Storify, a social content aggregating site that helps users tell stories by curating social media, today announced its new “front page”. This complete homepage redesign is meant to help readers discover which news is hot or trending by highlighting the following:

• Featured Storify stories
• “Featured topics” linking to more stories
• Top Storify stories
• Top stories from Storify users you subscribe to
• Featured users

Pages on Storify have also been updated to include relevant stories to the current page being viewed. For a peek at the new front page, see below, or head to Storify.com to see the changes for yourself.

For those of you unfamiliar with Storify, check out one of our posts made by utilizing this neat social content tool.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog, BothSidesoftheTable.

tl;dr version:
If you’re an entrepreneur or VC or will be working in this industry - buy this. read it. live it.

When I first started as a startup CEO in 1999 there were no guides on raising venture capital. There were no explanations for all of the confusing details outlined in a term sheet.

Drag along rights? Um, OK. That sounds fine to me. I barely understood it. I asked my lawyer for an explanation. He gave me the human explanation for what the term meant. It sounded logical enough, so I moved on to the next point. Only later did I learn how it could be used to screw me.

Redemption rights? Sounds harmless enough. But know that every term in your term sheet is there as a result of some dispute of the past between shareholders or between shareholders & management.  Founders don’t often think about “primary” stock vs, “fully diluted” stock in terms of voting rights. I never did. VCs always know the voting thresholds and no number in your term sheet is there by accident.

To this day I’m still surprised how few CEOs really understand the differences between 2x liquidation preference and a liquidation preference with a 2x cap. Or what “participating preferred” stock is and how it can screw you. Or what “flat spots” on a cap table are.

If you want to see a quick summary of some terms & a video that walks you through how VCs view a cap table my colleague Kelly Hwang & I produced a quick tutorial here:

In fact, some of the biggest surprises I learned about term sheets were:

1) how the language never says anything remotely like “blocking rights” for terms that VCs want to use to block certain actions of your company. Liquidation preferences never say things like “participating preferred” although we all talk about it. It’s hidden in legal language. Blocking rights and liquidation preferences exist for rational reasons and when used properly are fair. Used egregiously and you’ll have problems later. You need to understand them.
2) how seldom lawyers walk you through the “how can this term be used against you” scenarios or the “pragmatic guide to VC terms” overview. They are helpful, certainly, but often if you don’t know the right questions to ask you’ll be left unawares.
3) VCs are anal about things like voting thresholds, seniority of their stock, protective provisions, etc. – entrepreneurs never seem to focus on anything other than ownership percentage.

It’s no surprise that I got a bit fawked on my first company. There was no guide. No book. VCs were negotiating with asymmetric information. Brad & Jason’s, Venture Deals, aims to change this.

I was significantly wiser by 2005 when I started my second company. Even so, I found myself reading Feld.com every day. I think that’s around the time when Brad & Jason did their famous “term sheet series,” which was the authoritative guide I never had the first time. I read every post several times.

This series inspired me to start my blog as a VC. I also decided never to spend much time on term sheets on my blog because they had already covered it far better than I thought I ever could (Jason was a lawyer with Cooley Godward, one of the top VC law firms, after all).

From there VentureHacks was then launched which gave entrepreneur advice on fund raising from your point of view. It is also a must read.

Now Brad & Jason have raised the bar. They’ve written this comprehensive book called Venture Deals that should be read by anybody dealing with funding of startups – whether you’re a startup CEO, CFO or other founder or whether you work in the ecosystem (lawyer, debt provider, banker, VC). It goes far beyond any other book I’ve seen on the topic in helping you understand the key terms, plan the negotiation and understand the motives of the various actors at the table.

It’s a gem. I think the industry works better when all sides are informed. The fact that Brad so routinely puts out information like this is what earned him the number one spot on this list of VCs that entrepreneurs most respect. And while Jason is less high profile as the ever-present Brad Feld, I think even Brad would acknowledge that when it comes to the knowledge supplied in a book like this, Jason is the man with the deep knowledge.

Let’s get rid of the information asymmetry problem. Every startup needs the knowledge in this book.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog, BothSidesoftheTable.

