Sticking Our Noses In The Blog Networks’ Business
Wednesday, May 24,2006
b5media welcomes a new blog to it’s growing family. MSRA Notes has been added to the Science and Health Channel and will be penned by Christina Jones.
Tangent: She reminds me of Rene Zellweger in Bridget Jones’ Diary. (That’s a compliment.)
Instablogs, who had a rough start in October of 2005, has reached the 20,000 post mark.
To think, they managed to make another 10,000 posts since February of this year — that’s more than 100 posts a day.
The Fine Fools Network started by Paul Scrivens has had its ups and downs. Now, it seems it’s time to let it go.
Scrivs announced that Fine Fools will be auctioned off at the SitePoint Forums.
It’s not a hard thing to do now, but it’s probably something that should have been done a long time ago, but it was hard to let something die that I knew I could make stronger. Of all the projects that I have done in the past I learned the most from this one and I have no regrets.
The details released in the forums are quite telling. The network gets quite a bit of traffic and pageviews, but only brings in roughly $300/month.
I’m sure this would be a sweet project for anyone willing to put the time into monetizing all of the sites to their fullest potential, but with a “buy it now” price of $20,000 (starting bid is $3,000)…
This is definitely an auction to watch, however, from the last question asked at the time of this entry, there may a problem for a potential buyer.
Shiny Media will be bringing news of the World Cup to mobile users via blogs after teaming up with Refresh Mobile.
From June 8, football fans can send a 300 word entry about their ideal World Cup blog to www.germany2006mobizine.com. The 20 best entries will be unveiled online with four winners being chosen by a vote of website visitors. The winning four mobile sports bloggers will have their content produced and published by Refresh Mobile’s Mobizines with the best blog comments also being carried by Shiny Media’s World Cup fanzine Who Ate All The Bratwurst.
Who Ate All The Bratwurst is Shiny Media’s 20th blog and it looks as though it’s been well received.
Now we all know which blogs are officially part of the Diva Blog Network…
The Diva Blog Network, a relatively new blog network with its oldest blog starting December of 2005, has just announced the consolidation of the six blogs within the network.
Let me introduce you to the Diva Blog Network - one blog at a time:
- Diva Dish - an emerging celebrity gossip and entertainment news blog with a brand new Celebrity Gossip Forum. Diva indulges in the sin of celebrity gossip - and has fun doing it! You’ll find news on some of your favorite (and maybe not so favorite) celebs, as well as a weeky gossip snarkfest on Thursdays, as she participates in the ever popular Thursday Thirteen MeMe - with a Diva Twist
- Weigh In - tales of a size 8 wannabe. Here we find a personal journey of weight loss, dieting and fitness coupled with some resources, news and sharing of information through interaction with readers and visitors.
- Uptown Girls is all about shopping, shoes, clothing, handbags, fashion trends and news. Twice a month, Uptown Girls runs interactive reader polls to see what the fashion opinions are out there in the blogosphere.
- American Bride is all about weddings, wedding planning and everything bridal (and groom-al, for that matter!). Planning the special day or know someone who is? Or maybe you had so much fun and great ideas planning your own special day you just want to stop by and share your two cents on the matter?
- Just My Garden is a blog written by a gardening enthusist who is slowly but surely covering all things garden! Personal gardening experiences mixed with useful resources, information and tips make it a vital bookmark for gardeners everywhere!
- Domesticated Diva - another home-focused with the emphasis on home improvement, home repairs, cleaning tips and obscure information about all sorts of do-it-yourself projects and repairs
The Diva Blog Network is not a blog network in the traditional sense. According to their site, there’s no revenue sharing or blog applicant requests. They’re just there and blogging.
Tuesday, May 23,2006
You may have realized it, or not, but the Blog Network News website isn’t abandoned and I am not dead. It seemed that way for a while considering there haven’t been any posts made.
Here’s a quick update for you, I was hired on another blog project and didn’t have the time to maintain this blog. As that project comes to an end, I will be publishing more content here.
