Our path to create Know More Media has been twisted and turned by many influences.  I have already mentioned our experiences with About and with Nano-Publishing.  Another influence was our run at building a social media company back in 2000 (we didn't know that was what it was called back then).

After the sale of Freeservers, Hal and I were partners in a business incubator, and we funded and launched a social media company, HumanLink and hired Rich as CEO.  HumanLink offered free collaboration tools around a personal website.  Initially focused on families, HumanLink allowed family members to upload to and view an online family photo album, publish family histories, share personalized web content, establish a family directory, and stay in touch through family chats, email, newsletters, groups and a calendar of family events.  You could link your website to the family community and share all of these resources.   Additionally, communication tools such as family email addresses, instant messaging/chat, and genealogy tools were provided free to enable families to share information. Alas, we were not able to establish a stable revenue source and additional funding soon enough to make it last through the dot com bust, but a seed of this business continued to germinate.

We really became aware of blogging as a possible publishing platform at the SES Conference in Chicago in 2004 (Danny, we always find SES to be very valuable)  while we were building Tornado Solutions.  We believed  in the democratization of media, nanopublishing, and citizen journalism.  We read and followed the writings of these concepts and the development of web 2.0.  We got on board with the Cluetrain Manifesto and saw David Weinberger speak.

By this time, we had met and heard from many of the thought leaders in Social Media, and we had shaped the vision of Know More Media.

While our inspiration in 1999 was Scott Kurnit and Jeff Jarvis, in 2005 it was the people we met and heard from at the Business Blog Summit and BlogOn. Please forgive the shameless name-dropping but it was the ideas, enthusiasm, and encouragement of several early and prominent bloggers that provided the impetus to create Know More Media and we want them to know we drank their kool-aid.

We met and were taught by the likes of Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Chris Pirillo (I love gada.be, but I have got to say the whole Chest Rental thing kind of frightens me), and Suw Charman. We were not surprised to find Jeff Jarvis still in the thick of things. We had lunch with Chris Shipley and Buzz Bruggeman, at BlogOn, who kindly offered their feedback and critique of our business model.

We learned about Naked Conversations by Scoble and Shel Israel.  Shel was kind enough to talk with us for a few minutes. It was quite remarkable how willing everyone has been to teach, to share, and to advise.

I will write later about Seth Godin's impact on me, but for now, let me just say that we heard Seth speak at BlogOn and we continue to follow Seth's blog regularly.

Thanks also goes to Dave Taylor and his seminar on Business Blogging 101 - it gave us a good foundational footing.

At the Business Blogging Summit in San Francisco in August of 2005, we watched as Shawn Gold from Weblogsinc, Stowe Boyd from Corante and Paul Scrivens from 9rules debated business models for blog networks.  From our perspective, Weblogsinc seemed to have it figured out. Stowe Boyd from Corante really seemed to look down his nose (I guess we were some of those less mature attendees) at doing anything so demeaning as to try to make money from blogging.  9rules puzzled us.  It didn't seem like Paul had a clear idea of what the business model was for 9rules. It does appear that they have been successful at pitching the idea that belonging to a network has value for the blogger.  There may still be a chance to aggregate ad space on 9rules and sell that to advertisers.

We have extensively read articles, interviews, and posts by the other major blogging networks, with Gawker and Weblogsinc being the main focus. We have enjoyed the love / hate relationship of Jason Calcanis and Nick Denton. Jason Calcanis and Weblogsinc have set a high bar.  We love his contribution, the constant flow of dialogue, and his willingness to be frank, honest, and direct.  Denton had a quote that really stuck with us.  In a Wired article, Denton said that the "blogosphere is an unending source of undiscovered talent;" we really believe that and think we will discover some great authors out there with amazing things to say.

We hope we can contribute to others joining the blogosphere and in appreciation for the help and guidance we have received from those listed above, we want to pay it forward.