An important update to my recent post about b5media, which is below. In addition to getting some financing, they are also getting the skills and abilities of my friend and former journalism colleague Mark Evans, who just quit his job at the National Post to join b5media as their vice-president of operations. His announcement is here. Congratulations, Mark — and to b5media. Rick Segal of J.L. Albright pays tribute to Mark here, and Om gives some props as well, while Kent Newsome has some thoughts about the challenges confronting a blog network.
Original post:
Congrats to Jeremy Wright and the rest of the gang over at the blog network b5media, including Duncan Riley and a host of others. Rick Segal broke the news earlier today that he and J.L. Albright co-led an investment in the company with Brightspark, which is Delrina co-founder Mark Skapinker’s shop. In response to some questions from interested onlookers, Rick — ever the iconoclast — even announced how much the two had invested: $2-million U.S. in total. As he put it:
Lots and lots of people are going to go, yeah right, bunch of VC lemmings chasing flavor of the month, pissing away gobs of cash on another me too blogger pile. In the words of Seth Godin, I can only respond; so?
In an interview with the Blogging Times, Duncan discussed what the team plan to use the money for, which appears to include a salary for Mr. Riley, among other things (b5 also plans to spend some of the money compensating its bloggers). More on the deal from Problogger and b5media partner Darren Rowse.
Update:
Phil Sim of Squash isn’t convinced that blog networks really make sense as a business, or as an investment. And Nick Douglas at Valleywag heads straight for the jugular, as usual, although coming from someone at another blog network he might be protesting just a wee bit too much, methinks. Plus the capitalization thing is totally offside 🙂 Shel Israel has some thoughts here, and Syntagma (a competitor) has some more critical thoughts.