"But added to historical tradition is another obvious but rarely noted reason for social media’s ongoing durability. It’s in social media’s DNA: that social media collapse the distance between production and consumption."

Stowe Boyd.  If anything could be described as our raison d’etre, it’s the last phrase above from Stowe.  For we believe that in the “collapse” of the distance between producers and consumers lies the future of media growth.  So, we focus on business that enable that intersection of production/consumption (see Tumblr, Twitter, Tipjoy, Goodrec), as well as “washing machine” business that take dirty, unstructured data that necessarily results from this collapse, and cleans it up in a way that provides specific value to publishers, users, or advertisers (see Stocktwits, bit.ly, chartbeat, outside.in).  We also believe in the value of real-time communications, collaboration and media (aka the now web), so we also layer that on top on these two buckets.