It's always a good sign when anyone comes to see us here for business. We're a tad in the boonies, and not so easy to get to, so when they make the trip we really appreciate it. And it almost always heralds the start of a beautiful relationship, because at worst it shows they like what we're up to and would like to help, and at best it shows that they can see the potential of what we're up to and the value of being part... and hence want to help. We don’t mind a little bit of mercenary forward-thinking when it endorses our concept.
So yesterday was a big day for us. Because we were meeting to discuss all sorts of issues surrounding our imminent dedicated daily news feed, with the lovely folks who will be providing us with it, Adfero (http://www.adfero.co.uk/).
The partnership now seems the most logical thing you could imagine, but the irony is that it almost never happened. They had a booth at both the recent Online Marketing Show and Internet World shows. So did we. In slack moments they popped by to see what we were up to. We reciprocated. But at no point did either side say 'you know, we could work together!' (Of course, that may be down to the communications standards on our respective stands).
It was only a few weeks later that I sat wading through a bunch of material we'd gleaned from the net that day, getting frustrated that we didn't have the copyright to reproduce it or the time to get in touch with the protagonists to rewrite it on Junkk.com. Then it sunk in. So I called. And they came. And we exchanged a lot of stuff. And they came again. And soon, very soon, we will have our very own homepage daily news, crafted to our audiences. Plus an ever-growing searchable archive on specific topics.
So a few mad panics this end in the next few weeks re-jigging the site design... again.
But it gets better, though, naturally, more complex. It hadn't really sunk in ('til Tom of Adfero mentioned it) that by doing this we were becoming even more valuable a resource. We'd be coming up with stuff in an area that's not very well covered, and in a style which is, well, pretty unique. This will attract an audience. So while WE are daily signing up for, receiving, reading and gleaning nuggets from countless sites and feeds on all sorts of topics, pretty soon we're going to be one too and have all sorts of folks doing the same for us.
Which means that on top of trying to get to grips with blogs, pods and whatever, I now have to grasp and master a whole new raft of initials like RSS and XML. Only this time there may even be money it, so I'm all eyes.
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