Connelly:creeds taxonomic dispose hunt immaterially filled Yentl credit http://www.avai...dit-report.com/ …

Yes it looks like Myspace (since a good number of the people working at gather did work at myspace) but Myspace caters to a completely different crowd then the over-educated, higher earning, well-informed public radio listening audience: in other words, people who can command higher ad dollars.

I wouldn’t judge Gather.com’s success yet just based on what everyone is calling poor design — it’s in Beta testing right now, anyway, and design can change. What I would watch is the number of ads popping up all over public radio, especially as “underwriters” of popular shows like Marketplace.

My belief is that we have yet to see the wild card of this Web site. If on-air personalities like Garrison Keillor start telling everone that he “gathers”, who knows the strange effect this will have on the marketplace. Combine that with getting out the message that when you support gather.com, you are supporting public programming, you are going to see a lot of loyalists (the same ones who write their annual checks to public radio) making sure that if they do post a blog, that a copy of it gets onto Gather.com.

Hey Michael- Thanks for the constructive criticism. We take these thoughts seriously. The team at Gather knows we have a lot of work to do on the service (and we are hard at work doing just that).

That said, just two months into our public beta, our community has grown past 10,000 people and is doubling every month. Gather members are engaged, publishing, commenting, and connecting at an increasing rate. Something is working well on Gather.com, all the challenges aside.

A couple of specific thoughts:

1) We agree on the interface: We are working on ways to simplify it for our new users and make it more customizable for regular users.

2) Tags v. taxonomy: We wanted to try both methods of organization because our members skew older than the MySpace crowd. We wanted to see how they reacted if we offered a choice. We have finished that evaluation Tags win even for this audience. More to come on that front with our next release.

3) On revenue share: I respectfully disagree. Advertising revenue in the space is climbing quickly. Demand for ad space is outstripping supply. This is shown most powerfully by climbing CPC’s.

We simply believe that we can take a share of the billions that will be spent on online advertising for individual publishers, helping them to monetize their content online.

My prior company, Be Free, had great success capturing a share of advertising revenue and sharing it with “the long tail” as well. Be Free was one of the largest “affiliate” or “pay-for-performance” marketing companies in the late 1990’s. (Be Free went public in 1999, completed a secondary in 2000, and was sold to ValueClick NASDAQ:VCLK in a 50-50 merger in 2002. It remains a profitable part of the ValueClick family). By aggregating many, many smaller publishers, we created a very compelling sales channel for advertisers.

This is a different model, to be sure. We are excited, however, to see numbers even in this very early stage that are trending as we expected them to. On this front, I suppose, nothing succeeds like success. Our first few writers that start making real cash on Gather will be the proof point.

To clarify one question raised above in comments: Gather has raised a total of $9M to date, $3M in December 2004 and $6M with our round announced this month. The oft-cited $7M figure quotes articles showing that one of our investors (American Public Media Group, a public radio organization) invested $1M in the company and adds that to our just announced investment round. That $1M was part of the $3M invested in December, 2004.

I would love to talk more about your thoughts anytime and look forward to showing you an improved Gather in less than a month.

Some of the buzz around the blogosphere is created by the heavy knocking sound on Gather.com’s (is it Gather, which is on the website, or Gather.com?) business model and a lot of questions about its future. They closed a $6 million round from Jim Manz…

Over the recent weekend I read Ellyssa Kroski’s superbly researched and written new article, The Hype and Hullabaloo of Web 2.0. It’s a must-read piece whether you’re a die-hard aficionado or a battle-hardened detractor. The article is es…

I was chatting with a buddy on IM today about how Gather.com is getting raked over the coals by some bloggers following a story on them in the Boston Globe (reg may be required). Looking over Michael Arrington’s complaints about……

But I guess I’ll break from the crowd and say that I think it’s a neat concept. I don’t see it as just another blogging platform. The focus is more on the article than the blog – which makes it more collaborative. As a reader you might go to Gather to check out recent articles from a number of your favorite authors – a subtle difference from going to a blog to check out recent posts from a blogger. Not quite a wiki, but closer.

And as far as the revenue sharing – say what you want, but these guys are still ahead of the curve. How many Web 2.0 sites are giving back to their contributors? And unlike the blog networks, Gather’s writers are not handpicked superstar bloggers – they’re anybody.

I think it’s only a matter of time before ALL sites that rely on user-generated content will have to share the profits.