Livemocha Mention in New York Times

Can't ask for better press than this. The print edition goes out tomorrow.

From an academic perspective, this is an interesting case study in the effectiveness of online vs offline promotion AND mainstream vs "long tail of the blog-o-sphere" promotion because this press is so isolated (ie we don't currently have any other promotion happening right now other than this NYTimes article). Using analytics, I'll be able to see the # of visitors that have been referred from the NYTimes.com site, as well, I can see the increase in visitors (increase from to our typical visitor count independent of the NYTimes.com). So, Increase in visitors - Increase in visitors being referred by the NYTimes.com = Increase in visitors associated to NYTimes print edition. I wonder how online vs offline conversions will differ?

Also, this could help us make future ROI-based decisions wrt PR investment. Purely for example, if our current Google Advertising conversions cost $2.00, and we get 10k conversions as part of this press, then we break even if our firm costs us $20k.

That said, our "free" blog-press has resulted in almost 1300 blogs. It's hard to beat free.

Silicon Valley North(West)

For my entire academic and most of my professional career, I grew up in Canada's Tech Triangle, bordered by Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge; an area dominated by RIM and the University of Waterloo. This area didn't receive the label "Silicon Valley North" which was given to Ottawa; dominated by Nortel, Alcatel, Corel back in the day. Seattle, which has always been known as a "tech-ish center" thanks to MSFT and Boeing, got props from NYT's John Markoff today: Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley.

When I lived here to work for RIM, I didn't see much of the entrepreneur culture. At Livemocha, I've really enjoyed participating/ attending/ witnessing the action:

• Ignite Seattle: This is great. Put on my O'Reilly, a dozen folks get 5 minutes to hammer through a presentation on something geeky. I liked Dave McClure's Product Marketing Metrics for StartUps and Shawn Murphy's Hacking Chocolate.
• Refresh Seattle: Typically a speaker on something design related, then drinks in Ballard. I saw CommonCraft Lee Lefever give this talk on Community is Like Hosting a Party.
• StartPad: Pretty cool concept - basically it's an organization that offers shared space allowing startups to share costs and collaborate. They put on a session on OpenSocial a while back - no we're not building an app... yet.
  
• StartUp Weekend: I'm not this hardcore, but I like the idea. Teams of 8 compete over the course of a weekend to kick off their start up.

On related news, the Seattle 2.0 list came out today - Livemocha is #35!