b5media

December 6th,2005

Temporarily Closing Blog Applications

By Administrator

b5media is creeping up on it’s 3 month anniversary (just under 2 weeks away) and as directors we’ve been doing a little reviewing of how we’ve been traveling.

As with all start ups there have been successes and failures, we’ve gained some fans and detractors, we’ve learned lessons-a-plenty and I think grown quite a lot as bloggers.

I view blogging (and life if we want to get a little philosophical) as something of a journey. It’s like hiking through the mountains and catching glimpses of the destination ahead but knowing that to get there you have to take a step at a time. It’s all very well to have the big picture in mind but getting there sometimes means taking sidesteps, detours, taking rests, adapting to conditions etc.

What the hell am I talking about? Sorry - I’ve been known to be a little tangental.

All I’m really saying is that there are different phases of the journey and that b5media is coming to the end of one and the start of another. As I’ve said before - while we’ve come a long way in 3 months we have a long way to go - and to get there we need to shift gears.

We’ve been in something of a growth spurt the past 3 months. We asked for applications from bloggers wanting to join us and we certainly got them. There have been literally hundreds of pitches for new blogs and we are still working through them (although I’m happy to say we’re coming to the end of that). There are still new blogs getting ready to launch in the coming weeks but we’ve decided to temporarily close applications for new blogs/bloggers (with one exception - see below for details of this).

The reason for this is simply that it’s time for us to change gear a little. As regular readers of this blog know, we’re getting to the point of needing new servers, we’re still migrating our merged blogs across and we have a wonderful existing group of bloggers who we want to spend more time working with to improve the blogs we already have.

It’s also the end of the year and a time for a little holiday. Here in Australia it’s summer and I’m heading to the beach for a week or two in January and I’m sure the rest of the b5 gang will enjoy a breather also.

I say that we’re ‘temporarily’ closing applications because we fully expect a time will come in the not too distant future when we’ll look to grow the network further in terms of blog numbers. We’re not going to publicly put a time frame to this but expect it to be another 2-3 months.

In that time you’ll see a few new blogs from the last applications that we’re processing and maybe a few from current bloggers but the growth will be slower.

There is one Exception to this rule! - We are taking applications for another week or two from bloggers wanting to join our soon to be released video game channel. As we mentioned a day or two ago we’d love to hear from gamers willing to pull themselves away from their console for long enough to blog about their obsession.