Thursday, October 6,2005
Blogging The Instablog Incident With A Cool Head
I’ve been reading all the press that Instablogs has been receiving because of their late, really late, launch. Instablogs is now realizing just how cruel a mistress the blogosphere can be if you rub her the wrong way.
Paul Scrivens raises a great point when he says Instablogs only launched with 50 domain names, not blogs.
I have to admit that I didn’t expect the Earth to halt rotation because of Instablogs launching, and not surprisingly, it didn’t. But I did want to see those 50 blogs and the quality of content across the network.
By my count, 17 of the 45 (not 50) blogs don’t have a single post on them, 4 blogs only have a single entry, and 2 blogs have less than 3 entries. In my opinion, they’ve had more than enough time to build up the content across all of their blogs, that was something they should have considered before they thought about branding and hype-marketing.
When they said they would be launching 50 blogs I thought it would actually be 50 blogs (thought no one would count?) and each of the blogs would have more than a single entry. But I guess it’s not false advertising because they didn’t say “launching 50 quality blogs.”
While it’s probably not the worst thing that’s happened in blog network history, it ranks up there. This is most likely going to haunt the Instablogs network for a little while, but they can bounce back. One can only hope they find a way to build up the momentum that they lost.
At the end of the day, I am glad they finally launched and I am still pushing for them to get it together and make something big happen with the network.
Technorati Tags: instablogs
October 7th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
Thanks Thorne pointing things out. That shows your concern for us.
In fact, there were a few problems on the technical front: our server went out of action for more than just couple of hours, causing delay in data immigration work. And this, in turn, delayed the whole process.
People are really angry with us and condemning us for the delay, all I can say, things go beyond human control sometimes. We aren`t even able to migarate the whole data, but will do in next few days.
October 7th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
Hi Nandini,
Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comments. I understand that we, as mere humans, can only do so much and sometimes things happen.
The best that we can do is try to anticipate these problems and plan for them. I’m sure you’ve learned some valuable lessons in this launch that you can apply to your network in the future.
I’ll be following the Instablogs story and honestly, I commend you for trying. It’s no easy task to launch so many blogs at once (or even to try).
I’ll be rooting for you because I really want to see more blog networks succeed.
May 24th, 2006 at 11:38 am
[…] Instablogs, who had a rough start in October of 2005, has reached the 20,000 post mark. […]