Blog Network Watch

b5media launches a Wedding Blog

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b5media has launched a wedding blog – ‘Our One Heart’:

There comes a time in every young blog network’s life when it starts to want to expand its world, put down roots, and find that special someone to settle down with. Thankfully for b5, we have Our One Heart to guide us down the path of love, wedding preparation and even honeymoons.

Written by Christine Gooding, this precocious young thing caught our eye early on, and we’ve been hooked ever since. Dozens of expensive dinners (where we didn’t mind picking up the tab), enough roses to choke a horse and many sweet nothings whispered into each others’ ears haven’t changed that perception one bit.

Originally posted on February 18, 2006 @ 12:09 pm

WIN’s Jason Calacanis has near-death experience

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Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis nearly crashed last week on a plane trip:

Almost died last week. Was flying into Telluride airport on one of those prop planes designed to land at small airports and we got caught in a wind storm.

Telluride’s airport is on a plateau, and it has cliffs on three sides. It has short runways that have hills built in them to help planes stop. America West is one of the few options for getting here.

As we started our decent the airplane started experiencing turbulents–no biggie, I’ve been on hundreds of flights and experience this kind of thing before. However, as we start to get below the caps of the mountains around us the plane started shaking and swaying from side to side. Folks started getting nervous and after about 10 minutes of the plane gyrating folks started heaving and screaming.

Originally posted on February 18, 2006 @ 11:04 pm

YPN sees Downtime

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Many covered an apparant outage on the Yahoo Publisher Network yesterday, Jensense was one of the first to break the story:

The first news of YPN downtime came on Digital Point at 11:20 PM PST Thursday night. WebmasterWorld reported it an hour later. Members on both forums discussed seeing only blank spaces across all YPN sites (including the YPN ads here).

Outage lasted nearly six hours, with some users beginning to report seeing YPN on a limited number of sites at about 5pm PST. However, the ads were soon back to showing white space on all sites for another couple of hours, when ads began to slowly return to sites.

Total downtime was about 12 hours, which will make a significant dent in publisher’s earnings for the day. And as can be expected, some publishers switched out YPN for AdSense.

Originally posted on February 12, 2006 @ 11:30 am

Kicking the Girlfriend

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Just when I think that everyone has said everything that there was to say about yesterday’s 200,000 posts about 9rules, along comes Chartreuse with a little ditty about his ex-girlfriend:

When Paul Scrivens, 9rules CEO, wrote One Content Network Please, I thought it was brilliant.

It made sense to me.

You’re either for us or against us.

Ride or Die.

And I thought the please was a nice touch.

But then I noticed something.

Om Malik of Federated Media Stays

Bryan Veloso of Yopos Network Stays

Ben Beilkamp of BlogMedia Goes.

Girlspoke Salaam.

Obviously the point was to dump people associated with Blog Media/Erati whatever.

He should have just stood up and said that.

What people want in leaders (since he asked) is authenticity.

When you give doublespeak as if you are the President of the United States then you end up looking like The President of the United States.

And nobody wants that.

I’ve said just about everything that I have to say on this whole mess – except for two simple things.

First, if you want to write about BlogMedia or Erati, more power to you. But get your facts straight. My email is matt [at] blogmedia [dot] biz. I’d be happy to answer anything you like. You may not like the answer you get, but you’ll get an answer.

Some folks in this debate / argument / spewstream of the last 24 hours have some issues with their fact checking and instead make assumptions – while those are entertaining to those of us that believe in factual debate, they also make the assumer look like an idiot. Which can also be entertaining to watch.

Moral of the story: Don’t be an idiot, contact me if you need facts.

Second, I’m remiss if i don’t point out two great posts by two former 9rules members. Ben and Chris. Because they chose to work with us, to make something of their own blood, sweat, and tears, to dare to risk it all to create something they believed in, they got booted from 9rules. And hell hath no fury like two entrepreneurs scorned.

Originally posted on February 16, 2006 @ 10:59 pm

Blue Fish adds A Smiling Dog Blog

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A Smiling Dog Blog has joined the Blue Fish Network:

We’re pleased to announce that A Smling Dog Blog has joined the Blue Fish Network.
It’s written by Collette who says:

A Smiling Dog Blog seeks to bring timely and helpful dog news, tips and hints on dog training and dog health, and observations on life with dogs to dog lovers everywhere. Written by a dog lover and sprinkled with the occasional personal “tail”.

It starts our ‘Natural World’ channel.

Originally posted on February 19, 2006 @ 9:28 am

More on 9rules Shrinking

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The 9rules team has this to say on their official blog:

When we started this Network a question that came up a number of times was why we didn’t let any site into the Network. There is strength in numbers right? We didn’t take that approach because we wanted our Network to stand for something and we chose quality content as that one common theme. As we have grown over the last couple of months there have been other issues that we have had to deal with concerning our brand and image and how it affects our memebers and readers that have entered into the equation of how we select a site.

Through all of this we also know that our members have lives and their sites aren’t priority #1. Some sites start to lose some of the qualities that made them members in the first place. Some take a different route with their content, while others just stop posting. It’s called “life” and it happens. However, we understand our members are only helped out by us when our image is strong and the sites within the Network have the qualities that our readers have come to expect.

Yes, what this means is that some sites will be removed from the Network. This is not an easy thing to do at all because I have become good friends/acquaintances with many of the members in the Network. However, this is something that many members have been asking for a while now and an issue I brought up a couple of months ago within the forums so really it’s nothing new. There are also two other new policies (if you wish to use that corporate term) that we are putting in place.

There’s much more on their post including explanations on their new rules/guidelines.

Other commentary on the web – beginning with Tyme White’s Not Too Geeky:

Hello, my name is Tyme White and I am the Community Director of 9rules, Inc. My job is to foster interaction within the Communities, keep the members happy…you get the gist. When I was appointed the position I took it seriously, went into business mode and started interacting with the members but more importantly the readers who read their content. Because I want everyone to read 9rules Communities.

It didn’t take long for me to start noticing some problems and unfortunately receiving complaints. The loudest from readers was sexually explicit adult content being mixed in with non-adult themed content – with no warning. Because I’m not uploading a bunch of email here is the first one I received Jan 24. and the last one I received yesterday. There are more and I received permission to post these minus the email address.

So I mentioned this to Scrivs in January and he said he would deal with it. I suggested perhaps an adult warning on the content. He said he would deal with. I mentioned it again – being dealt with. Rinse and repeat. Fast forward to this weekend. Meme from GirlSpoke made a post in the private forums voicing concerns about significant drops in traffic. I can only imagine how Scrivs felt when he read her comment since he was the one trying to find a way to keep the site in the network.

Tyme’s site also claims that the aforementioned Sex Blog Network is not a 9rules project. The official question: Is it? Or isn’t it?

On a side note, our personal guess is that the Man Blog will be the next to get booted.

Tipsters: Contact us if you are aware of any other sites being booted from 9rules

Originally posted on February 15, 2006 @ 12:58 pm

Chartreuse on the Blog Herald auction

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Chartreuse has a few thoughts on the Blog Herald auction:

The Blog Herald is worth a lot more than $25,000.00. An advertiser just bought a weeks worth of advertisement on the videoblog Rocketboom for $40,000. In that week they will reach about a million people.

At the going price they could have purchased the Blog Herald for that amount, filled it with ads and reach the same audience for a year.

Jeremy Wright and Duncan Riley, though smart technical folks, are failing at the media game: Creating attention and selling stuff.

Read on…

Originally posted on February 13, 2006 @ 10:21 pm