Friday the 13th turned out to be a lucky day for those of us able to attend the launch party for Om Malik’s new initiative, FoundREAD.

More than 100 of the technology industry’s best and brightest assembled at this invitation-only event. The only qualifications: being on GigaOM’s radar and being a founder.

The attendees ranged from established founders such as Michael Arrington, Bram Cohen, David Sifry and Kevin Rose, to up-and-comers such as Tom Arnold of TerraPass, Michael Tippett of NowPublic, and Gina Bianchini of Ning.

Lasting images from the evening? Ted Shelton sporting his new Technorati t-shirt, and a beautiful arrangement of Moo cards customized for every attendee.

Equal parts blog and community, FoundREAD is described as “a shared resource, where anyone can contribute, either through their posts, or experiences or comments. You can choose to contribute freely or anonymously. Just like a GPS system helps us drive through a maze of freeways, the founders and entrepreneurs help their peers navigate the twisted, confusing roads of company building.”

Interestingly, if there was a theme of the evening, I’d have to say it was humility. In Om’s remarks on Friday, and in earlier conversations I’ve had with him, he willingly admits to having a more substantial empathy for entrepreneurs now that he is running a business, and not just reporting on them.

Even the entry form to the event required providing a lesson learned which were projected (but not attributed) to the entire crowd. My favorite had to be the story of the unknown exec caught singing the U2 catalog at the top of his/her lungs, all the while unaware that their business partners parents where in the next room.

This is the second event in recent months that I’ve had the pleasure to attend (Guidewire Group’s Fall Leadership Forum was the other) where company leaders and founders discussed the inner dealings of company-building. From a PR perspective, it’s amazing to see company executives let their guards down, and ask other industry leaders for advice. Guidewire’s event was closed to the press, and only the GigaOM gang was present on Friday.

To emphasize that there wasn’t too much humility involved, the gig was held at the swanky new barber shop (really!), Mr. Guests were treated to manicures, massages, shaves and shoe shines. (FYI, my shoes still look great!) Champagne, cocktails and nosh were served with aplomb and a sparkle by the friendliest collection of fembots that I’ve seen in a very long time.

- Tim

James Hong of Hot or Not Gets a Trim

The Crowd

The Happy Host

When I first heard about the Webby Awards the first year it came out, I thought it was the biggest joke. Why would anyone want to vote on a website? Was there a universe of 100 people who cared? And how many websites would be that cool anyway? Fast forward to last year when the Webbies were THE coveted party of the moment in NY. I was shocked!

This year I’m proud that a bunch of our clients, past and present, are nominated. Last.fm is currently winning the music category and was also nominated for Best Practices. TheFind is up for best retail site and Index Ventures portfolio company Spotrunner has been nominated in the Business Service category. Yahoo! and Flickr continue to lead in their respective categories.

Congratulations everyone. I’m a convert!

Donna

For eight years Donna has led the Spark team from the Bay Area. We started off in Los Altos (in Chris’ husband’s spare bedroom, if I’m getting the story straight) and then moved to Palo Alto and Menlo Park before arriving at an emptied out bathroom fixture warehouse on 87 McLea Court here in San Francisco. From these locations, we’ve provided global PR support to our clients, working with companies and reporters in places like Japan, Sri Lanka, Estonia, Spain and Finland. The globalization that has drastically changed the face of business has also impacted the way we do PR. The most interesting startup may not be in the Bay Area anymore. And articles or blogs that run online aren’t limited to a specific region or location. Because of this, we decided that it’s time for Spark to formalize its global footprint. Starting in June 2007 we will have an office in London, giving us not only a physical location in Europe, but also exposure to different conversations, ideas, and trends.

The idea is that we’ll be able to work with leading technology companies in the UK, providing them on the ground, in person support, with a direct line into Silicon Valley, a place that still drives much of the technology discussions that happen today. There is so much happening in Europe right now, evidenced by the amazing companies we met with during a trip in February. These companies are changing the way we think about wireless access, defining how our online identities manifest themselves in the real world, and leading the discussion on internet radio and online music communities.

On a personal note, this is a big change for me, not even a year after getting married. But I’m excited about what London has to offer right now. It is a city hitting its stride with a level of excitement that I haven’t seen in years. It feels like it is the right time to be going over there and it means my husband and I have a whole new city to explore. While I am sad to leave San Francisco and have a heavy heart as I plan for this new phase of life, I am looking forward to learning a new city and eventually calling it home.

I’d love to hear from you if you have any tips! Always looking for great restaurants and interesting companies. And, of course, the invitation to come visit is always open!

Rachel

The debate between citizen media and traditional media has been waging for awhile now – will they be friends of foes? With ad dollars and subscriptions on the decline, traditional media needs to find a way to modernize and change formats to accommodate for the tectonic shift in the way news is gathered, distributed and consumed—or face extinction.

It seems with all of the recent mergers and partnerships (NowPublic and the Associated Press, Yahoo! and Reuters and the reorg of Gannett’s USA Today’s site) that friends it might be. And it appears the threat of this new medium is dwindling in the eyes of editors, too. In an interesting survey, Newsroom Barometer by TheEditorsWeblog, only 5% of editors across the globe felt that citizen journalism was a threat, see below:

What best describes your view of online / new media journalism and its role in your community?

That is a quite a change from this new medium’s inception, which at first was seen as a format killer.

Editors are seeing that this citizen, or crowd-sourced media, is useful. It allows for expansive access never achieved before with the traditional press. According to InfoTrends, the proliferation of camera phones is enormous – there will be 860 million by 2009; this up from 178 million shipped in 2004. Traditional media is taking note of how this growth has substantially increased “on-the-street” reporting. For example the AP partnered with NowPublic to further expand its network of over 4,100 contributors from over 97 countries to include NowPublic’s reach: 70,000 contributors from over 140 countries. That’s a nice canvas across the globe.

The impact of citizen journalism is undeniable. It also begs the question of how PR will have to evolve, as well, in this new frontier. Food for thought.

-Amy Burke Bessette

Boy, it has been quite a week for Bambi Francisco, formerly of Marketwatch. I gotta say, I’m a bit sad I won’t see her columns moving forward. I met Bambi when she was an on-air persona for CNNfn in New York back during the bubble. I don’t think there was a client’s Internet-focused concept that didn’t hit her desk. After what I think was six years at CBS MarketWatch, Bambi resigned amid mounting pressure that her coverage was biased. Bambi’s actions definitely blurred the lines. By Dow Jones standards, it was a clear conflict of interest.

Some would say, could we blame her for pushing the envelope? It’s hard not to catch the entrepreneurial fever here in the Bay Area. She even had a blessing from Dow Jones management for her unique arrangement. How is this different from former Mercury News’ venture capital reporter Matt Marshall and the conflict of interest reports for his popular VentureBeat blog. Or blogger Michael Arrington? He, too, received plenty of criticism about conflicts of interest in his tech news blog TechCrunch.

So should we view this as publicly chastising emerging entrepreneurs for mistakes? Or hold them to higher standards as members of the media community?

Regardless as to how you approach this debate, one thing is clear. This line-blurring continues. We have watched more and more journalists evolve into bloggers, analysts and even PR people to take advantage of the frothy advertising environment. It is now harder to tell if the influencer you’re targeting has changed the rules of the game. I guess the rule of this new game is to continue to watch closely.

Diane