Fire and Motion I This is a personal e-mail newsletter from Andrew Montalenti, co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly About three years ago, I had just return

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Fire and Motion I

This is a personal e-mail newsletter from Andrew Montalenti, co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly

About three years ago, I had just returned to NYC from Philadelphia, where I had participated in the Dreamit Ventures accelerator program. We had just built the Parse.ly Reader, promising a better news consumption experience: "fresh content with minimal garnish".

In 2010-2011, Parse.ly evolved into a platform for online publishers. Earlier this year, we launched Dash, our flagship editorial analytics product. And Dash is now trusted by editors and writers at top media organizations such as The Atlantic, Mashable, ArsTechnica, and USNews.

Along the way, I've met many people who have provided advice, feedback, wisdom, and criticism of the products I helped build. But to date, I hadn't come up with a unified way of addressing you all with thoughtful updates. That changes today, with Fire and Motion I -- my first e-mail update to everyone I've come across in my startup travels.

As for the name of this newsletter, it comes from Joel Spolsky. In 2002 (when I was a freshman at NYU), he wrote a post called Fire and Motion. In it, he wrote "Fire and Motion, for small companies like mine, means two things. You have to have time on your side, and you have to move forward every day. Sooner or later you will win."

Six years out of college and three years into Parse.ly, I know exactly what he means.

Joel also wrote an excellent follow-up piece in 2008 for Inc Magazine. In it, he focused on the notion of making forward motion while forcing your competition to run for cover. Sachin (my co-founder) and I regularly re-read this piece as a reminder of how to break into markets held by stagnant incumbents.

Fire and Motion. I hope you'll find this email's contents thought-provoking, informative, and worthy of your time. And, of course, if it isn't, feel free to unsubscribe.

Newsblur: an intelligent, open source reader

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At Parse.ly, we're proud of our company vision: to make online publishing data-driven and profitable.

We're also proud of our product and team. We work hard every day to improve the experience of every online editor and writer. GigaOM said we are "revolutionizing web publishing", and we agree.

But, the original need for an intelligent news reader for our infoglut age -- the original impetus for Parse.ly's existence -- has never gone away.

I therefore wanted to share what I consider to be the appropriate replacement for the personalized consumer news reading tool we originally launched out of Dreamit Ventures.

I first came across NewsBlur back in 2010. Samuel Clay was working in the NYTimes office, nearby Parse.ly's office in midtown. He was hacking on DocumentCloud, contributing to important JavaScript projects like Backbone, Underscore, and VisualSearch. In his spare time (on his subway ride commutes, in fact!), he was hacking on NewsBlur, developing the service in the open on Github.

As I wrote on HackerNews during NewsBlur's launch: "Not only is Samuel an amazing developer, but he is also the perfect person to build the news reader of the future."

I can say confidently that NewsBlur gets everything right that we got wrong in our original design.

I now use NewsBlur as my primary reader and I am a paying customer. I have also evangelized it to my friends. I am excited that Samuel is now full-time on this project -- and has even formed a company around it -- so he can make it one of the best pieces of software on the web for news junkies like me.

So, if you have been waiting for years for an intelligent news reading experience, let me tell you -- the wait is over. Just go sign up for NewsBlur and you'll be set on the right path. It's also a great time to join since NewsBlur now has an iPad app to go with its existing iPhone and Android apps.

Parse.ly API and vision

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As reported in FolioMag, Parse.ly has officially launched the v2 API, which is used by ArsTechncia and other publishers for powering on-site features such as real-time pageview data, contextual recommendations, and personalization.

In the past several months, the team has put together a stunning array of features, including real-time traffic tracking for the "past 24 hour" period, social share count tracking for four major social networks, and improved support for metadata standards such as Facebook OpenGraph, Schema.org, and rNews. This has helped us expand our reach to hundreds of top-1,000 and top-10,000 sites. We are now tracking over 2.5 billion pageviews a month, across millions of URLs.

But we're only just getting started. In the coming months, we plan to lay out a broad vision for how we will shift online publishing into an age of data-driven profitability. This will involve connecting various ends of the content ecosystem in ways never before seen by the market. I look forward to your feedback as this vision unfolds.

My personal excitement about our potential impact on the industry has been keeping me up at night and fueling some awesome hack-and-brainstorm sessions.

My old backpack

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I recently turned 28. On my birthday, I wrote a reflection on my backpack, which I've had for ten years.

At the tender age of 18, I coveted few things. But among the web designers and programmers whose blogs I read regularly and whom I looked up to, this backpack was the ultimate in durability and functionality.

Continue reading to learn how this backpack reminded me that the good things in life are built to last.

A final reflection: On Being Nothing

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Brian Jay Stanley recently wrote a beautiful reflection on the individual's need to be noticed by others.

Upon reflection, a desire for recognition seems irrational. Since we live in our own minds, why should we care what thoughts are in the minds of others? Is this not like a Canadian fretting about the weather in Mexico? How to explain this need for notice is debatable. Are we so doubtful of our worth that others must attest to it? Conversely, are we so certain of our worth that others must bow down to it?

Mr. Stanley's reflection came at quite the time, right as I was putting together my first e-mail newsletter. Why, in this age of the social web -- where self-aggrandizement and attention-whoring have become everyday afflictions -- should you pay attention to an e-mail newsletter like this one? And why should I seek to spread any of my ideas around?

The answer, I hope, is self-evident. Sometimes, you need to fire without thinking. Other times, you need to aim. Reading, writing, and reflecting -- this is how we aim.

Thanks for making it all the way through this email. And remember -- Fire and Motion. It only takes a little progress every day to add up to something big. Let's keep moving forward,

Andrew Montalenti
http://parse.ly
http://pixelmonkey.org
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