Jacob has an interesting critique on Weblogs Inc – taking a close look at the topic and posting frequency of some of their blogs.
He particularly takes aim at two factors:
1. Lack of Updating – Jacob notes that the Digital Radio blog Droxy has only one post in the past month and that the outsourcing blog has one post so far this year. There are others that I’ve noticed over the past few months have had some pretty irregular bursts of posting (and not posting). Whilst I’ve had similar thoughts to Jacob about the inactivity of some of their blogs (I guess it doesn’t look good for the network to have something inactive?) I can also see why it may have happened. There are a number of factors that could have come into play:
I’m not making excuses for WIN (after all its really none of our business is it?) – but these might be some of the reasons a small number of their blogs become a less active than others.
2. Money Grabbing Blogs – Jacob argues that some of the blogs that WIN has their name on seem to be purely about making money. He uses the Mortgages blog to illustrate this (and mortgage ads are renowned for being good payers). Once again I can see where Jacob is coming from completely – this is probably one of the most inspiring blogs in WINs stable – for me.
I guess that’s the point though – for me its boring and useless (mainly useless because I’m in a different country) – but I’d argue that obviously for some its not. Really what it comes down to is letting the market decide what is a valid topic for a blog or not. Whilst most of those searching the internet don’t require the type of information on some of WINs blogs – there are obviously some that do – and if they don’t I suspect it won’t be long until they close this blog down for lack of feasibility.
I guess this is the point of niche blogging in many regards. A magazine design blog is not going to appeal to the masses – but for at least one person (Pariah S. Burke – its author) it obviously is something of interest (and by the comments which are being left on every second post – it seems that a handful of others are into it too).
Will it be a huge money spinner? Probably not. Is it a good move for WIN to include it in their stable of blogs? I guess thats for them to decide as they look at their goals and objectives as a network.
I’m not trying to give Jacob a hard time here – he’s a great guy who is pretty cluey when it comes to making a living online – I’m just trying to look beyond the obvious critique and put myself in the shoes of the big players. It’s pretty easy to pretty easy to knock the high profile blog networks – but sometimes I think we’d learn more by getting in their shoes than always taking a shot at them.
I’m interested in others opinions – anyone from WIN who wants to respond and shed a little light on this is more than welcome to do so.
Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.
Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.
