Welcome to Crowd Around

I first discovered the scale and potential of the web while at university.  In a crude advertising experiment I created online billboard that overlayed ads onto a picture of the world map.  At first the site wallowed in anonymity. But a few press releases later and site traffic surged to over 150,000 unique visitors a day. TV, print and online journalists started calling and money started flowing in.  The site made more than US $10,000 in a week.

A month later the site was dead. The only visitors were an army of search engine bots and crawlers and no amount of marketing revived any interest in the site.

While in hindsight the venture was pretty naïve, it inspired me to start a web company. Since then I have launched several ventures and learned a tremendous amount about the web, running startup companies and turning ideas into products. In particular I have developed an interest in crowdsourcing and the social web – the two topics I plan to write about in this blog.

Social media has transformed the web and enabled crowdsourcing to transform entire industries.  In my role as a director of Careerworms I am an active participant in this transformation. In this blog I plan to write about the insights, trends, products and companies I come across in my day to day involvement with Careerworms.

So if you share an interest in startups, crowdsourcing and social media then you’ll enjoy Crowd Around. Go ahead and subscribe so I know you’re listening!

The earth is on sale - online advertising billboard