Wiki and Blog-Mania

Matt Marshall's Venture Capital column in the Mercury News covers the funding announcement:

Wiki-mania: Money is flowing into Wikis, which are Web sites that let many users read, write and edit with a single page. It's kind of like a Web blog, but for many users at the same time.

Palo Alto's Socialtext, a company that develops Wiki technology, has received more than $500,000 from a number of investors, including Jun Makihara, partner with the Japanese venture firm Neoteny, and the Omidyar Network, a group led by eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar.

Socialtext is trying to sell the Wiki idea to large companies, and it's beginning to make headway. It has 50 customers, including Kodak and bike-maker Zipp. ``Unless you cultivate a social network within your enterprise, sharing of information doesn't happen, and people don't innovate,'' says CEO Ross Mayfield.

Mayfield scored the funding in part after giving away the Socialtext software to the Omidyar Foundation, which used Socialtext to create the new Omidyar Network. Now the help is coming full-circle.

Blogo-mania: Blog start-ups are taking off too. A number of companies, including Feedster, Technorati and DayPop, track assorted blogs. Technorati, which tracks more than 2.4 million blogs, has reportedly raised $6.5 million in a round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company's value was about $12 million, according to tech pundit Om Malik.

One correction to the above is Omidyar Foundation became a paying customer after a 30-day free trial (we have academic community and non-profit pricing available).

We didn't do a formal announcement for many of the same reasons as Dave Sifry (congrats!):

Making a big deal about VC investments is unnecessary, it seems to me. One of the biggest reasons for the dot-com crash was an imbalance of attention: far too much on investments, and far too little on building real businesses with those investments. In a sane and sober business environment, the proper ratio should be completely customer-focused.

But good news should be shared with friends, and I appreciate the kind words from the blogosphere: Om, John, Susan, Thomas, JD, Oliver, Dave, Scoble, David, Jeff, Joi, Mitch, Brian, Rafat, Loic, Sean, Anil, Russell, Jeff, Rick, Christian

How's this for serendipity? The day the news was blogged was the 5th anniversary of Blogger's launch and we closed the round on Friday the 13th, when Google went public and eBay invested in craigslist. On the other hand, and to Sifry's point, the same day a stellar bubble was spotted by Hubble. Planets in alignment, back to school and back to work.