I recently wrote a post about the open nature of Twitter and why I’m long on its future. I know it’s easier to write “horse race” stories about who’s signing up more users, raising more funding or who’s “hot” lately.

But something more nuanced is at hand that is worth debating – is the future of the Internet & global communications more open or more closed?

I’ve discussed this on StockTwits with Howard Lindzon before, so if you want the longer view check that out.

Twitter is open.

Not just the fact that you Tweet publicly versus privately, but also that they’re open in letting their Tweet stream flow into other products & services. They’re an open feed.

It is open also in the same way that Google was open in its early days. Google started as a place where you came to be taken via links to other people’s websites. I know many of you don’t remember the context, but that was heresy when Google started. Google was duuumb. Sending traffic to other websites, ha!

The rule of thumb then was “stickiness” – remember that? Get people to your website and never let them leave. Clooosed. That’s what AOL was. A “walled garden.”

In a world where it’s easier to judge the immediate value of a business, I know that metrics like “time on site” matter. That’s why Facebook is totally rocking it right now. And they will continue to do so.

I just want to point out that longer-term value is often harder to perceive when a product is still going through its growth stage. So we value things like ”referral traffic” much less. But we know that Twitter has become a major source of referral traffic. As you become a large, open network for referral traffic your long-term strategic value goes up. That’s the Google lesson. As companies like Google grow over time the pendulum swings and even the great link generator Google starts to think maybe it would be good to drive traffic to Google monetized properties. Still, at its core I believe Google’s instincts are open.

No prizes for guess who today’s AOL is. Strategically really well positioned today. Not so open. Brands who build pages there are not building equity in the open Internet, they’re building it in today’s walled garden. The “Internot.” And some tech companies are growing like wildfire helping brands to find more people who “like” them. I’m starting to spend my time evaluating companies that can help brands simultaneously build within the fortress but also maintain social value in the open web.

I think this fortress company knows open will win over time and I think their instincts (or the market) will lead them in the right direction. I’m hoping that HTML5 + mobile will lead them down a more open path. It’s clear to me that other major vendors have less open instincts in their blood.

Openness.

That undervalued attribute in life and in tech. I was on NPR this week with Peter Thiel and Gregory Zuckerman of the WSJ. The topic of social media came up and one dial-in caller lamented the fact that all Silicon Valley was producing was silly social media companies. I understand this sentiment at the surface. But as I pointed out on the show, look deeper at the impact of social media as a tool to organize crowds, hold public debates and spread information in a decentralized way. These are core attributes of a healthy democracy.

We want a media system where you don’t have one powerful leader who controls the media and you also don’t want a system where you have one powerful media who controls the power.

Social Media helps change that. As in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria & Iran. I’ve lived and worked all over the world so I’m not so naïve as to think that social media ensures revolution or even explains it. But person-to-person communications is vital to enabling democracy and you can’t deny the role of media in driving social change. People need to be able to self-organize to resist the temptations of the power to control them.

In the first place, media helps show people in places where they don’t have rights what life can be like in places where the world is more open. If you really want to understand the politics of the Middle East better you can read my favorite book on the topic.

And that brings me to the US election.

By now most people acknowledge that social media helped play a role in candidate Obama’s 2008 election campaign. Ranjit Mathoda said it best in the previously linked NY Times article:

“Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money. But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”

In 2011 it is too early to say what the story of the 2012 election will be, but I’m certain that social media will play a large role in it and that it won’t look like the social media campaigns of 2007-08. I’m sure there will be some Macaca moments, but I’m excited to see what other innovations there will be.

I’m interested in watching initiatives that help make politics more open.

I was recently contacted by an open, Twitter-based jobs company, TweetMyJobs to participate in an online, open discussion about jobs in America and the election.  My interest was piqued.  This morning, 7/19/11 we will hold an open Twitter conference on job creation in America. Please join us. You can dip in for 5 minutes or stay for an hour.

The company claims it’s the first of its sort. I’ll be there to answer anything you have to throw at me regarding job creation.

I will be in a forum with Lou Kerner, the best read social media analyst working on Wall Street. Just use the hashtag #jobs4USp (that way I’ll see it). I’ll be on at 11am PT.

