I'm pleased to announce that FM and Metroblogging are teaming up. We're excited to work with Sean and the team there - they've built a great local presence in 45 cities, and are growing very quickly. FM will be including Metroblogging in our self service platform, which launches shortly, and representing MB's sites in our outbound sales. From the release:

Metroblogging is pleased to announce its partnership with Federated Media Publishing, a company that connects a select group of author-driven websites to world class progressive marketers. Now handling advertising across this expansive network of local sites, this partnership with Federated Media is sure to excite marketers who are trying to make an impact with such an engaged and influential audience as the group that reads and writes Metroblogging.

“We’re very excited to be working with John and the whole Federated team,” says Richard Ault, Partner at Metroblogging. “They are at the forefront of helping independent publishers succeed and we are proud to join a network containing so many amazing authors and websites.”

“Metroblogging is a great example of author driven media at its best,” said John Battelle, founder and Chair of Federated Media. “It’s clear their model is taking off, and readers love the local focus of Metroblogging’s extensive network.”

Welcome to FM, Metroblogging!

We're busting at the seams here at our Sausalito offices, with the addition of three great new team members.

Sales Director Bernie Albers goes way back with our VP/Sales Chas Edwards. He started his ad-sales career at Gamespot in the late 1990s, then did stints as a sales manager for ZDNet and CNET Radio. Most recently, he's been the top new business/salesperson for Portland, OR, ad-agency Babcock & Jenkins.

Jonas Halpern is a veteran online media planner, buyer and supervisor for agencies such as Carat Fusion and Mediasmith, where he managed accounts like Dish Network and Napster. And he's an author himself: check out http://drinkoftheweek.

And Melanie Colburn (here's her site) joins us as an Editorial Assistant, where she'll be working with our wonderful authors, as well as with me as I continue to build out Searchblog. Melanie joins us more recently from Google and various publications, online and off.

Please join me in welcoming them to the FM family - we're now at 12 folks, and as you may have noticed, we do have another job open if you know anyone!

We're growing again, this time in NYC. The job posting:

FM is looking for a New York-based senior advertising sales veteran to open FM's New York sales office. Candidates must have at least 6 years of outside media sales experience, with online media experience strongly preferred. The ideal candidate is a creative thinker who can help marketers shape innovative online advertising campaigns, can communicate these concepts to prospective buyers in person and by email, and can negotiate from concept to contracted business. Strong relationships with the media-buying community (verified by references!) is required. The position will report to the Vice President of Sales. Please contact Chas Edwards.

Yahoo Publisher Network has its own blog now, and I like watching it to keep up with what is sure to be a big year for Yahoo as it rolls out a more full throated response to AdSense. And most of you know I'm also pretty interested in new ad models generally, and RSS specifically. So this headline on the new site: "So What's All This About Ads in RSS" certainly caught my eye.

The post explains the basics of RSS, and how folks who publish feeds can make some extra revenue by adding Yahoo RSS ads (YPN text links for now) into their feeds. The post explains how RSS readers work, using examples like NewsGator, Bloglines, SharpReader, Firefox's Live Bookmarks and others. These are all full text readers, so Yahoo's RSS ads will show up in them (they appear at the end of a post).

But the problem is this: One of the largest RSS readers in the world is My Yahoo. In fact, in the post, Yahoo promotes it's "Add to My Yahoo!" RSS feature as a great way for a publisher to promote their RSS feeds. Yet My Yahoo's implementation of RSS is crippled: It only pulls headlines and snippets. It strips out URLs and ads. In other words, it won't show the very ads that Yahoo is promoting (or any others, for that matter).

The post, therefore, is pretty much a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, it says you should add YPN advertisements to your feeds - they'll show up in full text feed readers (in other words, the places Yahoo does not control). On the other hand, it encourages the use of the My Yahoo RSS reader, where those very ads will never show up (and they don't need to, because Yahoo will show their own ads around My Yahoo).

I don't think you can have it both ways. I use both FeedBurner and FM ads for FM's feeds. Hence, they don't show up in MyYahoo. This is not a new issue - the question of who makes money off other folks content is a big one. For now, the industry has settled into a quid pro quo of "headlines and snippets for clickthru traffic". But readers don't care about that. They want their content where they want it, and if it's inside MyYahoo, great. Just deliver ALL the content, including the ads. I've brought this up with the good folks there. They understand the issue, but for now anyway, they aren't going to change their model. I think they should.

If you wished someone would help you edit down the best of the best voices in technology blogs, look no further than Federated/Tech, the "metablog" we recently launched. Check it out here - editor Bill Brazell reads all our authors' feeds and selects a mix of posts each morning for your perusal. He then updates the site throughout the day. I've added its feed to my feedreader, I find it indispensible. Another cool feature is the ability to pick dates to see the front page on any given day, a sort of growing daily archive of what's up in the technology world (the date picker is on the left, below the fold). Enjoy!

We've got an office there, in fact!