Since we are talking about things that have influenced us, I have to mention our recent experiences with Tornado Solutions.

In the spring of 2004, Rich and I made a bid to buy back Freeservers from Primedia.  We were outbid by United Online, but in the process, Rich and I found that we enjoyed working together again so we decided to launch our own company.  With our experience with FreeServers, which was free hosting sponsored by advertising, we felt that we really understood the personal, niche, nano-publishing models that were emerging as opportunities.

So in May of 2004, we launched Tornado Solutions, a publisher of niche content about specific topics.  We quickly grew and found that we needed some more help.  We approached Hal, who we both had worked with before and explained the opportunity to him.  He was crazy enough to get on board and in late 2004, Hal joined us as President of Tornado Solutions. Hal put together a team and established clear processes and organization; over the next 6 months, Hal oversaw the creation and publication of over 60 niche sites, supported by advertising programs such as Google's Adsense and some affiliated marketing deals.

We attended every SES conference we could to learn as much as we could about SEO, Adsense, Affiliate deals, organic rankings, PPC.  People like Dana Todd were kind and helpful mentors and friends.  

We tried to glean whatever we could from Google when they presented.  For the most part, the Google team usually gave the nebulous corporate line, with little useful information.  We did always appreciate Matt Cutts (photo) who invariably spoke straight and was more than willing to answer our questions the best he could.  We also appreciated the honesty of people like Greg Boser and Todd Freisen in cutting through the haze and answering our dumb questions (if only we could get some of that magic link juice that they drink).

Tornado grew rapidly, and we have been able to bring in lots of targeted traffic and see real promise in the alignment of traffic, content, and advertising.  However, we saw some shortcomings in this model.  The publishing process was cumbersome and had to flow through a programmer to do the HTML work to get the site published, so scaling was problematic.  While we offered content written by experts in their fields, we found that there wasn't a lot of reason for our readers to return often since our content was static, so we had low repeat visitors.  We were also troubled that it was very hard to engage in a relationship with our readers in this format, since it lacked a real structure to allow readers to join in the conversation.  It was uni-directional, and we wanted more of a two-way engagement.

We really became aware of blogging as a possible publishing platform at the SES Conference in Chicago at the end of 2004.  By the end of the summer of 2005, after attending a number of conferences and reading a handful of books and doing a ton of research online, we were convinced that blogging offered us a great opportunity to allow experts from all over to publish continually without the involvement of a programmer, to build a network of niche topics like we experienced at About, to allow a reason for our readers to continue to return as well as participate in the conversation, and to offer very segmented audiences to our advertisers.