Good news for a good idea


Scott Karp’s Publish2 has raised $2.75 million in Series A funding from Velocity Interactive Group.

Congratulations! Read the news.

I’ve been experimenting in one area of Publish2 and Karp’s vision of the future, link journalism. I had been dabbling in extensive outside linking as “the content” rather than “supplemental content” before I ran into Karp’s ideas.

But his thinking outlined on his Publishing 2.0 blog crystallized what I could see in my the Web stats for knoxnews/govolsxtra.

The epiphany: Human aggregating is a valuable, journalistic service.

Sounds simple. Most good ideas are. What I have found is that “stories” that consist of links to relevant content are consistently high traffic drivers.

Karp’s vision goes much further than mere external linking to the power of groups, a sort of wisdom of the crowds approach. But one not subjected to gaming or social relationships that happen on sites like Digg.  How to quickly develop ad hoc crowds of human aggregators on a breaking news event is one of the challenges still to unravel.

That might be enough of a goal. But his business plan goes further than creating a cool tool for journalists and it’ll be interesting to see what he outlines there. He says his ideas around a sustainable business model will be announced in the future.

This is an intriguing effort that has caught the attention smart media thinkers like Jeff Jarvis. I’m listed as an “advisor” for Publish2, but I’m more of an incurable road tester. I’ll leave the smart thinking and advising to Karp, Jarvis, Howard Weaver, Howard Owens and Beth Parke.

If you’re a journalist and you haven’t already signed up for Publish2, head over there and request an account. This is a good idea to wrap your head around.

As today’s announcement shows, guys with skin in the game think so.

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