The event’s Tweetnote will be Tim Pawlenty at 9.15am PT, who is a candidate for the Republican party and is the former governor of Minnesota. Questions for him with #jobs4US

TweetMyJobs is a startup that interests me because it uses an open social interest graph to help job seekers and companies find each other. (no, I’m not an investor in the company).  Companies such as Starbucks, McDonalds, IBM, Motorola & SAP are using their platform that is now generating more than 1 million job leads per month according to the company.

This election will be about jobs. And while we in the tech sector don’t feel it acutely (unless you work for Cisco), believe me that much of the country is still in pain. You wouldn’t know employment was a problem if you frequented the restaurants & bars of San Francisco, went shopping for a house in Palo Alto or visited the high-end malls of Los Angeles.

I was glad to see Jon Bischke, one of the most likable guys in Silicon Valley talking about unemployment & the two-speed economy this week on TechCrunch. There’s a real problem with job creation in this country that we need to deal with or even those of us in the tech sector will be affected.

That’s what I plan to talk about at the TweetMyJobs conference. I look forward to debating with all of you in real time. On the open web. Using the Twitter stream. On a website that Twitter probably doesn’t even know exists. Where I’ll drive my Twitter followers. With an open link that refers you there. See you then.

Image credit: Melanie Cook

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog, BothSidesoftheTable.

Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics.

These were good packages in the pre social media world at helping figure out who was driving your traffic.

Today they’re wrong. Terribly wrong. And figuring out who is referring your traffic is a very important part of determining how you allocate your marketing budgets. It is almost certain that Twitter is driving much more of your referrals than you think.

Possibly up to 4x as much.

Jonathan Strauss is the gentleman who did all the number crunching and has written an excellent post on why this is.

I’ve been a user of awe.sm (his product) before I invested in his company (disclosure) so the understatement of Twitter as a referral source is a problem I’ve known about for a long time. Let me give you the simple explanation.

Take a look at the Google Analytics log for BothSidesofTheTable.com for yesterday. I had 8,502 visitors yesterday of which 1,669 are listed as “direct.” Direct traffic are people who typed in my URL directly. They weren’t “referred” by anybody.

But look at the second line. This says “direct – bothsid.es / bothsid.es – twitter” and shows 1,423 referrals. Line 5 says twitter.com / bothsid.es – twitter” for 712 referrals and line 9 shows twitter.com for 170 people.

What does that mean?

awe.sm tracks all of my social media sharing behavior. What awe.sm does is it allows publishers to be able to track each individual share behavior to a level of granularity that no other campaign tracking tool I’m aware of allows.

In ordinary tracking line 2 would have shown up as “direct” traffic and I would have assumed that I was getting a lot more direct traffic than I really was. I would have assumed I was 36% direct and just 10% via Twitter when the reality is that I’m 20% direct and 27% via Twitter.

In fact, the actual Twitter referrals are generally up to 4x as much as people think is happening. And the same is almost certainly the same for most publishers in terms of understating referrals.

This is a problem because publishers might then under invest in Twitter campaigns relative to others because they don’t get “last mile attribution” right.

This happens with other marketing campaigns, too. Often you hear a radio ad, see a TV ad or read an article in a magazine and you type the results into Google to find out more details about the product or service. The problem is that marketers assume that Google drove the traffic. They did not. So you ramp down your TV or print campaigns and suddenly your search volume goes down.

Doh!

Last mile attribution is very important to understand marketing ROI. For the above problem the best company I know of is called Convertro. I’m not an investor in the company. But Jeff Zwelling is one of the most informed people on last-mile attribution with whom I’ve spoken.

And in social media the problem is even worse than I described. Twitter is an amazing generator of social hooks to websites. Some of that comes from Twitter.com or other Twitter clients. But since many other websites pull in Twitter data, including links, you don’t always know who is referring the traffic to you.

Case in point: LinkedIn. Many Tweets are now being sent to LinkedIn and then the publisher assumes that the source of the referral is LinkedIn. In some ways it is because that’s where your user engaged the content. But get rid of the Tweet and you get rid of the referral traffic in the same way as I described the loss when you cancel your TV commercial.

