The greatest thing about blogging is that it has opened up so many new voices and new outlets.
Just in the past few weeks, we have two new outlets, both from WSJ veterans.
The All Things D team has flown the coop and has resurfaced as Recode. The formula seems to be pretty similar to All Things D, the team is intact (at least it looks so to my untrained eye) and the format is familiar. They will do a big conference to anchor the whole thing. At least right now, it seems that the only things that have really changed here are the URL, the color scheme, and the ownership structure. But a new home and a new ownership structure may open up possibilities that they could not pursue in the past. We will see about that.
Jessica Lessin, one of the top tech journalists at the WSJ over the past ten years, launched The Information in December. I am not a fan of paywalls and barriers to the free flow of content and information and so I am not a subscriber or a reader and I don't plan to link to anything behind a paywall. But this is an ambitious experiment and an attempt to make a challenging business model work in the tech news sector. As I told Jessica in a private email last month, I am happy to be proven wrong about the paywall business model and there is nobody I would rather see prove me wrong than her.
But maybe more exciting to me is the proliferation of new voices that I am seeing out there. One of the driving factors is the emergence of Medium as a blogging platform that is home to many of these new voices. Every day I seem to find a new blogger on usv.com who has written something interesting on Medium.
But it isn't just Medium that is hosting great content. You can still find great stuff on old platforms, like the one that Ev built before Twitter and Medium – Blogger. This post from Duncan Anderson on the important trends in mobile is on Blogger.
As far as I can tell, there has never been more diversity and quality of content than there is right now. And the reason for that is the printing press of our times, the cms in the cloud, is just getting better and better, easier and easier, and cheaper and cheaper. I will continue to do my part in feeding the blogosphere and I hope and expect that usv.com will continue to be a good filter for those who are interested in the intersection of technology, startups, policy, and capital markets. With all of these new voices and new outlets emerging, we need filters and discovery more than ever.