Blog Network News will also have another blogger coming on shortly. Next month if all goes as planned. She’s a terse author with a style that should complement my, sometimes verbose, commentary.
This is old news, but I finally decided to stop holding my tongue after seeing all the feathers flying.
Just over a week ago, the TechCrunch website was kidnapped and is currently being held hostage by leprechauns. Oh, wait, the design was intentional.
News of the redesign quickly spread through the blogosphere and suddenly, everyone had an opinion. Mike Rundle of BusinessLogs doesn’t like the redesign. Neither do I, but it really doesn’t matter. N@W tries to explain why it doesn’t matter what people like Mike or myself think of the redesign, but it tapers off into some unorganized diatribe aimed at Mike Rundle.
I’ll sum up what N@W said in one sentence: As long as the website works and meets the requirements of the target audience, it doesn’t really matter what designers or other people who aren’tthe target audience think.
Agreed. To a degree, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Since I have the luxury of not knowing Michael Arrington or Rachel Cunliffe personally, the following advice will be as an unbiased third party.
Watching this entire scenario unfold is like watching a presidential election. You’re either on the far left — love Rachel and think Michael Arrington’s an ass, or on the far right — love Michael and think Rachel’s a flake. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground, except for Darren trying to be impartial.
Looking over the entire situation again, both Michael and Rachel behaved like asses (plural).
Michael, you were wrong for posting the screen shot from another designer and proclaiming to the world that you thought it was cool and that you wanted to steal bits from it. Sure, you didn’t slam Rachel’s work on the redesign and yes, it’s true that you even praised her work in previous entries, but you implied that you were not 100% satisfied with the quality of Rachel’s work with that single entry. What you should have done is take the bits you liked to Rachel and discussed the changes you’d like to make privately with her. After that, feel free to roll out those changes and offer your eternal debt of gratitude to the leech who sent the design to you. Instead, you post a shill of an explanation?
Rachel, you may have had every right to quit the TechCrunch project, but you come off looking flaky, unprofessional and hypersensitive. You may be a great designer, but if you can’t handle yourself professionally and take the high road, people will not want to work with you. Firing a client should be done with finesse, and not a blog entry penned in the heat of the moment. Couldn’t you at least wait 24 hours for Michael to actually read the e-mail and respond?
I’ll finish up by stating that I don’t know the whole story. No one does except Michael and Rachel. All I have to go by are the speculations floating around online and the comments made by both Michael and Rachel on their blogs.
When, exactly, did the blogosphere revert back to grade school?
The Blog Spot Network, sporting the nifty “World’s Largest Blog Network Portfolio” tag line, will be up for sale later this month.
The Blog Spot Network of more than 240 Blog Portals will be offered for sale on May 30, 2006.
The Blog Spot Portfolio includes:
Industry Specific Blog Portals
City Specific Blog Portals
City Specific News Blog Portals
Tourism Blog PortalsFor more information:
portfolio@blogspotnetwork.com
If you’re in the market for a blog network with 240 blogs, you may want to jump on this, but don’t overlook doing due diligence.
Thursday, October 6,2005
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.
Work in progress that it is, Blog Network News is online and ready to start obsessing over blog networks and what they’re doing.
What better way to enter the blogging scene than to report the news that’s been happening while we’ve been trying to whip this site into shape, aesthetically.
Before we even finished adding the blog networks to our blogroll we were saying good-bye to Webby Media, but don’t fret, true to form another blog network was launched seemingly to fill the void.
Jason Calacanis has confirmed that the rumours floating around are, indeed, true. Weblogs, Inc has been sold to AOL (yes, America Online - the internet service provider) for $25 million dollars. I can’t be mad at him though, $25 million dollars can buy a lot of blogs.
Apparently, Verisign felt left out in the cold so it purchased Weblogs.com for an estimated $2 million. Not quite $25 million, but it can still buy a lot of blogs.
And now that we seem to be somewhat caught up with the news going on out there, we can actually collect our thoughts and start blogging.