Disclaimer: I was enlisted to help broker the sale of The Blog Herald, and am a former owner of the site.

It was just ten months ago that we acquired The Blog Herald from Duncan Riley, the original founder. And now we’ve closed a deal to sell The Blog Herald to an undisclosed buyer.

It’s with a whole bag of mixed feelings that I find myself writing this post. Many of you have noticed over the last few months that we’ve been working on refocusing our company. Our core business has always been the consulting work that we’ve been doing since 1994 in one form or another. We also found ourselves not enjoying the blog network business as much as we used to do.. and with a hot market right now for existing blogs – it looked like a good time to divest ourselves of some of our sites.

But it was never our intention to sell The Blog Herald…

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Originally posted on December 3, 2006 @ 8:02 pm

BitTorrent parent company Azureus recently received 15 Million Dollars in Venture Capital funding. So what are they putting the money into developing?

Zudeo, a high speed, high definition video sharing site that has a simple interface, a downloadable client, and the power of bittorrent. What’s not to love?

According to ArsTechnica:

The site, still in beta, allows the usual mix of tagging, uploading, and free viewing, though content is quite limited and features are still sparse. Users first need to download the Azureus application to get content, though, adding a layer of complexity to the normal process.

In return for using a BitTorrent client, Zudeo offers full HD-quality videos and gigabytes of storage space. It’s free to content producers, who need to use the Azureus Director Edition to upload their creations.

Azureus isn’t the only company using BitTorrent to distribute massive video clips; there’s also, err, BitTorrent. BitTorrent (the company) has its own plans to become a content distributor, and it just signed deals with 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, MTV Networks, Paramount, and Starz that will allow it to offer their content for download in the new year (in addition to deals it signed earlier in the year). The company has also closed another $20 million funding round, a sign that investors still have confidence in peer-to-peer distribution models (or that they desperately want to create a YouTube-style success story).

Originally posted on December 5, 2006 @ 5:53 am

According to BusinessWeek, SkyBlog is doing big things in France.

It started as a lark four years ago. French rap radio station Skyrock, operated by Paris-based media group Orbus, launched a free blogging service to give listeners a way to talk back and get to know each other. The response was beyond management’s wildest expectations: Skyblog now attracts a remarkable 2.85 billion page views a month, putting it fourth among all Web sites in France and No. 1 in the coveted 15- to 24-year-old age range, according to researcher comScore.

What’s interesting to me is people need to take an approach that puts local social networking at focus instead of looking in the mirror at the behemoth all the time.

Originally posted on December 3, 2006 @ 4:53 pm

Matt Cutts of Google touches on the state of blog spam

Is blogspam gone from Google Blog Search, Technorati, and Blogger? Of course not. But is is better than a few months ago? Yup, I’d say so, and I expect folks to continue to work on reducing blogosphere pollution.

For more indepth coverage on the state of blog spam you can check out a report by KB Cafe and Know More Media’s Marshall Sponder on Web Metrics Guru

Originally posted on December 3, 2006 @ 1:39 pm