So, as you may have heard, the “other” blog I blog at quite regularly has been sold. Heck — I interviewed Matt Craven a few days ago about the issue. The other bloggers and I have been quietly discussing things amongst ourselves, and I think for many of us, it may be a time of reflection of where we’re all going to turn next.

Should we stay at The Blog Herald, which many of us identified as indistinguishable from the man who hired us, Matt Craven — or move on to different things? Our own blogs and bloggy aspirations? (wow — I was punning without knowing it) Take up a position with another news blog and continue our efforts there?

I’ve refrained from commenting publicly over the past few days, although we were privy to the knowledge that the BH had been sold quite a few days before it was publicly announced … mostly out of professional courtesy and simply curiosity. But, my itchy bloggy fingers (there, I go, punning again) can’t seem to stay away from the keyboard, so here are few thoughts:

• The new owners are bloggy-network.com, (not bloggynetwork.com), and they decided that they wanted to keep things their ownership a secret — even from its own bloggers
• I found out a few hours before a public post was sent out to the Blog Herald that it was, in fact, the bloggy-network.com that is my new employer.
• Unfortunately, trying to find out who is behind bloggy-network.com is quite difficult, as there is no “about” page — its “under construction”
• In fact, I only found out, through the comments section of that “announcement post”, that (one) of the owners is a guy named Mark — I didn’t have a last name until I started asking a few questions, and it turns out his name is Mark Saunders (I think).
• For reasons that are still unclear to me, Mark has elected to not speak to his bloggers in person, or make introductions in person, but rather, initiate, and presumably continue, communications through some management personnel, Abe Olandres and J. Angelo Racoma.
• While most (or all) of the bloggers have been emailed personally by the management, we’ve been told more details will be forthcoming in the next few days — or possibly after the weekend.
• Its possible that the reason why bloggy-network wanted to keep its ownership secret is because there is another blog network named bloggynetwork, and they wanted to avoid controversy at this time, particularly over the name, and particularly because the Blog Herald is an old, established blog property.
• In other conversations, it seems like Mark, and by extension, bloggy-network, has some interesting and serious plans in the works; I won’t divulge the details here mostly because I know a whisper of a twinge of a rumour of things.

At the end of the day, I would probably like to carry on with The Blog Herald for a bunch of reasons: I like to meet new people, blogging at an established Blog property is still an exciting idea, and … well, inertia is a tough thing to fight.

On the other hand, what is really bothering me is how the bloggers at The Blog Herald were treated in this transfer of power from Problogging to Bloggy-Network. Namely, that we were kept in the dark. And moreover, that, we continue to be kept an armslength away from the owner(s) of The Blog Herald.

(more…)

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? (more…)

Just an alert to those not subscribing to the BlogHerald RSS feed — I’ve started posting regularly over there. To preserve the freshness of those posts, I won’t be double-posting them here. But, from from time to time I’ll be posting a few summaries here as a heads up to the work over there. Check BlogHerald out if you have a chance, we have a growing stable of columnists who are trying to create some of the best work we can.

1. One post asks the question — with the controversy around Digg, the debacle around Facebook — and even the hubaloo around Lonelygirl15, what role do social networks have in disseminating information? Is it the wisdom of crowds? Or will they act like an accelerant — mutating the blogosphere into mob rule?
2. In another post, I chat about what the recent interview by a high ranking fox exective really means for the Internet — and its not just chest thumping on the behalf of MySpace. It may change the way we market on the Internet completely.