Not sure if you noticed what just happened… Federated Media Publishing (FMP) has made some major changes during the past 12 months. Often, you saw those changes in press releases such as Federated Media Acquires Technology Suite from TextDigger, Federated Media Acquires Foodbuzz, or Federated Media Publishing to Acquire Lijit Networks.

But something more fundamental is at hand. FMP is building a web-scale business to harness the power of the entire independent web. To build such a company requires a focus on technology that is both razor sharp in computational acumen as well as engineered to scale beyond what conventional media companies have built before it.

It started even before last year with the acquisition of semantic technologies from TextDigger, Inc. The TextDigger team built the foundational technology for something we call Conversation Targeting (CT). Unlike conventional context targeting that matches simple keywords or expressions, CT targets the conversations that matter in the independent web, where engagement is high and audiences are enthusiastic (which happens to be where marketers want to be also). The TextDigger team now forms a key piece of our intellectual property strategy around Semantic Technology within FMP. In the coming months, you will see a lot of interesting stuff posted here about the real-world problems of rolling out this kind of technology to hundreds of thousands of publishers and finding the conversations that matter to marketers.

The BigTent and Foodbuzz acquisitions layered in meaningful tools for publishers of all sizes to be discovered and belong to an ecosystem that, again, harnesses the conversations that happen each day in the most meaningful publisher segment, the independent and passionate voices.

Late last year, FMP acquired Lijit Networks – my company. Lijit represented a platform to layer in some of the CT work that had been done in the years before, and to reach far beyond the bounds of normal publisher platforms with hundreds of thousands of publisher sites and what is approaching over 1 billion ad transactions a day.

This focus on razor-sharp targeting technology and web-scale reach has created fun problems to solve. And it is not by accident that we all sit around the technology table at FMP excited to solve them. As the EVP of Technology at FMP, I am excited to build the world’s largest independent media company. As a group, we are excited to talk about the technology-based challenges and solutions that come out of all this!