We saw this coming, especially with the feature we did on the new b5media back in February. Mashing lots of blogs together and moving to WordPress MU, it all smelled forum integration with bbPress, and Facebook-ish social networking with BuddyPress from the start. And now they’re rolling it out, first on Splendicity and Blisstree, but the rest of the roster will get the community treatment too.

All of our bloggers will certainly play a key role in this. There are very few leaders in any given community; it is one of those miniscule percentages of total users, in the 1% range. We have a clear advantage because our bloggers are already our community leaders. [...] Most importantly, it allows bloggers to interact with their readers outside of the author/commentor relationship and allow readers to start discussions about their favourite topics as well.

Read the full presentation, and the hopes and dreams of the b5ers, in the blog post.

The b5media blog network has been busy, mashing all their blogs into supersites, like Splendicity which we’ve talked about before. That doesn’t stop them from launching new blogs, although it has been a while. The latest one is called TwilightGroupie.com and features everything Twilight, of course. I can’t tell if it is good or bad, I just know that I’m not the target audience here…

We’ve been wanting to start this site for a long time and are very excited to be launching new blogs once again! TwilightGroupie.com is written by b5media veteran writer Nikki Katz, who you may know from JuniorCelebs.com.

That’s from the Inside b5media blog post. It’ll probably do fine given the topic.

Late to the game, are we? Maybe it was the Royal Pingdom report on top tech brands on Twitter that sparked the move, either way, b5media now pushes their own Twitter account, promising retweets and whatnot in a blog post. They also ask who they should follow: @blogherald of course!

The times are changing and so are the blog networks, something that appeared to be a solid business model a couple of years back, but now deemed a rough one if you want to succeed. One company above others are being mentioned whenever blog networks are branded as a failed idea, and that’s b5media. Not because they have failed or anything, but rather because they have all these blogs, and no real focus.

Well, that’s about to change, and starting today at that.

The first big change is Splendicity, something of a portal page for the beauty and style channel at b5media. It’s not a new site, but with the redesign, b5media not only aims to bring something new to the table, they’re also reshaping the logistics of their blog network.

Or, to put it frankly, they have taken their 32 blog strong beauty and style channel, and converted them all to one big site: the new Splendicity.

32 blogs, becomes 1 site. That brings a lot of questions, doesn’t it? read more

I received an email tip via Performancing today about some key b5media personalities having to leave the network–one of the bigger blog/new media networks today, in terms of content and contributorship. Foremost of these is AboutWeblogs.com founder and b5media “co-founder” Shai Coggins. In a blog post today, Shai explains the circumstances behind her leaving b5.

Even with the fresh injection of funding, the economic times aren’t cooperating.

So, it all ended with another Skype chat. Well, sort of. On the 14th of January 2009, I used Skype to pay for the call to the b5 conference line – where the company COO and CEO broke the news to me.

Times are tough.

And that’s how it ends.

I’m not sure I am at liberty to quote or discuss the actual contents of the email, as it appears to be privileged communication between Jeremy Wright and his fellow b5′ers. But it appears that this move was due to some belt-tightening measures that the company has had to do in line with its trimming of costs, refocusing of strategies and exploring of new opportunities. read more

Brian Gardner announced that b5media will use one of the Revolution themes as the base theme across the network, and CEO Jeremy Wright confirmed that it is indeed so. The theme will apparently roll out in a network redesign due next year, and not a moment too soon if you ask me.

While I have nothing against the Revolution Streamline theme, which will be the basis of the new design, I’m a bit surprised to see b5media going with something that is a premium theme available for all. Or is it? I can’t seem to find it on the Revolution Two website, so maybe b5media bought the rights to it? I’ve contacted Brian and Jeremy for a comment on this.

Check out the Revolution Streamline demo if you want to know what the basis of the new b5media base template will be in 2009.

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

Blog network b5media is revamping their pay scheme, and that means a lot less money for the bloggers. More or less every blog within the network will see a drop in revenue because of this. TechCrunch broke the story by posting a memo from CEO Jeremy Wright, in which the following is key:

I’m sure by now you’ve run your blog through the system above and realized that (with a handful of exceptions), due to the change to Omniture as a stats package, your pay will go down. For some it will go down significantly. Obviously this isn’t the intent of the new pay system, it was just the flaw in the previous stats package. For the last two years, b5 has been effectively paying bloggers 2-3x more in traffic bonuses than they were actually getting. While, again, this isn’t a blogger’s fault, neither is the new pay system about “cutting pay”. Any reduction in pay is due almost exclusively to the reality of using an inaccurate pay system in the past vs an industry standard third-party audited system going forward.

Jeremy Wright has tried to respond to the post, but his comments are apparently getting caught in moderation, so he posted it on his blog for now. He points out the obvious culprit: read more

The U.S. and Canada are going through hard economic times. You knew that, right?

And you probably knew that blog networks, like all businesses, thrive or perish according to their ability to respond to changes in the economies in which they operate.

But what you maybe didn’t know is the extent to which the current economic struggles of Canada and the U.S. are affecting the blog networks you visit on a daily basis – Gawker, b5media, Federated Media, Splashpress (which owns this blog) and Weblogs, Inc., to name a few. read more