The Story of Mashable

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have analysed 2.5 million tweets and used its "Influence-Passivity Algorithm," and found that technology website Mashable is the most influential Twitter account, based on links posted and links retweeted, MediaGuardian reported today.

Richard Ludlow: Mashable makes much more of an effort to publish content specifically designed to attract users through search engines. Examples include their frequent "top 10" lists (http://mashable.com/lists/) and "how-to" articles (http://mashable.com/how-to/). Much of this content has a longer shelf-life than any given tech news article, so over time the cumulative effect of the traffic is very significant.

Chris Sel: Timing and hard work. When Mashable started, there were only 2 tech blogs - Techcrunch and Mashable. That gave Mashable (and Techcrunch) the head start as well as a lot of content to play around with. No other blogs featured startups the way Mashable and TC did and naturally when your company is featured on one of these sites, you are going to share the link to every Tom, Dick and Harry, increasing traffic to Mashable. I should also not downplay Pete's hard work. I remember talking to Pete couple of years back and mentioned how he used to stay up all night due to time difference (Scotland) so that he can push news out and not miss out on any breaking news.

PC: Right, and I think it’s kind of a weakness of the blog format we are tying to increasingly overcome, is that we have this huge archive of content that is incredibly useful, and that we do let people know that exists and that it’s available to them, because a lot of the time with blogs you see the first 10 posts on the front page and you don’t realize that this blog might have 15,000 posts, of which 100’s of them might be on this topic. So, yeah, we also try and direct people to what’s useful from out archives and what’s kind of an interesting resource on that topic.

"Mashable" comes from the "mashups" trend. In recent years, people have been combining pieces of the web in interesting ways; you might want to plot photos from your Flickr account on Google Maps, for instance. You might also want to combine music, videos and text from different services. Whenever you combine parts of the web like this, it's called a "mashup". These days, virtually everything on the web is remixable…Mashable, in other words.

Founded in 2005 as a one-writer blog, Mashable (Mashable) has now grown to include a staff of more than 30 people and has become a well-known source of great content and great events.

In this week's edition of Bloomberg Venture, Cris Valerio talks with Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of social networking blog Mashable, about his business and growth strategy.

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