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

Envato continues to push onwards. Rockable Press is their latest project, a publishing outlet that connects to their other sites, such as NETTUTS and PSDTUTS. They’re using it to publish even more books in the How to be a Rockstar series, which started with How to be a Rockstar Freelancer.

Envato founder Collis Ta’eed had this to say in a post on FreelanceSwitch:

However in two weeks we have a new Rockable Press Manager starting here named Naysan Naraqi who is a former CNN Producer and globe trekker, and he’s going to be breathing life into the business. We’ve got four books and minibooks in production, so at last we’re going to start seeing some action. We’ve also finally settled on a proper name which has been checked for trademark issues.

As a part of the relaunch, Rockable Press gives away a free eBook by FreelanceSwitch editor Skellie, called Rockstar Personal Branding. All you have to do is to subscribe to the Rockable Press mailinglist. Sounds like a good deal.

Books and eBooks have been a natural extension for larger niche blogs for a long time. Is this where we’re heading, should advertising decline?

Envato, makers of PSDTUTS and FlashDen, continues to aggressively launch new sites. The latest one is Creattica Daily, a design news blog and the first part in the Creattica network. So far Creattica Daily looks well enough, but I’m more curious about upcoming Creattica Sessions, described by Envato head honcho Collis Ta’eed:

The next site release in the Creattica project is going to be one that I know PSDTUTS readers will enjoy. It’s a sort of Creative TUTS, and will aim to teach different types of design skills with tutorials, articles, community projects and more. It’s an ambitious project, so it’ll be a couple more months of planning before we can release it, but you’ll hear about it here and on Creattica Daily first!

Interesting. There’s a Creattica project landing page for now, and Creattica Daily. It’ll be interesting to follow this one as well, Envato is ever ambitious and offer high quality overall, so I’m certainly curious as to where this will lead.

Another marketplace for site templates, WordPress themes, and whatnot launched today. ThemeForest is the latest site to roll out in the Envato (formerly Eden.cc) network, which contains sites like PSDTuts and Flash template marketplace FlashDen. Collis Ta’eed’s got a launch post up on Nettuts, another Envato site, and he also announces a launch competition in the ThemeForest blog.

Like all Envato sites, ThemeForest sports a good design, and the platform is known to work since it shares its backbone with FlashDen and AudioJungle. It’s a bit scarce for now though, with 53 site templates, 13 WordPress themes, and 3 Joomla themes as I’m writing this. That will surely change, however, as designers start offering their work through the marketplace. Revenue share rates can be found here. Stay tuned for an interview with Collis Ta’eed over at BloggerTalks tomorrow.

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.