Lijit

Maybe it’s because our logo is green or maybe it’s because we can appreciate a holiday designed to be celebrated with beer, but whatever the case, we’re happy to be spending this holiday with some of the best bloggers out there. Our publishers cover the spectrum when it comes to content and it’s always amazing to see what different people have to say about a day like today.

Some of our publishers like to see just how crafty they can get with green while other blogs celebrate the craft projects that may not be blessed with the luck of the Irish.

Of course, there are the blog publishers who share their favorite Irish jokes, their favorite pictures from Ireland or the real story behind St. Patrick’s Day.

And where would be on any holiday without appropriate food and drink? Whether it’s posting a traditional corned beef and cabbage recipe or something a little less traditional, like Irish Car Bomb cupcakes, your palate is sure to be pleased.

To wash down those delicacies, there is the ubiquitous green beer that comes out of the faucets in Ireland. While I may have just made that fact up, one of our publishers is making sure all of his readers know everything they should about beer and another one of our favorite blogs offers up a complete list of St. Patrick’s Day cocktails.

If you’re in the mood for dancing a jig or two, we have a publisher who created a special playlist just for today and another publisher who recommends the best places to enjoy traditional Irish music…in the Adirondacks.

Let’s not forget the important role that color plays in today’s celebration. If you’re into all things green, then our many publishers have you covered there as well.

We had one blogger share a fabulous Irish quote and taking a cue from her, we’d like to share a toast with all those Lijit publishers out there:

May the lilt of Irish laughter
lighten every load.
May the mist of Irish magic
shorten every road…
And may all your friends remember
all the favors you are owed!

If you’re Lijit and writing about leprechauns, shamrocks or other byproducts of Ireland today, leave us a comment and be sure to include a link to your post. Sláinte!

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to speak at WordCamp Denver. What is WordCamp you ask?

Basically, WordCamp is a day (or two) long event where bloggers and developers (specifically Wordpress developers) get together to talk about all things Wordpress.

This was the first time that Denver has hosted a Wordcamp, and Crowd Favorite (the makers of our Wordpress widget) put it all together.

What a great show it was.

It was broken into two segments, the first, in the morning started as WordCamps usually do, with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress, giving his “State of the Word” talk. He brought up all the interesting things that the Automattic (the team behind Wordpress) was working on, what the next release of Wordpress would have, and he talked about a couple new resources that were launching, Wordpress.tv and the Wordpress Handbook.

The morning included a panel on web design, with Kevin Menzie (Slice of Lime), Jeremy Harrington (crawlspace|media) and Brian Warren (Be Good, Not Bad). Jane Wells of Automattic talked about Open Source, and right before lunch, one of my favorites, Ben Huh of ICanHasCheezburger who spoke on how his company, Pet Holdings, focuses on the core aspects of their business by outsourcing all technical needs. And he did it without once showing a LOLCat.

In the afternoon, there were two tracks. A technical track and a blogger track. True to Alex King, the technical track was highly technical, with Jake Spurlock and Joe Scott coming in from Utah (Jake spoke on BuddyPress, which one day will be released! Joe spoke on XML-RPC, which might be one of the coolest things ever).

Over at the blogger track, there were a varied subject matter. Boulder’s Jim Turner was on a panel talking about making money blogging; Gil Awsakwa spoke on Media and Publishing, which was especially timely given the recent close of the Rocky Mountain News.

Jon Fox (another Boulderite) spoke about his company Intense Debate and how they are attacking the comment space.

Dave Moyer, an incredibly intelligent and successful kid (and by kid, I think he is 15 years old) spoke on Podcasting. Working at Bitwire, he has become quite the expert on the subject.

At the end of the day, I spoke about Measuring Online Influence, and tried to focus on the reasons why we blog. I have embedded my deck below:

All in all, WordCamp Denver was a great experience. After speaking out at Wordcamp Las Vegas, it was great to get to be involved in a WordCamp closer to home.

If you are interested in attending a WordCamp, check out the upcoming ones. I am speaking at Wordcamps in Chicago and DC, and may be at the ones in San Francisco and New Orleans.

Next weekend, I’m heading to Nashville for the Blissdom Conference and am most excited to be going. In addition to speaking on a panel about blogger outreach, I’ll also have the chance to meet lots of bloggers getting their bliss on. The conference has sold out and the list of activities is impressive. I took a quick look at the attendees and can’t wait to meet the following Lijit users in person…

Her Bad Mother
Complete Organizing Solutions
The Bean
Velveteen Mind
The Inspired Room
Successful Blog
Blissfully Domestic
DesignHER Momma
Alex Year Two

…not to mention having the opportunity to evangelize Lijit to many other bloggers. If you’re going to be at the conference, be sure to send me a note and let me know your t-shirt size. You know I’ll be packing some serious swag with me.

While Tara was at Chicks Who Click ‘09, I was out in Las Vegas speaking at WordCamp Las Vegas (which occurred during CES, which Todd Vernon, our CEO attended).

Whew!

WordCamp Las Vegas was a wonderful event, where Wordpress users and developers get together to discuss all things Wordpress.

