Jean-Marie Hullot and Gilles Samoun have – today – launched fotopedia.com. It is the culmination of the work done by the fotonauts team over the past 2 years.

fotopedia is both a web site and an optional downloadable client. At launch the web site brings together awesome images covering more than 4500 subjects. It allows those who download the client to create encyclopedia pages for subjects of their choice, or to add images to the already existing encyclopedia pages. Users vote for their favorite images (either on the web site or in the client). Each subject is produced dynamically from the votes of the contributors and the users and will likely change over time.

The subject pages bind to Wikipedia content for the same subject.

Here is one I did earlier, for Manchester United. I am using the embeddable widget feature to put it here on my blog.

fotopedia brings to the Internet the photographic equivalent of what Wikipedia did for text. It is inclusive and community driven. And above all else it is beautiful.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in fotopedia…and I am very biased. But it truly is wonderful.

fotonauts released a new build of the Mac beta today and it got me to playing with it again. It can now access Facebook files and also file system based images. It already had iPhoto, Aperture, Picasa and Flickr.

So, here is a memory jogger. this is an album of RealNames related people and events between 1998 and 2002.

Wow! Mike looks young. And so does Jean-Marie. As for me. I look pretty much the same . But what great memories. And now shared…

Notable faces:

Gené McPherson, Jim Strawbridge, Rob Reid, Griffin Golamco, Barbara Gore, Nicolas Popp, Bruce Ong, Ted West, Amy Katch, Jeff Stephenson, Rob Bowman, Rusty Baker, The DARNAPSNPS Whieboard (our business plan), Mary Burnside, Terri Holbrooke, Alan Marcum, John Dowd, Greg Ott, Yves Arrouye, and many others….

Leave a comment if I missed you out.

Update 2:Rafat has a comment to this post pointing out that by just looking at paidcontent.org I am doing the valuation of ContentNext a disservice. Of course he is quite right. ContentNext has other sites and also events. It is also true to say – although Rafat doesn’t – that valuation has many variables, including the quality of the people etc. Rafat is very good at what he does and he has a great team. So … fair point Rafat.

In my own defense, this post is not intended to be a scientific analysis of valuation. I did a “back of the envelope” comparison. I didn’t take into account any of the other sites that GigaOm has, or TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb. I also didn’t take into account TechCrunch events. All I was saying is, there are probably (by relative comparison of the web sites) some pretty valuable businesses out there right now. Hope you agree with that Rafat.

Update: Kara Swisher is speculating who’s next. Jeff Jarvis is hoping she’s wrong. Now there’s a Techmeme discussion.

The news that Rafat Ali’s ContentNext, owner of PaidContent.org, has been acquired by the UK’s Guardian Media Group got me to thinking. What does this mean for the valuations of other Tech blogs?

I did a quick back of the envelope calculation based on the numbers published and the Compete.com stats for June 2008.

By this math PaidContent.org got something like $139 per unique reader or $56 per visit as an acquisition price. Of course the Compete stats will not be wholly accurate (although Quantcast has Paidcontent.org at only 40,000 unique visitors, so Compete could be high)

Using Compete.com for 4 other significant technology Blog services we get some interesting numbers. TechCrunch should be valued at between $200 and $450m; GigaOm at between $46 and $55m; ReadWriteWeb at between $63 and $65m and Venturebeat between $50 and $53m. I’d say a merger between these 4 would bring them collectively up to about $350-500m even without the synergies and growth prospects of being one. I also looked at the search analytics data from Compete.com. 4,563 keywords for TechCrunch, 585 for GigaOm, 913 for ReadWriteWeb, 581 for Venturebeat and 363 for PaidContent.org Interesting indeed.

I am adding some graphics from Compete.com (all from this URL).

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in TechCrunch – along with Mike Arrington.

I spent a great morning watching Manchester United beat Wigan 2-0 to become English Premier League champions.

After a nail-biting 90 minutes, Chelsea eventually only tied with Bolton 1-1. united were far and away the best team all season. Next up….. United v Chelsea in the European Champions League final – May 21st. Can’t wait.

As the man says – “Unbelieveable”!

Marvel lawyers have sent a cease and desist to TechCrunch on the plans to show Iron Man for $1 a seat – tomorrow in San Francisco.

What – gives? Play the video and see. You can leave video comments here (click on the Seesmic link in the comments)

I’m a big fan of Dave McClure’s approach to product marketing.

Today he gave a talk and led a discussion at Web 2.0 Expo. His slides are below.

Andrew Chen has a good follow up

| View | Upload your own

I just looked at my Wordpress dashboard and noticed that Marc Canter had linked to me. Curious, I clicked to see what Marc (who is always interesting) had been up to.

Wow! What a nice surprise. Not only did he describe me as one of the:

Major players and people to watch and listen to:

which is always great for the ego .

But he has written an awesome series of posts about the emerging trends in data, architecture, and users.

Here is the post I read first, but it is part of a series entitled “How to build the Mesh”.

I won’t repeat Marc’s lengthy discussion here, just to say – go and read it.

Part 1 is Social Graphs and Groups Part 2 is Persistent, Ubiquitous Content Part 3 is Shared Structured Content Servers

Part 4 is on the way.

Marc is not only, together with Chris Messina and Tantek Çelik, a really focused advocate of open, user-centric, web services. He is also a brutally honest, yet nice, guy.

I just got this email from Slideshare:

It is based on a post I did yesterday to earningscast.com You can check it out here: Slideshare Here’s the homepage.

I am getting inundated with requests for more information about Jean-Marie Hullot’s new startup fotonauts. Mike Arrington has a post up on Techcrunch that speculates about the company.

Mike rightly states that I am going to play a role in the company, and also that there is, indeed, a company. The technical team is in Paris as Mike states. I will be remaining in Palo Alto.

Aside from that I cannot say anything at this point. The company will not be announcing any products for a few months. And we will not be pre-announcing what we are doing.

However …. it is awesome and exciting

Earlier today I posted on the edgeio blog the news that the transition of edgeio to its new owners – Looksmart and Vast.com – is complete from my point of view. I continue to believe that edge-published classifieds will one day be a large advertising opportunity, and sooner rather than later.

The edgeio web site will go silent for a while until Looksmart integrates it into their ad platform. Vast.com has already gone live with the real estate assets they acquired.

As for me. i am playing with a few things:

1. I have office space at 654 High in Palo Alto, through 31 August. If you have a pre-funded startup and want help, ding me. I can help.

2. I am playing with vertically specific social media. http://seriouslypolitics.com, http://seriouslywallstreet.com and http://seriouslymedia.com are VERY early implementations of some thinking I am doing about supporting people who are highly focused on specific interests to remove noise and allow higher productivity within their interest area. If this is an area that interests you, again, ping me.

3. I am working with my friend Jean-Marie Hullot again (he and I co-founded RealNames). He and his team in Paris (France) have been working in stealth on an awesome concept for 2 years. Later this year I will help bring it to market. Can’t say any more. but I am in Paris Mon-Thurs, and London Friday this week if anybody wants to get together. My cell is +1-650-704-2674.

4. I am working with a bunch of startups – Spotplex; Real Time Matrix; Snipperoo; AboutUs.org. It is great to work with entrepreneurs on early stage products.

5. I continue to be involved with Mike at TechCrunch. I can’t believe how amazing its growth and influence is. Very exciting! Very Mike!

So that’s my update. I’m on Twitter quite a bit if you want to follow me – http://www.twitter.com/kteare.