So when I see MG Siegler announce that LinkedIn is sending more traffic to TechCrunch than Twitter – I’m not so sure. I understand why he would think that – Google Analytics tells him so. But I’ll bet a hefty amount of LinkedIn clicks were originated on Twitter. And I’ll bet a whole lot of TechCrunch “direct” traffic is from Twitter.

With proper social media attribution you need to generate a unique URL for EACH share behavior. So if you click on a “Tweet this” button on a website to send an article to your friends, that link needs to be individual to you and to that exact share instance. By making the URL link unique to its point of generation you can then track it better as it spreads to other sites

And importantly when anybody else then shares the link to this site it maps out a “parent / child” link relationship. So if the original Tweet was on Twitter and then somebody builds a “Tweet this” from a product like LinkedIn, you can still tell that the original source of the the story was Twitter. Call it, “last mile social media attribution” and when you’re a brand spending money on products & marketing you need to know this.

They also cookie users so that we can better track who it was that drove viral adoption of campaigns. It could be that one influential person send a Tweet but he doesn’t have a lot of followers. If Ashton Kutcher follows that person and suddenly shares if with his 7 million followers it would start to snowball.

So there you have it. The story is never quite as simple as the data might lead you to believe.

Image courtesy of Fotolia.

Perhaps you noticed that TechCrunch went through a bit of a redesign yesterday. Well, we’re not the only ones undergoing a major facelift this summer. Another site you all know and love will soon look completely different. More importantly, it will soon function much better. It’s a change that will affect millions. Get ready for New Pandora.

Yes, after years of familiarity, Pandora will begin a massive metamorphosis on the web this week. At first, subscribers of the Pandora One service will begin to get access to the new site (on a rolling basis). And over the next several weeks, everyone will. The transformation is pretty stunning — and I mean that entirely in a good way. New Pandora is beautiful. I cannot think of a single thing I like better about the old site.

“I’ve been looking at it for seven years. I was ready to give it a fresh coat of paint,” is how Pandora head of product and CTO, Tom Conrad, sets up the change as we sit down to go over the new site. “We started on it about a year ago. But even earlier than that, we’d been talking about it. There were core navigation problems that needed fixing. At first, we had been talking about more incremental changes, with the site still operating in Flash. But then last summer, it became clear that browsers with full HTML5 capabilities had gained enough support. We realized we could do the full Pandora experience without Flash,” he says.

That’s right, another site once completely reliant on Flash is breaking the addiction.

“Back in 2004, web browsers didn’t natively know how to play music. There was QuickTime, Real Player, and Flash. Flash was so ubiquitous back then — it was an obvious choice,” Conrad says. “Fast forward to last year, everything was changing. I had begun to get worried about site performance on the client side. The backend is fast, but as we kept adding features, everything would slow down for users. If you try to load Pandora right now on the web with a moderate amount of stations, it takes something like 10 seconds. By any reasonable standard, it’s an eternity,” he continues.

Conrad then brings up New Pandora and shows me how quickly it loads compared to the old site. By my count, it takes 2-3 seconds and then music begins playing. It’s an insanely faster onboarding experience.

And the site itself is stunning, yet familiar. “We wanted the experience to be completely fresh. But we didn’t want to force our listeners to completely re-learn the Pandora experience,” he says, noting that while things look much cleaner, the same basic layout remains largely intact. “We keep many of the same progressions from the old site,” he continues. “There are a bunch of great features on the new site, but we continue to be really committed to the idea that Pandora wants to be a simple solution.”

Conrad says that it was also about a year ago, as mobile growth was exploding, that he began to realize that Pandora’s app for the iPhone and iPad were actually closer to the essence of Pandora than the web version was. So it should be no surprise that New Pandora takes its design cues from the iPad app Pandora first built last year (this is similar to the way in which “New Twitter” was influenced by Twitter for iPad).

You’ll notice that along the top of New Pandora, there’s now a music control bar that stays in place as you navigate through the site. This is key. “Content on Pandora is deeper than most people realize. We needed a better way to present it,” Conrad says, showing me that you can now visit any page on Pandora while your music continues to play. And unlike the old site, where elements would open in new windows or clunky Flash overlays, everything is fluidly displayed using HTML. This alone will drastically alter the way many use the service — it will likely be much more of a source of music information to aid discovery.

Then Conrad’s eyes really light up. “Oh! The back button finally works!,” he exclaims. Due to the limitations of Flash, Pandora has long been crippled by natural back button usage in browsers. But not anymore. Want to go back from where you just came? Just click the back button. Again, the music in the top control bar will keep right on playing.

Conrad is also clearly excited by the fact that you can share an actual URL now thanks to the HTML usage. Previously, you had to rely on the share widgets to dynamically create an URL that would work for the Flash-wrapped site.

Lyrics also now expand on the homepage of songs for the first time. And comments finally feel native to the site. “We’ve got millions of people leaving comments on the site, but they never got surfaced. We might see a real explosion,” Conrad says.

“Another core change is the way the station creation process works,” Conrad says, showing me that when you click in the new “Create a New Station” box, a drop-down appears to help you. As you type, you’ll get suggestions for stations to create. These include bands, artists, genres, even comedians. And it’s not just keyword-based. Pandora will dynamically serve you recommendations based on the music genome core, your own voting and listening history, and social elements of the site.

Speaking of social, that’s another key to this revamp. ”I wanted to use the clean sheet of paper as an opportunity to rethink how you interact with music socially,” Conrad says. “We have tried lots of different angles on social over the years. Email, profiles pages, commenting, embeddable widgets for MySpace. Twitter, Facebook — then deeper Facebook integration. It just felt to me that we hadn’t gotten the formula quite right in all those attempts,” he continues.

With New Pandora, the social experience is much more central to the site. Right next to “Now Playing” is your “Music Feed” which shows you the activity for all of your friends on Pandora. Every like, every listen, every comment. It’s a bit like Apple’s Ping, but a Ping people will actually use because it captures what everyone already does on Pandora — again, mainly listen to music and give “thumbs up” ratings.

There is also a “My Profile” area to keep track of what you’ve been doing on Pandora. These profiles have actually existed for some time, but few used them as they were very static and uninteresting. Now they look great and are useful. Clicking on any users’ profile allows you to easily see their activity and to follow them. Their activity will then appear in your “Music Feed” stream.

When you click on the “Share” button for each track on Pandora, you’ll still have the standard options to send to Facebook and Twitter, but the default is now to simply share on Pandora itself. For example, you can share what station you’re listening to and send that right to your music feed for all of your Pandora followers to see. “Pandora now has its own follower/following system,” Conrads notes. “We talked to our listeners and found that the vast majority are very conscious about spamming their friends on their other social networks. They’re more reluctant to share than I would have imagined,” he continues. “My hope is that as people develop followers on Pandora itself, they’ll become more comfortable with sharing in general.”

“I like to think of sharing inside of Instagram as training wheels for the other networks,” Conrad continues. What he means is that people at first are only comfortable sharing images with their contacts within specific apps, but eventually the gain confidence and branch out to share with other social networks.

“What I’m excited about is that this environment is a starting point for us to further evolve the social aspects of music. You can imagine all types of content flowing through our feeds,” Conrad says. “We could port in when artists that you like have new albums, for example,” he says.

Conrad is quick to point out that Pandora still has private profiles as well. If you choose to make your profile private, you’ll basically be invisible to the service at that point, he says.

So what do all of these social endeavors mean for Pandora’s relationship with Facebook? After all, they were one of the initial Open Graph partners — and Facebook is about to launch their own entry into the music space, supposedly with a number of partners. “We’ve had a really, really close working relationship with Facebook for many years. We continue to talk regularly about things. Mark [Zuckerberg] himself has called me with ideas for how to make Pandora more social over the years,” Conrad says. “Clearly, Facebook is the center of the world for social today. We’ll continue to be a part of that.”

That’s all Conrad would give me with regard to Facebook. So I guess we’ll just to wait and see if they’ll be one of the Facebook Music launch partners.

Going back to HTML5, clearly Pandora is making a bet here that this is the future of the web. But that’s an easy bet to make at this point. Still, they’re thinking bigger too. “HTML5 is the only technology that has a shot at being a ubquitous solution across a wide range of computing experiences — tablets, TV, automobiles, etc. We still have along way to go, but it’s possible,” Conrad says.

“I’m not ready to predict our answer for things like tablets will be HTML5 down the road. But it’s nice to have the infrastructure in place,” Conrad notes, while saying there’s still a lot to love about native apps as well. “We’re devoted to delivering the best possible experience.”

And while over half of Pandora’s listeners now come from mobile devices, Conrad notes that the web will always have a place in their heart — it’s where Pandora began. And now it’s where Pandora is evolving.

Again, to be clear, this initial roll out of New Pandora will begin with Pandora One subscribers first. The idea there isn’t to bring in more Pandora One subscribers, Conrad promises. Instead, they simple would like a smaller group to test the new site with (as well as reward those paying members). Pandora is also hard at work to perfect the advertising that will be the a part of the free version of Pandora, which most users use. You can expect this to be largely the same as it is now on the current Pandora site — large ads splashed in the background.

Conrad credits his “incredible engineering team” for pulling off this transition from Flash dependance to HTML5. And while it’s clear that the Flash addiction has been kicked, Conrad notes that they continue to have fall-back Flash elements for browsers not fully HTML5-compliant.

Conrad says the work on New Pandora really touched everyone at the company. There have been well north of 100 people working on this project by this point, he says. Compare that with the 8 to 10 people who built the original site. And remember, they were building this in secret while also going through an IPO!

“It’s the best work we’ve done,” Conrad says simply of New Pandora. Upon using it myself for the past several days, I have to agree. It’s brilliant.

You can find out more about New Pandora here.

Adzerk is in the midst of closing a $650,000 seed round from a mix of institutional and angel investors to build a “next generation” ad serving platform that includes features like real-time reporting, ultra-fast ad serving and network building support.

The company is raising seed capital from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Robert Senoff, Invite Media co-founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, former Accipiter CEO and GM at Microsoft Brian Handly, Halogen Networks’ Peter Horan and Neil Patel.

Adzerk already counts Stack Overflow, StatSheet and a number of ad networks as its customers.

The startup grew from two niche ad networks – The Lounge and Ruby Row – which were run by James Avery, founder of Adzerk and also the co-founder of TekPub, a site devoted to helping developers learn from high-quality screencasts.

The additional capital will be used to enhance the platform to provide publishers and ad networks with more flexibility and control over their ad serving.

Perhaps there’s something to these friend circle/list/groups after all.

As you’ve doubtless heard by now, Google recently launched a social network that revolves around one core idea: people want to share different things with different groups of friends. Of course, it’s an idea that isn’t all that novel — Facebook has allowed users to do just that via its friends lists, which launched years ago. And it’s barely been touched by their userbase.

But is the problem that people don’t care for this selective sharing, or that they simply don’t want to put the effort into building out their friend lists?

A hot new startup called Katango thinks it’s the latter, and it has the answer: it’s going to sort your friends for you, hooking into your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and automatically generating Lists based on your interactions with your friends and a host of other data. You can download their app right here.

The company has some strong credentials behind it — founded a year ago, it’s since raised $2 million led by an investment from the Kleiner Perkins S Fund (Bing Gordon is on Katango’s board). Cofounder and Chairman Yoav Shoham is a professor of computer science at Stanford; the other two cofounders, Michael Munie and Thuc Vu, are Stanford PhD grads. And they recently brought on Yee Lee as VP of Product, who was an early employee at PayPal, Slide, and founder at TipMobile and Crave.

So what exactly is Katango launching?

Today the startup is introducing step one of its plan: an iPhone application, which just went live on the App Store. Fire up the iPhone app, connect it to your Facebook account, and it will generate a handful of Friend lists based on a variety of factors: how closely you’re connected on the social graph, your stated geographies, and, most important, how you’re interacting with each other on Facebook. I haven’t gotten to try this out for myself yet, but if it works as advertised, the lists Katango produces should be surprisingly accurate. VP Product Yee Lee says that there will likely be some errors, but the friends that don’t fit in a given group can be easily flicked away.

Once you’ve created your lists in Katango, you can selectively share content to the friends in those lists in a handful of ways. The app gathers contact information from both your phone’s address book and Facebook. And you go to send a message or photo to a group, the app will send it via email, Facebook message, or push notification, depending on which contact information you have for them, and if they have the Katango app installed themselves.

But the iPhone app launching today is really a proving ground for the technology. Eventually Katango plans to let other services and apps tap into its algorithms, allowing them to integrate its auto-grouping functionality (this wouldn’t be a purely benevolent move, either — Katango would also be able to improve its algorithms from that additional data). And the Katango will eventually be on other platforms, like Android, and a web-based version of the app.

Katango is tackling an immensely challenging problem, but if they get it right, the resulting engine would be invaluable. I asked Lee if the company has gotten any offers from Facebook and Google yet. He chuckled, but did say they’ve talked to a couple of “big names in social”.

Since its inception, StumbleUpon has always been one of the most perfect lean-back apps. Long before anyone even used that term, the StumbleUpon toolbar took various pages on the web and allowed you to quickly jump between them to find new things of interest. This concept seems perfect for a device like the iPad. Unfortunately the app just wasn’t very good. Until today.

StumbleUpon has just launched an entirely redesigned and rebuilt iPad app to finally bring the experience iPad users deserve. “I feel like stumbling is perfect for the iPad — for sitting on the couch. It never took off like we wanted,” founder Garrett Camp says, talking about the first iteration of their app for the iPad (which was built by a contractor). “We decided we were going to re-do it from the ground up. We re-did the interface. It’s much better than before. It’s almost like a black version of Flipboard,” he says.

And that’s a good comparison. Flipboard is often looked at as the pinnacle of media consumption design for the iPad sor far. But it’s mainly concerned with text. StumbleUpon’s app takes on both web pages and things like pictures, and videos, which have become vital parts of the stumbling experience — particularly on mobile devices.

Camp notes that mobile usage of StumbleUpon is soaring. On the iPhone and Android devices, the service is growing 35 percent month to month, he says (compared with 20 percent overall). Since the mobile apps launched last August, a full 10 percent of stumblers now visit that way, he notes. With this new iPad experience, Camp believes they can take tablet usage which is now hovering around 1 percent and at least triple it. Again, it’s a form factor that just seems natural for the service.

The iPad experience now has things like swipe-to-stumble, the ability to flick through content. And the app pre-loads content, meaning they look to see what you’re next stumble will be and they pre-load it so you can flick and see the new content instantly.

But the coolest addition in Camp’s view is the Social Bar. It’s a new gray bar that resides at the top of the app that shows the user who submitted the page you’re on and links to their profile. “Right now, you can’t easily access who liked the page. You might not know who it came from,” Camp says of the mobile apps. They’ve updated the iPad, iPhone, and Android apps to now all have this. “It’s a much more social kind of experience,” he says, noting that in the future, they’ll extend it to including friends’ comments and tweets, etc.

“I think we’ll now fit into other slots of people’s free time,” Camp says of the new iPad experience. “It’s just like the iPhone experience that people love, but it’s so much better on the big screen,” he says.

You can find the new StumbleUpon app for iPad in the App Store here.

A Lion is quickly approaching. OS X Lion — aka OS X 10.7. Some are saying it will hit this week. Other signs point to next week. Either way, it’s coming very soon. How do we know? Apple has just put out a call to developers asking them to submit their OS X Lion apps for the Mac App Store.

The email message (pasted below) notes:

OS X Lion, the eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system, will soon be available to millions of Mac users around the world. Submit your Lion apps for review now so they can be on the Mac App Store when Lion ships this month.

A GM build of Lion was released to developers last week. By most accounts, it is solid and seems ready to go. The hold up now may be Apple’s preparations to ship new MacBook Airs (and perhaps even Mac Pros) alongside the new OS.

One key feature of OS X Lion is the Mac App Store. While the store has been available for OS X Snow Leopard since early this year, it will be fully baked into Lion. That is likely to make it the main way OS X apps are distributed. The fact that Apple is only distributing OS X Lion this way as well (though you apparently can also go to an Apple Store where they can download and install it for you) says all you need to know.

