Finishing up a great week here at ThePort.  We definitely have momentum at our back and numerous deployments in front of us.

Some newspaper companies are finally "getting" social media and now understand the transformative nature it can have on their industry.  Our good friends at Lee Enterprises fit that bill.  They were just in for a visit and we have some great stuff about to launch with them.  I am a firm believer that newspaper companies have many valuable assets that can be dramatically leveraged in the digital world.  At some point, the discussion will shift from a focus on the decline of print circulation and the loss of big print advertising revenues to the newly constructed digital business model with which many newspaper companies are reinventing themselves.  A key issue is figuring out when that shift will occur.  We are clearly not there yet, but maybe the time is not that far away.

Next week I head to NYC for Advertising 2.0 and a whole host of meeting with publishers and investors.  June is a great time to be in New York and I look forward to a fun, productive trip.

A continuous flurry of interesting articles on the divergence between company valuations and real money making performance in the social media arena.  I obviously follow this closely as CEO of a leading white-label social media company. 

The Financial Times kicked off this week's discussion with a story entitled, "Web 2.0 fails to produce cash".  Leading venture investors predict a shake-out , but many reserve judgement saying Silicon Valley is usually right and usually early.

Bernard Lunn over at Read/WriteWeb goes into more detail about proposed business models.  His interesting analysis of a walled garden model vs. a utility model gives many consumer facing social media sites and apps creators much to consider.

Being in the social media "infrastructure" or tools business, ThePort has a clearly defined business model that should produce significant cash, recurring revenues, "SaaS" margins and significant room for product innovation.  But a model like this doesn't have the same sex appeal to venture investors as some free models including Automattic, the parent of the free, open source blog publishing system Word Press which has gained huge market share, Ning, the free, self-service social networking platform which too has strong market share and consumer-facing social networking sites.  Now Word Press and Ning may very well be able to convert their millions of users into sustainable revenue streams and walled garden social networking sites may drive extremely high CPM rates at some point off of a large traffic base, but these are interesting home-run bets.  ThePort's business model is more conservative I guess, but very attractive especially at scale.

I plan to write more on this subject in the weeks' ahead and articulate some of the significant opportunities that we see. 

Good cover story this past Memorial Day weekend in BW on Social Media.  Basically, the BW reporters went back to their original 2005 reporting on this new phenononon, "Blogs", and expanded the scope to include all things social media.  The current article delves into somewhat newer areas like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Wikipedia, but even this is somewhat old thinking.  And, surprise, surprise, just like Fast Company and others, they even gave Ning a free two-page feature (ad) (Marc and Gina are definitely the social media couple of the year).

The article is good for ThePort in many ways,  It talks about how businesses are starting to see Social Media and the need for social media implementation.  Jeff Jarvis, a longtime blogger and former mainstream media member, predicts in three years BW's cover will not be about blogs or tools but about companies as communities.  An interesting concept, and hopefully ThePort will be "powering" many of these dynamic online communities.