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Rewind six months.  Lijit just moved into its downtown Boulder offices.   It’s December 31st, 2007 and I was sitting at home in my subterranean office thinking, wow – how are we going to make our 2008 numbers… Hmmm.

Then, almost like magic, an incredible publisher signed up – that, at the time, was HUGE.  I remember thinking, what a blue bird.  But how are we going to make the February numbers!  Well, we did make the February numbers and every month between then and now.

As a result of our success we decided to pour more gasoline on the fire.  Now we have a genuine Burning Man going on here.

Thanks to Foundry Group, who led our investment round.  If you’re going to do something in the online publisher space, get these guys onboard.  Nuff said.  In fact, all our investors are amazingly supportive and at one time or another have been instrumental in building what we are doing.

Lookout, there is no stopping us now.

I’ve already mentioned the awesome tech community that we are a part of here in the Front Range. At a Blogger Meetup last year in Denver, I met Rob McNealy, the man behind Startup Story Radio.

Last week, Rob stopped by the Lijit office to interview Todd Vernon, our CEO and master storyteller. The podcast interview makes for an interesting listen. I love hearing Todd tell the Lijit story, especially when he does so with a head cold. Check it out to hear Todd’s side of things and his predictions for the future of our company.

(Hint: Things are looking good….)

The Lijit team spent five days in Austin recently at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference. Most people are familiar with the music and film portions of SXSW, but if you’re a tech geek, then the Interactive portion of the conference is like Disneyland. But better because there’s free booze everywhere. Between Todd, Micah and myself, we were able to cover a lot of ground in Austin. After some reflection, I present my favorite moments from South by (which is what all the cool kids call it):

• Seeing Lijit publishers in action

Everywhere I looked at SXSW, I saw familiar names and URLs. Having the chance to thank users and speak with them firsthand about what they want from Lijit was priceless. I went to a session on building community and one of the speakers, Jake McKee, the Community Guy, was proudly wearing a Lijit t-shirt. Bestill my beating evangelistic heart!

• Blog Network Camp

b5media organized this event and Lijit was proud to be one of the sponsors. There was a great turnout and we enjoyed meeting Darren, Aaron, and Christina, among others. Todd gave an impressive demo of Lijit and the response from the bloggers at the event was positive. We’re looking forward to seeing how we can make network search even better!

• How to piss off a blogger

I attended this discussion on blogger relations and was pleased to find out that I don’t do any of the things we listed as ways to piss off bloggers. I’m self-taught and it’s taken me a year, but I feel that I’m in a position to contribute a lot to these panels. As I’ve always said, if you treat a blogger like you’d like to be treated, you’re probably doing the right thing. To read more about what we came up with, check out the post written by the session moderator.

• Hanging in da Bloghaus

This was the place to be to meet anyone who is anyone in the blogging world. Interviews were going on left and right, blog posts were frantically typed, free beer was consumed…and all with the energy and enthusiasm of a frat house. The Bloghaus is where I made the most connections, met the most Twitter friends and rubbed shoulders with the most A-listers. A very dangerous place for someone who freaks out around (very) minor celebrities!

• Startup Metrics for Pirates

Todd spoke on a panel about different ways of measuring the growth of your startup. While the panel spoke with knowledge and experience, it was also a great panel because they spoke like pirates. There were costumes, interactive pirate crowd comments and lots of “Yarrr”ing. Who knew seeing Todd with an eyepatch and earring would be one of the highlights of SXSW?

• The people
  

Duh. Everywhere you went, there was potential for inspiration and connection. Something about the mellow Austin mood must have rubbed off, because I had no problem walking up to anyone, regardless of their page views, and starting a conversation. It was such an electric energy, matching avatars to faces and meeting new friends. (Micah went as far as getting a permanent souvenir of the time in Austin.) You hear people say it all the time in the online world, but honestly, it really is all about the people.

You can read more about Todd’s SXSW experience here and here. Micah wrote about some lessons he learned and posted a round-up of how Colorado’s startups were represented at the event.

Since starting Lijit I have been living in the shoes of our blog publishers, trying to find new and cool ways to bring them value. Lijit provides awesome stats back to the publishers we serve, but primarily focused around visits and search. While those are important interactions, we were still missing something… Comments! When readers do comment, that’s an incredible wealth of information. And that’s when it clicked for me about how totally underutilized comments are and what they could really mean to publishers.

About six months ago I met Raj Bala. Raj’s company, BigSwerve, was building some really cool technology to crawl and index comments in the Blog-o-sphere. I was immediately excited to begin working with Raj and BigSwerve in order to bring even more value to Lijit’s publisher experience. Recently, Raj and I decided that it just made too much sense to pass up putting our two ideas together, which brings us to today and Lijit’s announcement about acquiring BigSwerve.

Among the interesting information locked in the Comment-o-sphere is influence relationships. When a comment is left on a blog or a site, it indicates a positive assertion of interest and focused attention. Lijit is all about the explicit and implicit networks that exist between publishers and readers. Lijit has always found innovative ways to uncover these relationships, for example following publishers’ blogrolls or using MyBlogLog community information, but now we can take this to the next level and get them from the comment layer of the Blog-o-sphere.

I’m pretty excited about the BigSwerve acquisition. Comments are a really important source of information. Look for more comment related news in the coming weeks.

In addition to having our first birthday and closing on a round of funding, we got mentions in two places that we hold close to our hearts…

and

Yippie! To read what they had to say, check out TechCrunch and Mashable . We appreciate the attention and hope to soon introduce more newsworthy features! Keep your eyes open…

Thanks to Pete Cashmore over at Mashable for the writeup on Lijit. He says we’re “handy”, but we’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeve!