Mark: started bloglines to scratch my own itch. other people must have this problem too, that was genesis.

Rich: folks in newspaper companies surprisingly savvy about the Web. more and more content every day - our job direct people to that.

Mena: the day we took funding, wanted to be more than lifestyle business.

John: google weather, feed reader

Mark: google joining long list of companies doing feed reader - "one more data point that validates our original vision". bloglines changes the way people use the internet, so will be very important in future (ref: google feed reader, but framing it in bloglines terms]

Rich: doesn't have to be all or nothing, win-win, etc.

Mena: competing with all the big players...

John: re creating content - do you have populist vision, celebrity culture.

Mena: project comet... it's about communication more than publishing for her Mum, but are limited numbers of publishing. communications first and foremost for sixapart.

John: all have built platform on top of roiling conversations

Rich: we're really early. like web in 93-94. over next 2-5 years, going from bloggers writing "real content" to much more about discoverability for people on topics they're interested in.

Mena: it's about privacy, writing to specific audiences. no scale expectations.

John: video, audio in bloglines etc.

Mark: video, audio not as easy to consume. search technology isn't there. text will be king for forseeable future. use internet as it matures for different types of communication - more nuanced forms of communications. different mediums, more segmentation.

Mena: should be counting how active people are, how are they engaged, what are they doing.

John: spam, what do you do about it? threat or will we manage?

Mark: we have natural barrier - we only crawl sites our users subscribe to.

Rich: created opportunity for google, relevancy.

Q1: bloglines hasn't changed much recently [that sounds familiar!]

Mark: challenge for us is one of scaling, keeping up with huge recent growth. #1 priority is to keep the trains running on time and keep decent user experience. has most of that solved, so soon will see more innovation.

Q from Jason Calacanis: monetize for RSS for bloglines.

Mark: we haven't settled on a business model yet. couple of diff ways we could go - e.g. one option is we never monetize it. if we monetize, you the content owners are partners. so if we go down that route, we'll talk with publishers.

Rich: has to be publisher tie-in.

Q: only business model among entrepreneurs seem to be to be acquired. are there business models?

Rich: there are business models (they didn't take investment). ad-targetting, ads on sites etc brought in revenue. business model innovation required.

Mena: could've flipped two years ago. it's a long game.