This WordCamp was a bit different in that there was also a good discussion around the business of blogging and social media.

The speaker list was quite the who’s who of social media. Chris Brogan (Lijit User), Liz Strauss (Lijit User), Warren Whitlock (Future Lijit User), Jim Turner (Lijit User), Jim Krukal (Lijit User) and Dave Taylor (Lijit User) all gave highly interesting and informative talks.

My presentation, You Are The Center of Your Universe can be found here.

Luckily, our host, John Hawkins captured it all on Ustream here.

It was great to hang out with Matt Mullenweg (who celebrated his 25th birthday) and the couple of hundred folks the came to the conference.

I am planning on speaking/attending about 4 other WordCamps this year, including Chicago, DC, San Francisco and Denver (I might head down to Dallas as well). Let me know if you are planning on attending a WordCamp and I will bring you a Lijit T-shirt!

This past Saturday, Lijit was proud to help sponsor the first-ever Chicks Who Click, a social media conference geared for women. More than fifty women (and a handful of men) gathered to talk about many different aspects of social media, including how to effectively use different tools to market your small business, how to create a consistent brand online, and how to balance your online activities with your offline life.

I was honored to speak on a panel titled “Your Social Media Toolbox”, with the amazing Wayne Sutton and the talented Lucretia Pruitt, both of whom know way more than I do and both of whom I’m sure will be installing Lijit any day now (wink, wink). Once I got going, I realized that I’ve really learned a lot in my two years at Lijit and with that in mind, there is still so much more to learn. Just over the course of our panel, I learned about some interesting new tools that look promising. I’ll be sure to share more details once I’ve tested them out myself.

It was lovely meeting so many different women, doing so many different things, that were able to come together to discuss something we all had in common. Whether it was a small business or a huge corporation, everyone seems to realize the importance of social media. The main challenges come from proving the value of it to those who don’t understand…ah yes, ROI.

Some of the businesses represented at the conference include:

The Wisdom Coach
Fresh Organic Office Delivery
BirdDog Press
Baby Candy
Little Alouette
Sama Baby
One2One Network
BumperTunes
Park City Mountain Resort
ZoomAlbum
Working Knowledge
Klein Buendel
Crocs
Embarq
Colorado Springs Health Partners
Beneficence
Synapse3Di
Local Matters

If I forgot someone, please let me know and I’ll be sure to add you to the list. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone!) Many thanks to the other sponsors, Kirtsy, Metzger, and Walmart and to the many women who shared their expertise. Chicks Who Click was a wonderful event and I’m looking forward to doing it again next year!

[Photo credit: Emily Lewin]

A few nights ago, the Lijit crew gathered to celebrate the season. We met in the back room of a local tavern, located just a few blocks from our office. There was food, merriment and poker chips dressed up as drink tickets but it’s safe to say that the highlight of the night was the Lijit band taking the stage. After practicing for weeks, their debut performance was impressive and they easily wowed the crowd with their talent. Thanks to Micah for all the pictures and to everyone at Lijit for the fun!

Last week, the Defrag conference came to Denver. In its second year, Defrag is unlike the standard conferences Tara and I have attended on behalf of Lijit over the past year or so.

Defrag’s tag line “Accelerating the aha moment,” is rather appropriate. I liken it to a dinner where the participants are all highly educated and someone like Professor William Duggan, Columbia Business School and author of Strategic Intuition speaks on where the origins of innovation are in the brain.

Or, there is a rousing discussion around the aggregation and dissemination of content around the web with T.A. McCann, Gist; Tom Keller, IntenseDebate; Daniel Ha, Disqus; Avinoam Rubenstain, my6sense.

Imagine listening to Charlene Li discuss how to harness the implicit value of the social graph?

But, more importantly, because of the small size, interaction increases. I sat down with Howard Lindzon and was able to talk about Lijit and StockTwits at length, which just is so difficult to do at larger conferences.

It was great to have a conference of the quality of Defrag locally, and I am excited to see what Eric brings to Denver next year!

This is a guest post by our Senior Director of Products and Operations, Leslie Osborne. She was kind enough (read: I forced her) to write a post about our recent company outing.

Don’t get me wrong, golf is a fine sport. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it (save for the sketchy use of plaid in golfing ensembles). It’s just not the sport for me. Never has been. Not even since that special couple of “elective curriculum” golfing days in seventh grade gym class.

I’ve always worried about this slightly during my career, wondering if my lack of golfing skills would ultimately impede my ability to climb the corporate ladder. (At one point, I was concerned that my lack of karaoke skills would impede that climb, but we’ll discuss that some other time.) So just imagine how happy this driving enthusiast was when the sport chosen to celebrate Lijit’s recent round of financing was high-performance go-karting. Yay!

So off to The Track we went on a gray, October afternoon. We dutifully donned driving suits and driving gloves and helmets and neck braces (safety first, folks) and had an amazing couple of hours flinging ourselves around a fantastically entertaining, kart-scaled road course. Some of us were fast, some of us were not so fast, but we all laughed and cheered and had a great time.

