The Praized Blog

After nine days in San Francisco for Web 2.0 Expo and a bunch of Praized Media partnership meetings, I’m now in Seattle for The Kelsey Group’s “Drilling Down on Local ‘08“.

If you’re interested in local search and you’re not here, you’re missing one of the most important North American conferences on the topic. I can only attend the first two days but I’m looking forward the following sessions:

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

• The Industry Overview with The Kelsey analysts
• The interview with Pat Marshall, VP New Media at Yellow Book
• The panel with Matthew Berk, Lead Search Architect, Marchex

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

• The keynote with Rich Barton, Chairman and CEO, Zillow
• The “The Revolution in Classifieds” panel
• The “Events: Gateways to City Guides” panel
• The “Localizing National Verticals” panel
• The “Leveraging Geodomains” conversation with Dan Pulcrano, CEO and Executive Editor, Boulevards/Metro Newspapers

If you’d like to meet, send me an e-mail at seb AT praized.com.

The Praized founders (Harry, Sylvain and Seb) are attending Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco. We just landed at SFO and are enjoying a sunny afternoon around Japantown (it’s the cherry blossoms festival). If anyone would like to connect while we’re in San Francisco, you can ping me at seb AT praized.com or call us at 514-299-6670. If you’re attending the conference, you can use this site to find cool places related to Web 2.0 Expo: Web2Places.com.

I (along with Harry and Sylvain from the Praized Media team) will be attending the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. It starts on Friday and lasts until next Tuesday. If you’d like to connect, send me an e-mail, seb AT praized.com. See you there!

Montreal Gazette’s Roberto Rocha writes about the effervescent Montreal Web ecosystem today and the Praized team is featured. Excerpts:

But now Montreal is witnessing an Internet renaissance. New Web companies are sprouting up and venture-capital firms and “angel” investors who fund early-stage ideas are starting to pay attention, sowing the seeds of a new economic sector in the city. The activity is being driven not by government subsidies or by tax incentives, but by a desire to create something new and to meet like-minded people who see the Internet as the great new business frontier. (…)

Inspired by the collaborative nature of the Internet, local geeks with bright ideas started meeting at informal, community-organized events called BarCamps. The global movement that began in the Silicon Valley was the grassroots retort to stuffy, invitation-only tech conferences. In a BarCamp, computer whizzes show the first drafts of their garage projects to anyone who will listen. (…)

In a nondescript downtown office, Harry Wakefield and Sébastien Provencher are having one of their final meetings before taking their own startup, Praized Media, global. Their walls are barren save for an expanding pile of empty Guru cans by the windows and diagrams scribbled with the lingo of the new Internet economy - words like widgets, Ruby on Rails and tags.

“These kinds of get-togethers help good ideas bubble to the top,” said Provencher, who met his co-founders at YULbiz, a monthly gathering for business bloggers. Through their BarCamp connections, they assembled a team convincing enough to raise $1 million in venture capital from Garage Technology Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC firm that opened a Montreal office. Established industry groups “haven’t clued in to the fact that there’s a vibrant Web community here,” Provencher said. (…)

Praized Media is also mentioned in this list of Montreal networking venues and start-ups.

Yesterday night, portions of an interview with Sylvain Carle (Praized Media’s CTO) and myself were shown on the national news on Radio-Canada, Canada’s French public television network. We talk about Facebook and social media. You can see the results here (in French). I believe a second portion of this feature will be broadcast tonight at 6:25pm on the Montreal news.

Quick announcement to let everyone know Praized Media has now moved to a permanent location in downtown Montreal. We are located on Ste-Catherine Street, right in front of St. James United Church (as you can see from the picture below).

Our new address is:

Praized Media Inc.
460 Ste. Catherine Street West, Suite 402
Montreal, QC, Canada
H3B 1A7

Main phone number: 514-312-3893

Google map: http://tinyurl.com/27hl8z

Today, I celebrate my first year of blogging. When I started, I had an objective of writing at least one blog post per business day. Mission accomplished! I now have written close to 300 blog posts on a variety of local search and/or social media topics. I’ve met many new friends and blogging has become a very important part of my professional life. I currently have 416 RSS subscribers and I think I’ve found my blogging “voice”.

To celebrate, I take a look back at my top 5 blog posts that generated the most comments and trackbacks in the last year:

1) “Robert Scoble is Media“, July 14, 2007. By far my most popular blog post. I stumbled upon a major meme with “I am Media”. Lots of people have talked to me about that one and have told me they now understand Facebook because of it. If any book editors are reading, I think this could be a great business book…

2) “What Micro-Blogging is All About?“, September 13, 2007. Re-reading one of my favorite Douglas Coupland book, I found this excerpt which poetically describes what micro-blogging is potentially all about. Mashing-up Douglas Coupland with Web 2.0 earned me some great reactions.

3) “Google Opens an Office in Montreal“, January 25th, 2007. Major buzz in the Montreal blogosphere as I was the first blogger to discover that announcement in Montreal’s La Presse.

4) “Chronology of a Successful Facebook Group: The “Save Business 2.0″ Example“, July 19, 2007. Chronicling my efforts (with Colin Carmichael) to save Business 2.0 magazine using Facebook. That one was a lot of fun and offered some great learnings. We unfortunately did not save the magazine (I got my last issue today…)

5) “Web 2.0 Startup Praized Media Inc. Secures $1,000,000 in Seed Funding“, September 18, 2007. The announcement of our seed round of financing was welcomed by the local search blogosphere.

I’d like to start my second year of blogging by thanking all my Year 1 readers! Thanks and here’s to another 300 blog posts!

If you’re not a RSS subscriber, click here to add my feed to your favorite reader.

Today is a special day. I’m very happy to announce that our company, Praized Media Inc., has received $1M in seed funding from Garage Ventures Technology Canada. Yes, Praized Media is much more than an industry blog and today, we lift some of the veil (just a bit) covering our stealth initiative. After spending the last year talking about local and social in public, we’ve now taken the plunge and are becoming full-time Internet entrepreneurs.

There’s not much we can tell today. I’ll let Harry’s quote in our press release do the talking: “Praized is a social media company developing software that connects blogs, social networks, and local search in ways never seen before, says CEO Harry Wakefield.” The company is currently operating in stealth mode and expects to launch its product in key target markets early next year. This investment is going to allow us to really grow this business”.

If you want to be part of the beta test, sign up for an invite on our home page.

And if you have what it takes to be our Lead Engineer (Ruby on Rails and much more), we want you on the team!

Finally, don’t worry if you’re an avid reader of the Praized blog, I will still be covering and offering my take on Local 2.0 in the future. It’s not going away!

BTW, if you want to follow the evolution of our company, we’ve created a “Fans of Praized Media” Facebook group that you can join.