madKast Getting Mentioned in the Blogosphere!

I thought I'd take a brief moment to do a little round-up of blogs and bloggers who've mentioned madKast recently. Thankfully, all of the mentions are positive! We love it when bloggers write about us, since it provides a great avenue of feedback for us. Below is a partial list of some of the recent comments in the blogosphere about madKast.

• Rand Fish, on the popular search engine optimization blog -- SEOMoz -- called madKast "not to be missed" and said that he found it "remarkably useful."
• Bob Stumpel, on Everything 2.0 mentioned madKast as providing a useful "one click share widget and analytics for bloggers"
• Sources and Methods mentioned madKast as "the good people who make it easy to share [our] posts; they also mentioned our previous endeavour, Zemble, as an easy way to send text messages to individuals or groups
• Tara, from Lijit, talked about madKast's presence at Blog World Expo, calling us "another useful blogging tool from a Boulder start-up" and mentioning the fact that I am "organizing the upcoming Evangicamp and [that she] couldn't be more excited."
• Finally, Eric Olsen, mentioned madKast, saying that we "let the reader quickly and easily share [his] posts in a number of different ways; he added, "the install is quick and painless and I would suggest giving it a try if you have a blog."
  

Thanks to the blogs and bloggers who've mentioned madKast recently! We're happy to hear that you're finding madKast useful and easy to install and use.

As always, please send any feedback -- positive or negative -- to feedback [at] madkast.com!

Happy Blogging!

Reflecting on BlogWorld Expo

Now that I've had almost a week to "recover" from Vegas, I think it's appropriate to jot down some musings from the Blog World & New Media Expo that madKast attended.

We found it an excellent networking experience as well as a great glimpse into the current status of the blogosphere. The booths we stopped by and people we talked to gave us an excellent window into what bloggers are looking for (including the importance of blog analytics and ad revenue). Since we are moving in the direction of having madKast be the one-stop-shop for turbocharging your blog (sharing, analytics, ads, etc.), this was great for us to hear.

We also attended several interesting and informative panel discussions; one that stood out for me was Raising Capital for Your New Media Business with Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dan Rua, and others.

It was also a pleasure to meet new people in emerging startups like ours. In particular, I enjoyed talking to Scott from Blogcosm. The premise of his site is that, while there's no shortage of blogging about blogs (meta-blogging?), no one site does a great job of assembling all of the data and putting it in context; I would agree him and look forward to seeing what Blogcosm rolls out in the coming weeks and months.

I also enjoyed meeting and talking to Dante from 7Search about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how it relates to blogging. It was good to meet Jalali and Israel from Yovia, as well.

One of the highlights of the trip was drinking sake at Nobu with Ari Newman from Filtrbox, Josh Morgan from Intense Debate, the Lijit girls, Tim Wolters from Collective Intellect, Brad Feld and David Cohen.

So, all in all a great few days in Vegas for madKast and affirmation that the directions we intend to take madKast are ones that will appeal to a wide cross section of the blogosphere.

madKast Grows by 50 Percent!

I am delighted to announce that in the past week, madKast has grown from 4 full time employees (Johann, Doug, Tony and myself) to a total of 6 full time employees with the addition of two awesome new software engineers: Alex Grach and Jon Legendre.

Jon and Alex will be instrumental in helping us build madKast into a robust and multi-faceted company over the coming months. We have lots of stellar ideas for new and exciting directions we'd like to take madKast in and now adding two people on the technical side of things will immensely help this effort. In fact, stay tuned because we are going to have big news in the next couple of weeks. I'll give you a hint, think: world's best blog analytics.

Alex describes himself as a 10-year Boulder local who moved out here for the "music and mountains." Upon locating to Boulder, Alex went back to school and received a B.S. in Computer Science from CU Boulder.

Jon, like Alex, moved to Colorado 7 years ago and attended the Metropolitan State College in Denver, where received a B.S. in Computer Science. He spent the last three years working at a video and audio analytics company doing both software development and business analysis. He is married, and he and his wife, Summer, are expecting their first child in March. He adds that they have a "very naughty cat named Milo."

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our two newest madKast members. We're so glad to have them working with us!

Evangelism Brainstorming Sessions Rock!

As the Evangelist for madKast, I am always looking for new ways to promote madKast, reach out to bloggers, and keep our current users happy. Last night I had the pleasure of grabbing a bite to eat with Lijit's rockstar Evangelist, Tara.

It was interesting to learn that she, like me, had almost no previous experience in tech evangelism. She used to work as a teacher and in customer support; I used to work as a meteorologist. But we both agreed that our previous backgrounds outside of the tech space actually helps us communicate better about our respective companies' products since we approach them much as the lay person we're communicating with would.

We also talked a lot about our specific evangelism strategies. The bottom line is that as evangelists, we need to be in constant communication with our users. For instance, I e-mail every person who installs madKast thanking them and asking whether they have any questions, comments or feedback. When someone uninstalls madKast, I also e-mail then, asking why they removed it and what we can do better. Through this interaction with end users we can constantly try to improve our share widget and better cater to blogger's needs.

Tara also alerted me to several upcoming local blogging meetups, including The Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash and the Front Range Blogger Meetup. I, and Tara, will surely be attending both.

Finally, and something that's quite exciting to me, Tara and I discussed our joint desire to initiate some sort of local "Evangicamp," as Tara called it. We think it would be very beneficial to, on a monthly basis, have evangelists at various local startups (madKast, Lijit, Fuser, me.dium, etc.) meetup to throw around ideas and tips about how each of us can better promote our companies' products.

If you are an evangelist in a local tech startup, and would like to be included in the "Evangicamp" we're looking to start, please contact me at josh AT madkast DOT com!