February 2008

Lee Wilkins, founder of the Romanian blog network MyKinda, is denying he plans to leave writers in the lurch. The company recently said it will close its Russian, Bulgarian and Ukraine blogs. Wilkins, who bailed out of the ill-fated BlogNation before it went down in flames in late 2007, sounded like Richard Nixon in an e-mail to startup blogger Michael Arrington.

“Right now, I am in the process of making calls, to get my people their money asap, as i promised. I am not a thief, nor am i liar. These people delivered for me, I will deliver my promise to them,” Wilkins wrote the blogger by e-mail.

MyKinda owes its bloggers more than $17,000. Before closing the sites earlier this month, the network was losing more than $22,000 a month, according to TechCrunch.

“I have never lied to my people, maybe a little lack of communication yes, but lying, no! I should’ve, in hindsight, communicated earlier that I couldn’t keep RU & BG going, but I had hopes of being in a position to finance it myself,” Wilkins wrote.

In 2007, Blog Nation accumulated about $200,000 in writing debts, stringing along bloggers by telling them funding was on the way.

Dave Peralty, Splashpress marketing director and head blogger at Blogging Pro, wrote about meeting 24-year-old Matt Mullenweg at the recent Northern Voice conference for Canadian bloggers. It was like Peralty was meeting Miley Cyrus or the Dalai Lama.

“I did a double take, and of course acted a bit like an idiot around him. It was almost like how people act when they meet a celebrity for the first time,” Peralty wrote.

That awe-struck reaction is the sort of response that let’s Mullenweg skip the hard questions and speak about code and the free-market, rather than the details of a $29.5 million funding from the New York Times Company and other investors. He avoids talking about reports he was offered $200 million for his Automattic empire - or that his WordPress.com hosted service is now second to only Google’s Blogger.

What do we know about Mullenweg, other than he was named one of the 50th most important people online, according to PC World and that he used to work for CNet before launching Automattic? His hometown newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, added some interesting pieces to the puzzle:

• He graduated from Houston’s Independent School District’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where he studied jazz saxophone. Mullenweg attended, but didn’t graduate from the Univ. of Houston.
• Automattic was run from his apartment, making it a ‘virtual company.’
• Automattic has 15 employees.
• The WordPress name came from Houston blogger Christine Tremoulet (bigpinkcookie.com).

The London Guardian is asking whether serial-firer Nick Denton should be the next person to leave Gawker. Earlier this week, Denton, who serves as both publisher and managing editor of the site, booted editor Maggie Shnayerson via e-mail. Shnayerson, who had been there for five months, was told she just wasn’t generating enough page-views.

“Last month, you got about 400,000 pageviews; this month you’re at 160,000; even taking into account your break, that’s still far from satisfactory,” Denton wrote.

“You should be doing some 670,000 views a month to justify your advance. You’re a good writer, and your stories are fine; you just seem to wrestle with them for longer than we can afford. I don’t think you’re suited to the pace of Gawker.”

Denton in the past month wrote 91 posts garnering 475,000 views — far less than the 670,000 the media maven views as Gawker’s low bar. Judging from this, should Denton send himself an e-mail?

Former Gawker editor Maggie Shnayerson, fired Monday by e-mail, says Nick Denton may have a conflict of interest, acting as both publisher and editor.

Shnayerson, hired in September 2007 from the Village Voice to be editor, said Denton is trying to remake Gawker into another Huffington Post. “He’s trying to make Gawker much more mainstream, but I’m not sure if [Gawker] works as a HuffPo,” she told MediaBistro.

In December, after Gawker managing editor Choire Sicha,  editor Emily Gould and writer Josha David Stein resigned, Denton took the helm, explaining “Gawker is becoming a larger and more complex operation, and frankly, a more traditional one.”

Do you like going to Amazon and getting recommendations from other shoppers on books and other items? The same concept for blog posts is worth $5 million for Outbrain, a company that Monday received funding for a free recommendation plugin. The news is just the latest bid to untangle blogs for consumers.

