Grant Cerny

This Friday evening got really interesting when I found out that Mike Arrington had written up our Love.com project in TechCrunch.  I found out when I had friends arriving for a cocktail and what with ditching to my laptop and watching the post comments I’m afraid I was a really bad host.

This likely had something to do with my talking to Frank Gruber about an hour beforehand, and Frank’s posting about the same.   I guess TC follows SOMEWHAT FRANK.

I suppose that most folks just now caught wind of what we are doing, but we’ve been developing it in Production (that means available live on the web) since February.  Now that I’m counting it, it’s less than 2 months, but it feels like a four or five…

Metrics have never been so exciting as we launch www.love.com and see how the long tail can activate a forceful aggregate result.

It is also fun to strategize and plan ways to move the long tail into the high-value web experiences, and begin to see it work.

What’s most exciting (and tense) I think is watching competition.  Love.com is wading in a slew of aggregator broth, or more accurately, sharing a hot-tub of semantic soup with these folks.  My current list is as follows:  .

• Meehive (based on Kosmix)
• Loud3r
• Kosmix
• WNN
• JPZenger
• Evri
• NewsSift
• Alltop
• IceRocket
• Apture

If anyone has any other adds on companies doing this stuff, please send them.  I can be reached at grantcerny ) a t ( gmail.com.  Thanks!!!!

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-goom-radio-raises-16m-first-round/

Goom is (or says it will be) “HD sound” programmed internet radio with DJ programming and user-created stations.

I met Zac Bjelgrlic, the CTO for Goom last summer at an OpenID conference.  At the time he worked for BBC and I was trying to network my way into the BBC to find out more about their work on Musicbrainz when he told me he was leaving for Goom.  I followed up with him a couple times, at one point disclosing that we operate AOL Radio and Shoutcast.  We haven’t connected since.

You can sign up for their US beta invite at the bottom of goomradio.com, but why wait for personalization in the US.  Go to goomradio.com/fr or http://www.goomradio.com/goomWeb/home.do to try the product live as it is being marketed in France since it is not effectively georestricted.

The interface and player station-customization is neat.  Not sure how they’ll make the business work.  My sense is that they take a loss on the royalty-bearing DJ programming to motivate people to heavy up on user-gen uploads and playlists and don’t pay royalties on those, and net positive with advertising.

Today we were supposed to have the new “Rainbow All-American Double Decker Playground Swingset” installed.  The kids and I had grand visions of a sunny fun weekend with the new playset.  But it rained.  And the guy who was supposed to come and install it for us, didn’t show, and didn’t call.  I had to call him to figure out what was going on.  Grrr.

Then.  We noticed the carpet in the basement was wet.  Turns out our water heater tank just came of age, and is leaking.  Dealt with that business.  Many phone calls.

Tubs, showers, dishwashing etc. are on sporadic duty until we get the water heater worked out.

We wake up. Cook & eat waffles. Put on coffee. Sleep a little more.

Get up and go. On the road 2 hours – lots of cops – arrive in Beaverkill NY where my mom & dad are building a Fountainhead of a lake house.

Kids are surprised to find cousin Amelia and her parents Ian & Kristina at lake. Much joy.

Dad & Kids tour new house. very large and tall. Kids play awhile. Dad takes Ella & Isabel out on the lake briefly before we turn around and go home

Another 2 hour drive – lots of cops. Kids fall asleep quickly on the way back. When we get home to Powder Horn, it’s dad’s turn to relax. No not even, Dad! Forget about that! Dad disassembles the current playset, since the new one is coming tomorrow. Wife Kristin is about to birth baby 3 so Dad is in
hyperdrive. Next up – TUB TIME.

For the past few months a handful of us at AOL/MediaGlow have been working on creating a network of topic blogs or “passion points” called the Love.com Network.

MediaGlow has over 70 brands covering all manner of consumer interest with editorial power and nuance.  Check it out:  www.mediaglow.com.  MediaGlow’s raison d’etre is to find untapped audiences and provide them the media brand and editorial voice that resonates best.

If we call the 70+ sites big rocks (verticals) or small rocks (custom blogs), Love.com’s topic pages provide the scale to fill in the pebbles or sand to attain critical density in covering the spectrum of consumer interest and best serve the largest possible audience or collection of audiences.

Love.com Network is still being born.  Some key near-term goals include:

• Scale to the 100,000s with relevant news, image, video & other media assets returned for each topic.  Topics include celebrities, musicians, movie titles, company names, product names, sports teams, sports players, locations, as well as people who have a critical density of interest in the web
• Make consumers love it and gain audience

We are harnessing some internal IP from Relegence & Blogsmith, and are lucky to have some of the best talent involved in guiding the product direction & architecture and writing very fast java & javascript code  (Ian Holsman, Gregory Tomlinson).  We have the benefit of the very sweet UI/Design of John Kilpatrick, Anabel Gondelles, & Eric Kopicki.  And of course we have the core benefit – the Relegence back end technology – and the knowledge management guidance of Alf Poor and Terence Fitzgerald – in my experience some of the best in their business.

In the months to come we will be adding more and more features and watching traffic and monitoring consumer feedback. I welcome any and all feedback via this channel or others.