Blogger Andy Ostroy has a piece in yesterday’s ABCNews site’s politics section entitled Al Gore will not only run, but he can and will win. Now, given how far ahead Senator Barack Obama is in terms of stories submitted to Digg, the social networking engine, and its new US Elections 2008 section, this should prove very interesting to watch and see whether Ostroy is right.

If he is, can we conclude that winning an Oscar for the film Inconvenient Truth and then winning the Presidency means that old media is more powerful than new media, particularly the blogosphere? I’m not sure that’d be a fair assessment, but it’s still true that more people in the United States watch TV than use the Internet for any great length of time.

However, research from late last year shows that kids in the late pre-teens and early teens are ignoring TV for the Internet. Maybe, when they’re old enough to vote, the key to gaining the Presidency will rely on a proper new media campaign. For 2008, however, that may not be true, no matter how popular Digg’s Elections 2008 section becomes. Which might mean that Ostroy will be right, that Americans will vote in a President who has proven his/her ability to get things done.

Originally posted on February 28, 2007 @ 6:44 pm

Loren Feldman notes at 1938media that The Blogging Times is no more, replaced by a blank WordPress template with no content. The story is big enough news that it even got a run at Valleywag.

There’s no official word yet on why the site shut, but it’s public knowledge that Minic Rivera had left the site a couple of weeks back. Certainly deleting such as rich history of posts is a very strange move, after all the site was well indexed in Google, a status that will change very quickly with the content removed.

I’ve seen a lot of these sites come and go over the years, sites such as Blogosphere News and others with names I can’t recall now. In the past people would say things to me along the lines that the competition was going to beat the blogging news service I was providing at the time. They never did, but for all the inherent risks involved to your own status with competition, I always enjoyed reading the new comers, and indeed actively link to and promoting them. Blogs dedicated to Blogging News and related interests are still few and far between, and a diversity of voices creates a richer blogosphere for us all. Minic at the top of his game at The Blogging Times was a great writer who had knack for finding obscure yet interesting stories that made you want to come back for more. I know for me The Blogging Times, at least with Minic at the helm will be sorely missed and that the blogosphere shines ever so slightly dimmer with the demise of a site that showed so much potential.

Vale The Blogging Times 2006-2007.

Originally posted on February 27, 2007 @ 6:57 pm

I wanted to weigh in on the whole Why Blog Networks Died conversation. I feel a bit of gratitude is owed to Paul Scrivens by me. Yes, I’m sucking it up and saying thank you. He taught me a lot through the years. We don’t always agree. However I think he’s spot on here. You have to develop one big site and slowly branch out. The long tail is great if you arent creating the content however.

b5media and 9rules have had their clashes and I think a lot of that is because each of them wanted to be the next big thing in the blog network space. Now they are both evolving. 9rules having gone the way of a bloggers community, and b5 having gone the way of the long tail machine.

While 9rules doesn’t pay their bloggers. B5 pays their bloggers using an algorithm like this “$100 a month plus $1.50 for every 1,000 pageviews“. Using this algorithm 901am would be making $1250 dollars this month. Minus the fact that I don’t pay my bloggers using any scale like this,that’s pretty cheap. In fact so cheap that you could be making more if you started your own blogs, hosted them yourselves and spent a lot of time networking within various communities. Don’t get me wrong, I’m friends with a handful of b5ers I just think they should look at ways of progressing their model a bit more to reward bloggers.

Luckily 9rules has no promises of rewarding their bloggers so I can’t say much about them concerning monetization. The reason the blog network space is largely void of leadership is because of the lack of good monetization. Likewise the reason its void of monetization is because of a lack of leadership.

My advice to anyone wanting to start a blog network: Start with one big site and branch out nice and slowly.

Originally posted on February 26, 2007 @ 2:57 am