The $5 million is first-round funding from LGiLab, GlenRock, Sigma PCM and other venture capitalists. Outbrain was co-founded by Yaron Galai, who helped create Quigo, later sold to AOL for $350 million and Ori Lahav, head of research for Shopping.com

The plugin is available for self-hosted WordPress blogs , Google’s Blogger, Drupal and Typepad. The plugin is also available as Javascript and a Feedburner FeedFlare. Outbrain is considering a plugin for WordPress.com, John Logioco, vice president of business development, told Pro Blogging News.

A mockup of the blog post ratings from Outbrain.

Blogged.com has become the newest entry in the race to help consumers find their way among the millions of blogs — most either dead or at best of ho-hum quality. Unlike Technorati, which caters to the blogging geeks, Blogged.com hopes to attract the general blog consumer simply looking for quality and interesting blogs.

“There’s probably an untapped demand among everyday consumers for an easier way to find good blogs,” Nielsen executive vice president Pete Blackshaw told MediaPost. Nielsen has its own blog directory, BlogPulse.

Founded in 2007 by Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong, the site is getting 10,000 daily visitors. The service uses a staff of 10 editors to rate blogs based on appearance, writing and relevancy. Blogs are given a score of 1-to-10. The directory has about a half-million blogs in its index with users encouraged to nominate and share sites.

Blogged.com’s founders haven’t contacted venture capital firms about funding nor have they yet to decide on advertising or other monetization plans.

James Farmer, the creator of BlogSavvy.net, is trying to auction the three-year-old blog for $10,000. Farmer said he’s become too busy to maintain the site, which appears in the No. 2 spot under “blog consulting” Google searches. The reason: “I’m pretty much flat out with Edublogs and Incsub stuff these days,” Farmer writes.

Edublogs is akin to a WordPress.com for educators. The service, begun in 2005, now hosts 100,000 blogs. Incsub is another blogging service Farmer created that is a consultancy using WordPress and WordPress Multiple User.

The auction for BlogSavvy began Feb. 20 on Sitepoint. “It’s an excellent opportunity to continue to develop a blog consulting business, start another Blog Herald or get your problogging voice out there,” Farmer described. Bidding started at $5,000 or a buyer could grab the site instantly for $10,000. As of February 22, no bids were made. Farmer, an Australian, did not immediately respond to questions from Pro Blogging News.

Farmer said he earned $2,000 per month from consultant jobs obtained from the site. With advertising, Blogsavvy could be turned into an ‘about blogging’ publication, he suggests. The site gets 3,500 unique visits each month and 40,000 monthly pageviews. Blogsavvy has a 5/6 PageRank, according to the sitepoint stats.

In October, Rick Bruner sold his Business Blog Consulting site to a user for an unknown price.

Pay-Per-Click fraud is skyrocketing for blog ad networks such as Google Adsense or Yahoo. Almost one in three clicks (28.3 percent ) are from fraudsters, possibly running botnets based in India, a new report suggests. Click Forensics, a Texas-based outfit that tracks PPC fraud, said on average fraud involving search engine-run advertising in the fourth quarter of 2007 hit more than 16 percent — up from 14.2 percent in 2006.

At nearly 17 percent, the average click fraud rate equals around a total of 26 million participants (17 percent of 156 million Internet sites), figures the New York Times.

A potential cause of the increase could be new tactics from PPC criminals. The report found in the fourth quarter of the last year a 15 percent jump in the use of botnets in just three months. Additionally, PPC fraudsters are turning to more sophisticated means to perpetuate fraud.

“As the FBI and USAToday have reported, fraudsters are using more sophisticated means to perpetuate click fraud, including infiltrating mom-and-pop ecommerce sites,” the company announced.

Click Forensics, which maintains a Click Fraud Index, using data from a 4,000-member Click Fraud Network, advices increased cooperation among online publishers and ad networks to stem the tide of fraud.

We’ve changed our looks. Although the previous theme served us well, we thought a new design was in order to match our new role: as the source for tracking the people and money behind professional blogging. [click to continue...]