John Battelle is the founder and Chair of Federated Media Publishing. He is one of the original founders of Wired magazine, founded The Industry Standard magazine, and is a founder and Executive Producer of the Web 2.0 conference. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Anthropology and a Master's in Journalism. Visit the company page here.

What is Federated Media, and how did the company get started?

The company got started out of a need that I had from my own site Searchblog and then later helping my friend at BoingBoing run their site. I was in the middle of writing a book on search and thinking about how search was changing the world of media, and making it very easy for high quality content to gather an audience. BoingBoing had over half a million readers at the time I started working with them. Searchblog had probably well in the tens of thousands. Gathering those kinds of audience was very difficult to traditional media, and also very expensive, but I noticed that these blogs had been gathering audiences with no cost whatsoever simply because people, through word of mouth and through search, had been finding the sites.

It struck me that the economics of the media business were changing very dramatically, and allowing writers, artists, and content producers to access audiences in ways that allowed them to create true publications. However, there was a commercial element missing. They didn't have a steady revenue stream that would have supported their life: their mortgage, their kids, whatever. They couldn't make enough money just through Google Adsense. It struck me that high quality advertisers would like to be involved in these high quality conversations, and the way to do it was to bring high quality sites together in a federation, so that advertisers could access them easily, so that was the genesis of Federated media. It was in 2004 when I figured all this out.

Currently, how large is the company in terms of employees, authors, and advertisers?

We have about 25 people right now. We have 90 or 95 authors in our network. We also have hundreds of advertisers. We are not trying to be a huge network the way most advertising networks are. We're trying to be a very high quality one, and we try to do things by conversations between advertisers and content produces and audiences, as opposed to having the biggest network or most sophisticated algorithm.

How often do you receive new requests to join Federated Media?

We get about 10 a day.

Is there a minimum requirement for people interested?

Well, certainly it makes it a lot easier to have enough pageviews to have the basic economic of the Internet. Advertisers like to reach a certain scale of audience, but it doesn't have to be that large. We have sites that have a hundred thousand pageviews a month, and we have sites that have tens of millions of pageviews a month. We don't focus so much on size once you get past a certain minimum threshold, but we do focus on quality.

What software do Federated Media sites use?

FM is completely agnostic about that. We don't tell our authors what to do in any way. They get to choose what platform they want to use, what ads they want to run, how to design their site, and what they want to write about. That's why we focus on quality, because we figure people who really want to make a living at this are going to be very serious about it, and they're going to make the right choices. They don't work for us; we're their partners.

That said, the three top software packages that are used by our authors are Wordpress, MovableType, and Drupal or Scoop.

What do great blogs have in common?

All the great blogs, or community driven sites like Newsvine or Digg, have at their core a passionate conversation among a community that cares about the topic that the site is covering. Great site authors are very good at leading this conversations and being leaders of those communities. The most important thing is having something to say, adding to the community, and being in a relationship with that community, where the community feels like its respected and honored. There's value being exchanged.

What are some things a blogger can do to attract advertisers, and what are the best options for generating revenue?

Advertisers are attracted to robust and passionate conversations about topics that they're interested in. That's the one thing that I think people have started to forget. Advertisers are people too, and they're interested in many of the same things that we're all interested in. They like to support conversations that fit their brand. The key thing is to have high quality content and a high quality community. That attracts advertisers more than anything else.

There's lots of ways to make money from your site, but obviously the more traffic you have, and the higher quality is, the more money you'll make. There certainly is no silver bullet. At FM, we work with a relatively small number of authors, but we work very, very hard at it. There's no easy way.

What are some common mistakes you see bloggers making these days?

One of the most typical mistakes is to not post frequently enough. One of the key things of blogging is blogging a lot and having something to say. Beyond that, you can get into some bad territory by getting involved in grey hat schemes like link farms, link swapping, and marketing ploys where you don't tell your audiences that you're taking part in some form of marketing. You need to keep the integrity high so you can keep the trust of your audience. I think a lot of bloggers need to keep that in mind.

Do you think it will be easier or harder to blog professionally in a few years?

I think it will be easier on many levels. Certainly, easier to start and gain access to the tools. However, I don't think blogging tools, platforms, and ecosystems create any more talent than there already is. It just makes it easier for talent to be exposed to the world and discovered.

What are some challenges that you've experienced since starting Federated Media?

Working with the folks that we have selected to be in the network has been a learning experience, because they're all very talented individuals and they require a certain level of handling with care. We spend a lot of time talking with authors, helping them understand the publishing and media business, taking care of issues that come up on a regular basis with their sites and conversations with advertisers. I did not expect to be as much in what might be called the talent business. I would say FM is very much in that business. I sort of though, "We'll put these authors together and of course we would take care of them," but I did not understand the extent to which it's our responsibility to ensure that the authors are taken care of and that their needs are met. It's kinda funny that I didn't realize that, because I'm an author. Sometimes the thing you don't know is right in front of you.

One of the key differentiators of FM's business, is our ability to work with and manage the relationship with authors. This is something that's very different than traditional media models where you hire and fire your content producers on a whim. These people work for themselves, and it's an honor for them to be associated with us. It's not that I can tell them what to do, and that change in relationship really means that we have to treat them much more like talent - like stars so to speak. That's unique.

Another pleasant surprise is the kind of open embrace from the advertising community that we have found in the last year. I thought it would be a lot more difficult to break down walls in the marketing world to help them understand why marketing in these community driven sites is a good idea. I was really pleased to see how the advertising community wants to join this conversation.

Are your advertisers equally interested in each of your federations, or are some more popular than others?

The more popular ones are the ones that have been around longer, because it takes time for advertisers to get used to new areas. The most popular is technology, followed by business & marketing and parenting, media entertainment, then some of our newer ones like automobiles. I wouldn't say we're mature enough yet as a business to know whether or not one or the other is more popular.