Money is not a problem. I can`t get VISA for US in just a week. I need at least a month or more to prepare the documents. If you could have planned it few weeks before, nothing could have stopped me from coming.

I would have love to discuss more about blog networks with your guys. I have always vouched for all of us to work together, but it seem everyone is busy telling how great their network is instead of thinking of way in which everyone can collaborate.

And hats off to your Jeremy for being the first guy to think and actually plan something which could be beneficial for the whole industry.

Jeremy I want you to keep on the discussions open not only at the camp but even after it on your blog.

In French! ;)

I’m quite prepared to lose control to people who have greater expertise than I do — I call this Superdemocracy — but only where it works with our trajectory. It’s up to you guys to convince me.

I do like the sound of your SXSW propositions though. I’ll wait to hear what they are in detail.

As for not communicating — we are an American, an Indian, an Englishman and a Canadian. We each have different words for the same things. How are we supposed to communicate. ;-)

Let me see if I can make a few observations that’ll hopefully allow everyone to see where everyone else is coming from.

John: Ankit’s suggesting sharing resources. Hiring central resources and then letting each network remain autonomous. You wouldn’t have to take any ad deals, but if deals came along that made sense you’d have access to them. One of my suggestions at SXSW will be similar, but structured differently.

No merging. No jumbo sized anything. Reach without loss of independence.

Mike: To think that 9rules invented the “bring in exterior sites to form a network” idea is laughable at best, and insincere at worst. You guys have done lots of great thing, but inventing community / a network of like-minded folk / a network of sites / a portal of like-minded sites / etc isn’t one of them.

Ankit: John’s always going to be leery of giving up any control. It’s kind of like Americans and the ICC. They want all the benefits without any of the cost or loss of autonomy. And, no, John, I don’t mean that in any derogatory way. It might sound conflicting, but it’s really just a reflection of your priorities.

Ankit: What’s keeping you from coming out? If it’s cost, b5’s happy to lend you guys the money (and that goes for everyone).

John: For the conversation to continue forward, it’s probably best if you drop the idea that what you’re doing is totally new. We’ve accepted external sites (as have most networks) for longer than Syntagma’s existed. And, as you know, our split was 80/20. And we created the “channels” concept for blog networks. And we were the first to sell them as a “magazine”. You’re doing a great job, but nothing in your ad split or technology makes it impossible for you to collaborate :) It’s always better to focus on what’s similar when trying to collaborate than on what’s different!

Anyways, I understand if you guys can’t wait until post SXSW to discuss collaboration. After all, everyone’s busy. Likewise, I totally understand if folk can’t make it (since we floated the idea 1.5 weeks before the event).

But, this’ll be a central point of the discussions there. After all, no matter our differences, we all have ad servers, web servers, database servers, software issues, support issues, community issues and dozens of other similarities. Even if you’re not a “blog network” (like 9rules and Syntagma), most of these issues are still common to all of us. Maybe we should just call it the “blog media industry” so that nobody gets their feathers ruffled, eh? ;)

End of the day, collaboration saves everyone money. In every major industry, collaboration is a key to growth. Movie industry, music industry, airline industry, banking industry, car industry…

They all share resources, rely on common standards and brainstorm collectively in order to grow the industry. They then return to HQ and innovate the hell out of other areas of their business so they can kick their competition’s in the butt.

There’s no reason our industry can’t be any different: collaborate on what’s common, and differentiate on what matters.

I don’t think our system will easily slot into the engine you’re suggesting, which I think involves merging individual blog networks into one jumbo-sized, planet-wide, digital wonder of the world.

It’s a great dea, and when we first started, I’d have seriously considered it. Now, we’re too far down another road.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think 9rules offers anything like that.

Don`t take it in a wrong way, but I still don`t think 9rules has a definite business plan, other than adding paid features to 9rules portal. I would be very happy if it work out for you guys.

What I am suggesting is most of the blog networks have pretty good traffic in niche channels (adding traffic on individual blogs in a particular niche area). If we can expand this niche channel by pooling channels of various networks, we can have a large inventory to sell.

>> John: but I think most networks would prefer to stay in charge of their own inventory.

Everyone can stay in charge of their own inventory, as blog network owners will decide what part of total inventory should be thrown in the pool.

The biggest benefit we all can get is to allow advertisers to choose through various form of ads from Text link, RSS Feeds, CPM based, CPC based through an easy interface. By pooling our inventory, we will pooling our current advertisers too.

We can further hire a sales exec to help the program. Anyways our programmers would be completing the code in couple of weeks. We will be implementing it for Instablogs very soon. If someone want too see a demo or like send me an email in couple of weeks.

>> Jeremy: We’ve always offered technical and other resources to other networks (such as helping improve Instablogs monetization,

I for the one have believed that Jeremy you are always there to help other networks. This is something which is actually missing from all us. We should think ourselves as a community, and device new ways in which we can collaborate together.

Heads up for the BlogNetworkCamp at SXSW organized by Jeremy. I wish I could attend it.

Probably best to wait until after SXSW. We can have you up in 48 hours, though, so yeah. Don’t necessarily wait for us, but by the time SXSW is done there might be something more compelling that comes out of the whole community.