Which brings me to the thing I love most about Lijit–yes, even more so than the selfish alignment of automotive interests–is that we all genuinely enjoy each other’s company and have a lot of fun when we’re together, be that at work or at play. I think this gives Lijit, as an organization, a distinct personality (a positive one) and I’d also like to think it translates (again, positively) into everything we do. My hope is that when you visit our site, sign up for our service, install a Lijit Search Wijit, do searches, see your stats, run an ad in our new Ad Network, get an email or comment from us on your blog, or what have you, you can feel a little bit of this company’s tremendous personality shining through. And if not, well, you’re clearly dead on the inside, but we’ll keep doing good work for you anyway.

It was fun to have the opportunity to share an interest that’s near and dear to my heart with my co-workers. (I hope they all think I’m less nuts for attending high performance driving schools now.) I’m glad everyone kept the “shiny side up”, as we like to say, and enjoyed their well-deserved afternoon of offsite celebration.

I guess now all I have to worry about impeding my career aspirations at Lijit is whether or not I continue to beat Todd and Walter…

(To see even more pictures from our day at the races, check out Lijit’s Flickr photostream!)

Because of publishers like you, Lijit continues to grow in new and exciting directions.  We’d like to tell you about our newest one right now:  During 2008, Lijit has been developing features that allow advertisers to present your readers with highly targeted ad placements in search results.  But that’s not all – we’ve also developed features that allow YOU to share in the revenue from these ad placements!

The beta release of the Lijit Ad Network will be open to advertisers and publishers like you starting October 8^th, 2008.  In this release, publishers will be able to opt-in to the search-based ad network and begin receiving a share of the revenue for ad units displayed in your search results.  As a thank you for your patience while we’ve been developing and testing these features, your account will be pre-loaded with a credit for estimated revenues based on your search history during this period (a minimum of $5).

We’re not done yet!  In the near future those publishers who have opted in to Lijit’s Ad Network will be able to sell their search based ads directly to advertisers with whom they may already have relationships, targeting just their own publication and making even more money for themselves.  This is going to be big!

To start capturing your share of revenue from the Lijit Ad Network, log in to your Lijit account and at the top right of your profile page, click the “Start Now” button.  (If you don’t want to participate in revenue sharing, you certainly don’t have to and can continue using Lijit as you do today.  We promise to use your share of the ad revenues wisely.)

Our new publisher FAQ answers all the questions we could think of during development and alpha testing of this cool feature, but if you can think of one we haven’t covered, please email us at support@lijit.com.

We look forward to working together with you to help you monetize your search results. It’s an exciting time to be Lijit and we welcome any feedback you may have. Thanks again!

The Lijit team spent last weekend at the Blog World Expo in Vegas. In addition to speaking with bloggers, answering questions, and thanking our current users, we had the opportunity to debut our new trade show booth. While this may not sound exciting, it represented a big deal because it’s the first real booth-like thing that Lijit has ever had. We put a lot of heart into our trade show presence last year, but we put a lot of money into it this year and it made a difference.

Armed with the popular Lijit swag of small laptop stickers and uber comfortable t-shirts, we decided that we needed something more. We wanted to provide even more value and functionality to the bloggers attending the conference, so we decided to help people clean up their search. And their hands. (Don’t forget what a dirty city Vegas is…)

Besides spreading the joy of hand-sanitizing, we also helped to spread the word of our search. The beauty of Blog World is that everyone there is passionate about what they’re doing, so from wine bloggers to mommy bloggers, we had the chance to talk to people about what they love doing and to show them how Lijit can make them even better at it.

In addition to hearing feedback from blog publishers already using Lijit (big thank-you!), we also had the chance to convert some new publishers to our search goodness. Welcome…

Quickrelease.tv
Volleyball Voices
Vino Las Vegas
MoneyNing
Frugal Upstate
John Hawkins Unrated
Don Nozzle
The Wiz of Odds
Money Making Scoop

While we didn’t have much time to walk around the trade show floor, there were a few companies that caught our eye, including MindTouch, Zemanta, Woopra, JS-Kit, Photrade, ContentRobot, and BlogCatalog. This represents just a small sampling of the many Blog World exhibitors present and we only wish there had been more time to find out about all the companies in attendance.

We loved having the chance to co-sponsor some giveaways with b5media, because they are always such a fun group to be around. In addition to the poker chips they were handing out for the game in their booth, we got to see some of our favorite b5 bloggers, like Mary Jo…

Lijit was mentioned in a few other Blog World recaps. John Andrews, Senior Marketing Manager for Walmart, was impressed with us (as you can see in this video clip) and we sold Ben Koo on the up-and-coming Boulder tech scene. David called us some of his favorite naggers, which he meant as a compliment (I believe) and Carlton liked our Purell swag so much, he blogged about it. Additionally, Lijit captured Greta’s interest and managed to make an impression on Karen again this year.

The entire Lijit team worked hard while at Blog World and must thank all those who stopped by our booth to say hello! We appreciate your interest and support in making this year’s Blog World an even bigger success than last year. See you in Vegas next year!

[photo credit: carltonreid]