Dylan Hunter

Six Apart, the creator of social networking site LiveJournal and maker of blogging applications like Moveable Type, just snagged $12 million in a private round of funding from three firms, sources said last week. The series C round, rumored to include Intel, catapults San Francisco-based Six Apart into the thick of an emerging area of Web-focused investments that go far beyond search-related companies. But so far, public market access to that new industry-comprising companies that house content media properties as well as content tool makers-has been nonexistent.

….In any event, these new blended companies are becoming the talk of the media investment world. "Blogging and social networking are coming together," says one source familiar with companies in the new industry. "We’re coming out of the tech bubble doldrums and the next generation of media is online [content-driven companies]."

In the recent past, online search has been the star of Web-focused investing, but that’s rapidly changing as investors consider what happens after users conduct a search on Google or Yahoo. Typically, they then click on the links retrieved and move on to other sites, which are chockablock with content–the new "it" zone for advertisers.

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