Blog blow-hard, and co-founder of B5Media, Jeremy Wright has stepped down as B5Media CEO. He will be replaced by Elaine Kunda at the helmet of the blog network.

Wright used personal and family life conditions as the main reason for his decision:

I was burned out, unhappy in the work I was doing and looking for something more to life. I’m still exploring what that is, but suffice to say it should involve playing around with projects, family time and consulting… while I figure out what makes me HAPPY

Jeremy Wright published his personal statement over at Ensight his blog. He will now take some time off and start his consulting company Netmobs.

B5Media received more than $2m venture capital and went trough a delicate period last year when blogger fees were reduced.

More information over at The Blog Herald.

Geocities was one of those free internet services that, to my mind, really contributed to the explosive growth of the internet. It was also instrumental for many kids learning how to build their own websites.

But as with all things electronic or internet-based — its existence is fleeting even though its impact was undeniably massive. Yahoo!, who acquired the service in 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock, has announced that it will be closing the web hosting service on October 26, 2009 — and with it another chapter in the still morphing life of the internet.

The sobering note said that by the aforementioned date “your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

“If you’d like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you’ve posted online, please act now by downloading your files or upgrading to Yahoo! Web Hosting.”

It’s really quite sad to see another pioneer shutting down. Geocities, at its height, was THE place to be. AEveryone wanted to build their own websites and Geocities was the place to put them in. Geocities was also considered the first online community (remember those webrings?) — the larval stage of what will eventually become the social networking phenomenon that we see today.

Goodbye, Geocities.

Movable Type recently release version 4.26 of its blog publishing platform.

Version 2.46 is considered an optional performance release that incorporates a number of bug fixes as well as some improvements on its features. This new version is recommended for those who are using Movable Type Enterprise 4.x because of how it improves the search performance for those who have to manage large datasets. It also gives improvements to background publishing and its overall reliability.

We want to let you all know that Movable Type 4.26 is now available. This is an optional performance release which includes bug fixes and feature improvements. The guys at Movable Type are recommending that users only update to 4.6 if the changes documented on the release notes.
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Michael Jackson’s death last Thursday shocked the world. And despite the general consensus that Jackson is a has-been, his death proved that he has made an indelible mark on the world. In fact, the outpouring of sentiments on his death almost bogged down all of the social media sites.

Twitters from thousands of people reporting or giving their opinions on Jackson’s death slowed down the popular micro blogging service to a near crawl. It got so bad that Twitter had to temporarily disable its home page search field. Imagine seeing the number of tweets doubling per second! That could be a record of sorts.

But even non-social media sites were also affected. The web sites of Time Warner, Walt Disney, ABC, CBS and the Los Angeles Times, all experienced slowdowns.

So what is the significance of this? It puts into question how different networks — social media, blog networks, corporate sites — and its respective servers are addressing the growing number of internet users. Is there really a proper scaling strategy to account for the continued explosive growth of the internet, especially when we consider that social media sites are actually enticing more and more people to go online? Heck, even my wife’s 70 year old aunt just opened a Facebook account.