You’d think Apple will need at least a few days to start reviewing these Lion-specific apps from developers. You can be sure they’ll want a range of them ready for launch. Will there be enough time to review a bunch of them before the rumored Thursday launch? We’ll see.

Regardless, “this month” only has 20 days left…

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Tom Anderson, the former President, founder and first friend on MySpace.  You can now find Tom on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+

What kind of content creator are you? Kevin Rose or Fred Wilson?

Blogging or “self-publishing” in any form was supposed to democratize and revolutionize the media industry. Content creators no longer needed mainstream platforms to get their voices heard. Bloggers weren’t beholden to editors, and self-publishers could monetize their content with AdWords or any host of ad network partners.

Three days ago, Kevin Rose posted this on Google+: “Decided to forward http://kevinrose.com to my Google+. G+ gives me more (real-time) feedback and engagement than my blog ever did.” His decision set off a little debate on the pros and cons of doing so.

Kevin’s decision was made rapidly, and may well be reversed when it suits his needs. His sense of G+ went from questioning the value of the service in his first post (since deleted), to musing on how Google+ was more like a blog, to completely switching over on Friday. (I prodded him via text message on Thursday: “dude ur totally going to replace ur blog with Google+”)

Where to host your content is a tricky issue. When blogging started to become a serious endeavor and Internet folks realized they could amass their own audiences, they naturally assumed it was important to own their domain, control their distribution list, maintain the links that have been built up to their content, or in summary, control their own destiny.

And again, this is not just an issue for bloggers. It’s about web presence generally. Remember TV commercials promoting AOL keywords. Would brands have been smarter to promote their own websites? How about musicians using Myspace as their only website? Bands first used MySpace as an adjunct to their website, but gradually more and more of them found maintaining their own website a pain and shut them down entirely. Even major recording artists printed their MySpace URLs (and not their website URLs) on their CD covers. Visit those MySpace URLs now and they’re ghost towns. How about Youtube video channels. Can you imagine a day when Youtube is no longer the best place to find video?

Phrasing the issue in a new way, and perhaps a better way is: Should a content creator go to his audience, or should he expect his audience to come to him?

In the offline world, most writers would never think to publish their own magazine or newspaper. A writer uses the distribution of a larger platform/brand (WSJ, NYT, Time) to get his story and name out. But on the Web, some have argued that technology has changed all that. Has it?

That model of posting everything on your own domain might have worked in the earlier days of the Internet. But who is so interesting that they can get a large enough audience to keep a bookmark and check their website? Technorati doesn’t show a single personal blog in the top 100.

Personal brand (general recognition), site loyalty, and SEO is sort of the slow-build attractor to the old model of self-publishing. Clearly today, a blogger needs a mechanism to notify people of his posts—an email list (still semi-old school), Twitter (short posts leading & luring to the long-form), guests posts on largely trafficked sites (such as TechCrunch), and social networks like Facebook (Fan Pages) and Google+.

In the end, where you make your home depends on why you create content. If you want your little spot on the Internet to share some media or express your musings, then Tumblr or any other platform may be for you. If you’re Mark Suster or Fred Wilson, you may not want the level of engagement something like Google+ could bring. As VCs who hold the perceived keys to the kingdom for many a young entrepreneur, Mark and Fred probably appreciate that people have to do a little work and research to find their respective blogs and interact with them. They’d probably rather limit the discussion than be overwhelmed by the engagement and traffic that posting all their content on G+ would bring.

But more than anything, I think, you need to remain flexible and pay attention to how the Internet is evolving. There’s no one-size fits all strategy, and you’ll probably want to modify your own strategy as it suits your needs. As certain traffic sources (tech blogs, social networks) rise and fall, you may need to ride them up, and transition your audience on the way down. When Tila Tequila (a MySpace user with millions of friends) started to see MySpace was a sinking ship, she jumped to Twitter and later to Facebook. If you’re looking for a certain type of audience, then maybe you need to find where that audience hangs out, bring your content to them, and hopefully—if you want—bring some of them back to your “home base”.

Kevin abandoned his blog in an instant, whereas Fred built up his blog over years and years. What school do you belong to?