Deep Jive Interests

Although Matt Craven had mentioned that ProBlogging would be holding on to the BlogHerald not a week ago on this very blog, it looks like its no longer the case as the BlogHerald, one of the oldest blogging properties on the net, has now been sold off to a new owner.

Which is curious, because on this blog, Matt mentioned: “The Blog Herald is a key part of Problogging, Inc. and the cornerstone of our coverage of the blogosphere.” So what happened? Why the about-face? I sat down for a quick chat about what had changed — if anything — the challenges that Matt was running into as a manager of a Blog Network, and if ProBlogging doesn’t own the BlogHerald, how will they keep their own mandate to cover the blogosphere?

Tony Hung: So right here on this very blog you said “The Blog Herald is a key part of Problogging, Inc. and the cornerstone of our coverage of the blogosphere.” … what changed?
Matt Craven: Pretty simple – we decided to exit that portion of our business. In the process of divesting ourselves of our blog network, we found a number of parties interested in our sites – Blog Herald, Blog Network Watch, BloggerJobs, and others. The more we thought about it – the more it made sense to move out of this arena and fully focus on where we wanted to go…

TH: Which is consulting, right?
MC: Consulting has always been our core business – though one that’s not really seen with all of the Blog Network stuff that we had going on. But we do plan on expanding our blog consulting through problogging.com – but more importantly – we’ll be expanding the services that we offer for bloggers over at Problogging – including our talent management marketplace and some other goodies that will come out over the next few months. We’ll also be doing some ebook creation as a part of our efforts to tell our story – there’s some valuable lessons that we’ve learned that we hope to share with others – and make their journey a little less painful

TH: What was the greatest single thing about running a blog network that made you want to get out it?
MC: This was really about where we wanted to go as a company. Our options were looking like this.
1) hire more staff to handle the overhead associated with the blog network
2) divest the network
3) cutback on consulting and other work
4) find some other, more creative, solution
Running the network meant maintaining multiple sites – keeping adcodes up to date across all of those sites, maintaining a stable of bloggers, calculating pay, paying bloggers, and so on and so on. It simply wasn’t what we wanted to do anymore.

TH: True or False: Up until a few days ago, its almost like BlogMedia was, in a sense, a victim of its own success.
MC: Well, no – but I do think that we were taking a look at where our business was at and what we thought we could maintain without undergoing some changes that we didn’t want to make (i.e. hire more people – or cut back on other businesses that we considered closer to our “core”)

TH: You mentioned in the last interview, that the BlogHerald was a key part of your coverage of the blogosphere. Is blogging journalism — “covering” the blogosphere — now part of your “core” business?
MC: Yes and no. Are we going to be blogging about it 4-5 hours a day like we have for the last year? No. Will we be podcasting about the blogosphere and world of technology regularly? Yes. Because no one else is doing what we’re going to do with our podcast moving forward.

We’ll also be commenting over at Problogging regularly. But it will be a different type of post – you can see my “Reflections on my time at The Blog Herald” post over at Problogging for an idea of the type of writing that I hope to be doing.

TH: Less news and more of a columnist type feel?
MC: Yes – but we’re certainly not going to be covering the general blog news like we have at The Blog herald or Blog Network watch over the last year – my writings at Problogger wil be more about how to build your blogs, make money, find great bloggers, etc.

TH: It almost sounds like you’re getting into the blog marketing side of things
MC: Oh, we’ll be doing a variety of things

TH: Since you’re leaving the blog network “business”, any last words of advice for any would-be blog network entrepreneurs?
MC:
1) Research
2) Have a plan
3) Write
4) Write alot
5) See #3 and #4
6) Read problogging.com

TH: Thanks man and best of luck. And maybe you’ll offer some discount coupons to the readers at DJI for your future ebooks … ? :)
MC: ok

For more coverage, please look up:

• Aaron Brazell’s podcast interview with Matt Craven — hint: fastfoward to about 24:15 to hear some interesting comments about me and my blog.
• Also Matt Craven in Matt Craven’s own words – at ProBlogging.

For me, personally, I’ve enjoyed working with Matt tremendously. Professional, friendly, and always available, Matt was the consummate blogging “boss”. My own time at DeepJiveInterests is a priority to me, and I am very happy that Matt always respected my time in that fashion. The new owners have yet to make their own plans — and even identity — known to the rank and file at the BlogHerald at this time … which is somewhat troubling. However, I’m sure that all will be revealed in time.

And if its not, you’ll be able to read about it right here. ;)