b5media Reflections – 4 Months In

Posted By Darren Rowse 11th of January 2006 Blog Networks

If you’ve got some bookkeeping skills you might like to head over to b5media where we’ve just advertised that we need someone like you.

In other b5media news – with the last few blogs that we just launched (3 more from the merger) we now have 63 blogs (and over 40 bloggers) in the stable. We’ve stopped taking applications for new blogs but have a few more still to launch from the last round and from internal bloggers starting new ones.

It’s hard to believe that we only launched the network under 4 months ago. The growth has been quite staggering. 63 blogs and 9 channels (we just launched video games and a science/health channels which have been popular) so far. It seems we’ve expanded very quickly but one of the things that I realized today is that for every blog that we’ve started there is at least another 5 that we’ve passed on. The numbers of applications were above our capacity to act on (and at times there were too many to even process).

Phase Two – We’ve got many things to work on still but I’m looking forward to the next phase where we slow down expansion and turn up the heat on getting our current blogs to the next level. As with any new business it’s easy to loose track of the little things in the rush to get established and we’re more than aware of a number of areas we can improve in.

Social Blogging – One of the things I’ve been amazed about with the new network is the large numbers of bloggers who have a desire to belong to something bigger than their own blog.

In speaking to many of our bloggers and asking why they wanted to join b5, the topic of making money was almost always lower on the list than I’d expected. While b5media is a commercial venture it is also emerging to be a social and relational one.

I’m not saying that we’ve arrived on the relational level – but for many of our bloggers the major benefits have been the relationships that they’ve formed with other bloggers and the networks that have opened up.

update: no sooner had this post gone live that we launched two more blogs. I guess we’re up to 65 now…. although I could have miscounted :-)

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