Adii, or Adriaan Pienaar as his real name is, calls himself a WordPress rockstar and sells premium WordPress themes on WooThemes. You’ve probably came across him one time or another if you’ve been looking for a theme designer, or if you’re interested in premium themes.

Since the small controversy with WooThemes giving away a premium theme for free, much like Brian Gardner did with Revolution, I’ve been meaning to do an interview with Adii to get to know a little more on what he thinks about premium themes. So read on for a freshly pressed interview! read more

There is no doubt that the current financial situation is hitting the web as well as the rest of the media industry. This is certainly one of the reasons why we’ve seen blog networks close, cut costs, or rationalize their portfolio. So is the blog network business model in trouble, and what does the established blog network hotshots thing about these things?

I decided to find out, in the first roundtable discussion here on the Blog Herald. That’s why I invited these fine blog network heavyweights to participate in the discussion.

• Jeremy Wright, CEO of b5media
• Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato
• Mike Rundle, triad member of 9rules

So let’s get started and see what they have to say! read more

Darren Rowse is frequently mentioned here on the Blog Herald, but it is usually due to his excellent blog ProBlogger. This time, however, it is all about his most recent venture, a blog about microblogging service Twitter. We wrote about the launch of TwiTip previously, and the blog is shaping up nicely, with a steady stream of content, as well as a huge amount of comments.

I was curious to know why Darren elected to launch TwiTip, and there’s no better way to saturate your curiosity than to ask, so I did just that. Read on for more! read more

Brian Gardner has decided that the premium WordPress theme, Revolution, won’t be sold as of October 31, 2008. A new set of themes will be released instead, GPL’d and free to download. The move has been applauded by Matt Mullenweg, head honcho of the WordPress project. We covered this yesterday, but I figured it would be interesting to talk to Brian about it as well.

Moving the Revolution Theme to another level, with free GPL’d themes, is very interesting for sure. If I was a cynic I would be wondering if this is a move due to the competition in the premium themes market right now, and the fact that sales of the Revolution Theme might have panned out?

This is absolutely not true – in fact, sales have been as steady as ever. My theory is that the amount of people who were purchasing premium themes grew, so the market in general was increasing. There wasn’t a reduction in % split in the market for premium designers, it probably stayed the same, just more people buying them.

read more

Helium is one of those citizen journalism sites, where people can submit stories on various topics, and hopefully be read. At first glance, it reminds me of Instablogs, one of the stronger voices for citizen journalism.

What really got me interested in Helium, however, is the Marketplace. Basically, it’s a way for writers to earn a little money on the stories they publish on Helium, because other media outlets can buy publication rights through the Marketplace. That’s a pretty cool concept, and a way for citizen journalists to, possibly, reach the more traditional journalistic publications. That is, if the content is good enough, and if Helium can push the Marketplace as a solid place for getting in on a story for other publications.

Mark Ranalli, CEO of Helium, was gracious enough to do a short interview on Helium, the Marketplace, and citizen journalism in general. read more

Future of Blogging

Have you ever wanted to know the future of the blogosphere – say, what blogs will be like 10 years from now?

Thanks to The Blog Herald’s brand new Advanced Blogospheric Chrononavigational Discombobulus (ABCD) – basically a time machine fortuitously dropped at our doorstep last night by an unknown person – now you can.

Immediately after checking the outcomes of the next 5 U.S. presidential elections (Nader ’24! Who’da thunk?) and finding out exactly when World War III will start (thank heavens we can still prevent it), The Blog Herald excitedly sat down with a Ms. X, a professional blogger in the year 2018.

Here’s what X had to say about the future of blogs. read more

I have been collecting topic suggestions from my readers this week and one of the replies I got was not a suggestion for my forthcoming content but a cry for help.

This blogger had been notified by a visitor that some of her old posts were, while funny, likely to land her in hot water. She quickly thanked the visitor and unpublished two or three of the worst offenders.

That wasn’t where the problem ended though. read more

August 31st is “blog day”, according to Nir Ofir, who started BlogDay in 2005. The whole idea is to spread blogging and help people find new blogs, a noble cause if any. It could be a really big thing, is in a way, with the blogosphere’s lust for more readers, and its fascinations with specific days, be it talk like a pirate or naked CSS day.

So let’s find out what’s behind Nir Ofir’s BlogDay, shall we? read more

Hosting niche blogs is something I think we’ll be seeing more of, especially when the blog platforms are getting better and better with each release. We have previously covered Teens in Tech, the teens in love with tech blog host by 15 year old Daniel Brusilovsky, and then there’s Open Salon, taking a slightly different approach but at the same time being pretty niche since it looks to engage the Salon readers, certainly a crowd too.

WarhammerBlogs.com is another blog host going after a niche, this time people interested in everything Warhammer. So what is that? Well, it started like a table-top war game by Games Workshop, filled with Orcs and Elves and whatnot trying to kill each other. You would buy a bunch of lead figures, paint them, and then use the rules to bash other armies. Today it is a huge industry, with MMORPG heading for PC gamers, called Warhammer Online, and several spinoffs, like pen-and-paper role-playing games, books, and so on. read more

Lijit is a search company that lets you mash all your online presences into one, and search them. We’ve just recently implemented them here on The Blog Herald, and b5media is among their clients. The news that they had secured $7.1 million in Series C funding reached the blogosphere yesterday, as did further hints of their upcoming ad network. Basically, it seems like they’ll be sharing the search revenue garnered by their search widget with publishers, being mostly bloggers I guess.

Lijit CEO Todd Vernon agreed to answer a few questions regarding this. read more