others can become passionate about (employees, users, etc)?

9. Are you a self-starter? 9A. Is the business a self-starter? In other words, is there a clear, short-term monetization path; or, will you need to fund the business through that point?

10. Do you have a business partner? 10A. Do you have a technical partner? Or, if you are technical, do you have a business partner?

You can also read my guide to boostrapping a start-up

Widgetbox Partners with Atlassian & Confluence

Widgetbox is pleased to announce that you can now add their widgets to pages inside of Atlassian’s Confluence enterprise wiki. Confluence is the largest commercial wiki with over 7,000 enterprise customers worldwide. With this integration, Confluence users can quickly and easily add any of Widgetbox's 117,000 widgets to their wiki page, blog post or personal space.

Jay Simons, Atlassian’s VP of Marketing is really excited about the integration:

Our integration with Widgetbox is a great example of how wikis aren’t just for text anymore. Confluence customers want to add videos, slideshows, stock quotes and other dynamic content to their pages. By supporting Widgetbox, we’re giving our users access to an almost limitless amount of rich content.

Widgetbox has thousands of widgets to help business teams collaborate and stay informed. For example:

- A project team working toward a deadline can add a countdown widget to their project page.

- A company with offices around the globe might add an international clock widget to their Confluence dashboard.

- Or a salesperson might add LinkedIn badge or a SkypeMe widget to her Confluence personal space.

Confluence users can also make their own widgets with Widgetbox's Blidget and Blidget Pro tools. With these tools users can create custom, branded widgets from RSS feeds, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and other services. To see a demo of Confluence / Widgetbox integration in action, check out the video below:

To learn more about Atlassian and Confluence, please visit their website at http://atlassian.com/confluence or read their related blog post on Atlassian's Blog.

You can also read coverage on VentureBeat.

Why Amazon Continues to Pull Away from eCommerce

Read this blog enough and you certainly know that the one company I rely on and respect most is Amazon. Almost daily, I use Amazon as an example in good product experience, design, strategy, etc. Do yourself a favor and read Scott Wingo's analysis of Amazon's success over the last three years and how they have situated themselves differently from the rest of e-commerce (particularly eBay). Scott knows eBay and Amazon quite well - and the article is available on SeekingAlpha and eBayStrategies:

Amazon's relentless focus on value and selection along with their innovations around shipping and handling cost reductions, ease of use and merchandising built on the foundation of trust from the a-to-z guarantee have given them the most enviable position in ecommerce.

InGameNow Adds Live Scoreboard to iPhone Apps

Attention sports fans - InGameNow has added live scoreboards to its suite of iPhone Apps. Now you can easily access real-time scores from that day's events and navigate to the discussion for that particular game:

If you have already downloaded the iPhone Apps, they are now available for updating via the iTunes Store. If you have not, please use the links below to install:

Get all the iPhone Sports Apps by InGameNow: - InGameNow iPhone App
- NFL iPhone App
- NBA iPhone App
- UFC / MMA iPhone App
- NCAA Football App
- NCAA Basketball App
- Soccer iPhone App

Gawker Rolls Up Defamer & Valleywag... Chasing Huffington Post?

In my 20 Digital Media Projections for 2009, I stated that there would be a handful of other major sites racing into that space that Huffington Post and The DailyBeast have successfully created. Today comes news that Gawker is rolling up another of the big Gawker Media properties: Defamer. Just a couple months ago, Valleywag was rolled into Gawker.com (it now resides at valleywag.gawker.com)

At first I thought this was because Nick Denton had significantly cut staff and resourcing across the network. And while that may well have been the case at Valleywag, that doesn't seem to be the case with Defamer.

Defamer serves 6m page views a month (Gawker does 24m). That is substantial - albeit not enormous.

The roll-up to me looks more like a page out of Huffington's book: build a brand and verticalize within it. Gawker's take has always been to create unique, stand alone properties and hope that people navigate between the brands.

I would personally be more inclined to visit Gawker if it housed all of the brands (as disparate as they are)... assuming that Gawker could figure out a way to surface content that may be interesting to me via my tastes, history, and popularity across the site. I'll read more and I'll stay longer. I promise.

I am lazy. So too is the web (after all, the #1, #2 and #3 search queries are Google, Yahoo and eBay). Take advantage of it by making it easier for us.

Also good coverage of All Things D

Introducing TechNews (http://news.ryanspoon.com)

Introducing http://news.ryanspoon.com - I encourage you to test it out! About a year ago, I weened myself off of Digg (at least partially) and moved onto Hacker News. Hacker News is the best mix of technology content - from headlines to analysis to discussion.

After sifting through various services, I found SlinkSet (also a YCombinator company). Uninterested in creating a Hacker News clone or competitor, I was intrigued by the ability to 'remix' my own favorite feeds along with articles submitted by friends and readers:

It is an interesting way, if you will, to create your own 'distributed feed' (ala Facebook or Friendfeed - but without the direct network). Using SlinkSet's private mode, it is also a way to communicate with a distribution list.

SlinkSet is simple and a free service. My only critique is that it is based on iframes and consequently is not as flexible as you would like (in addition to being an SEO killer). It would be powerful to either

1. open the code (like Pligg or Wordpress) and allow users to develop against it, and/or 2. create a subscription version that allows further customization

Also worth noting, SlinkSet's custom service is terrific. They have converted an installation of SlinkSet into a feedback 'wall' and the founders interact ther directly with the users. Really a terrific example of what SlinkSet can be used for and how to interact with your userbase.

Facebook Photo's Remarkable Growth - Did iPhone App Play a Role?

According to ComScore (and via TechCrunch), Facebook Photos is running away from the nearest competitors: Photobucket, Flickr and Picasa (in that order).

Facebook has been the space's leader for over a year, but the gap has widened and really started to open in September 2008. TechCrunch suggests that it is due to the profile redesign:

"But the tagging feature has been part of Facebook Photos for a long time. What happened in September to accelerate growth? That is when a Facebook redesign went into effect which added a Photos tab on everyone’s personal homepage."

How about two other additions to why the marked growth is occurring (although I totally agree that the timing is due to the profile redesign):

1. The iPhone App is one of the most popular and addictive. And it makes photo taking / sharing dead easy. In fact, it is easier to upload a photo than to enter your 'status update.' Based on my network's feed - photo usage via the App has grown significantly.

2. Switching cost: once you begin to upload photos onto Facebook, it becomes difficult to move them elsewhere or start uploading elsewhere. The switching costs are high and there are network effects. As Facebook grows (and it is everywhere now), there is less of a reason to share via print sites like oFoto / Kodak, Picasa, Shutterfly and so forth.