Blogging

A few people have assumed that because I’m looking for a few good bloggers in a number of consumer-oriented areas that I’m starting a new blogging network. Countless emails, comments and blog posts have noted this.

Which is fair enough.

Are there opportunities in blogging networks? Definitely. None has actually hit mainstream acceptance in any way. WIN is as close as it gets, and I’m sure Jason would tell you that even though they have some impressive numbers and are definitely the biggest (financially, traffic and awareness-wise), that doesn’t mean they’re mainstream.

The question of what would make a blogging network mainstream is a difficult one, and one I’ve been wrestling with.

I will be taking a foray into blogging networks at some point. I’ve had offers from several people starting up new networks in the last few months, including a targetted Canadian blogging network (which I nearly jumped at), and one in the UK which was looking to start 200-250 blogs by the end of the year. I’ve also talked to some folks in Australia and even a group in Singapore who wanted to start a massive Asian blogging network and needed someone to manage and promote it.

There are lot of interesting opportunities with blogging networks, but most of them aren’t actually about blogging at all. After all, blogging is really about creating content. Once you have thousands of pages of current content being produced on a weekly basis, the sky really is the limit. You could launch a magazine. You could launch a major news portal. You could begin doing all kinds of cool things to get the data that consumers want into their hands.

Or, you could treat the blogging network as an ad network which already has content, and create blogs purely based on cash or sponsorship opportunity. Or, you could create a network which is built around the concept of trust: bloggers trust the network and the public trusts the network.

I see a huge amount of opportunities in content creation, aggregation and media delivery, specifically centered around blogs.

But, I am not creating a brand new network from scratch.

Obviously if I’m putting this much thought into blogging and blogging networks, something’s happening. I’ll admit that. But if I really wanted to start a brand new blogging network, I would have gone with some of the networks I mentioned earlier. Two of them had capital behind them, and it would have been a lot of fun.

Ultimately, at this stage in my life, anything I do I typically do because it’s fun, it’s challenging, I learn something, and I love the people involved.

The people are key.

So, to the people involved in this secret project: sorry that I felt the need to chat a little about this openly, but hopefully we’ll be able to answer the questions soon enough, yeah? ;-)

ps: I’m also working on 2 other new projects alongside this one, so please don’t assume any “new news” is all about this little puppy. Hope that clears up any confusion, while also making things sufficiently vague, heh.

Well, I haven’t done one of these in months, but now that I’m settled in, I’ve started podcasting again.

Here’s the latest BizBlog podcast, it’s with Steve Broback from the Blog Business Summit.