Giga Omni Media have closed a deal with NYTimes.com, which means that content from the GigaOM network will be available on NYTimes.com come early October. They are not alone in this, but rather a part in redesigning the Technology channel at NYTimes.com. Other heavyweights that inked a deal to have their content available through this are ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat.

This is the third heavy weight syndication deal for GigaOM, with BusinessWeek and CNNMoney already in the bag. Meanwhile, VentureBeat’s content is available on IDG’s Industry Standard. As far as I know, this is the first syndication deal for ReadWriteWeb though, although I might have missed something. 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

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

Open Salon is out in beta, and it appears to be a pretty decent idea at first. Basically, it is an opportunity for you to get a hosted blog, much like WordPress.com or Blogger (should you still want to use that one), but with two nice little extra features:

• More coverage, both on the Open Salon front page, which updates with a new “issue” daily, being selected stories from the bloggers, and in the future, from Salon.com itself.
• You can earn tips, being money paid by generous readers of your excellent posts.

The latter is interesting, but also a bit scary. read more

With recent events around blogging for networks, you could be forgiven for thinking this kind of deal is souring. How bad are these signs for the future of network blogging? read more

We’ve written about Collis Ta’eed’s ambitious Tuts network before, and now one of their heavier titles are expanding. PSDTuts, focusing on Photoshop tutorials, have added a Photoshop Wiki, which is a sound addition to the core PSDTuts blog, I think. They’re promoting it with a launch contest, so if you know anything about Photoshop then you might want to check this out.

Know More Media will be closing its doors as of August 1, according to editor Easton Ellsworth, who confirmed the open letter from b5media’s Jeremy Wright to the KMM bloggers. Still no official announcement on the Know More Media blog though.

Jeremy pitches the KMM bloggers, asking them to join b5media by buying their blogs. It is all very tactful, I think. He also has an offer to the founders. read more

TechCrunch reports that AOL has been making big budget cuts across its blogs. We’re not talking small stuff here, serious cuts up to 25%, which will almost certainly effect the writers the most.

The cuts range up to 25% of each properties total budget, which falls mostly on personnel costs – bloggers are simply being told to take a couple of weeks off for now, and there may or may not be work for them later in August.

The tech blogs, with Engadget being the most prominent one, is not affected, the sources say.

While this should be treated as a rumor for now, it is something that will and should rattle the blogosphere.
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9rules is getting ready for Round 7, where bloggers can attempt to get in the popular blog network by submitting their blogs for review. August 6 is the date you need to mark in your calendar if you want in. As they did the previous time, a special page will be available, open to submissions for 24 hours.

Om Malik of GigaOm fame has announced that his company, Giga Omni Media, have acquired mobile gadgets blog jkOnTheRun. No amount have been specified.

The reason for buying the blog is of course that it is a great one, filling an empty space in the GigaOm network. The choice was to either build a blog in this niche from scratch, or buying one. With that in mind, the deal was and is probably a no-brainer. read more