Profile: Weblogs, Inc.

Company: Weblogs, Inc.

Founded: September 24, 2003

Location:

Weblogs, Inc.
2200 Colorado Avenue, Suite 729
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Phone: 310-828-8284
Fax: 310-861-0600

or

Weblogs, Inc.
The Chrysler Building
132 East 43rd Street, Suite 1000
New York, New York 10017

What is it?

The Weblogs, Inc. network of weblogs (WIN) is a blog network – literally an affiliation of weblogs that are each focused on a particular industry or topic. For instance, my favorite weblogs, inc. blogs are The Web 2.0 Weblog, engadget, tvsquad, therssweblog and cinematical. There is a list to all weblogs, inc. blogs at the home page.

In their own words:

“Our Philosophy In Three Parts — Why we are doing this?
Traditional journalism is, in a word, broken. We’ve spent the last decade working in publishing (online and offline) and we believe that traditional journalism is imploding. News outlets like the New York Times are experiencing huge embarrassments like Jayson Blair. We believe these episodes are based on the increasing pressure media companies have to watch their bottom lines, as well as the fact that these outlets do not allow user feedback. If The New York Times was formatted like a Weblog, then the subjects in Jayson Blair’s stories would have been able to note the errors on The New York Times’ own Web site! Something that simple — empowering your readers to comment — could have prevented serious damage to the reputation of a respected news source.
On top of the unnecessarily one-way journalism being practiced today, the media space is suffering from the appearance of (and in some cases outright) impropriety. Do you really trust CNBC to report on their parent company GE? How did you feel when CNBC had the then CEO of GE, Jack Welch, on air all day? How do you feel when reading Time magazine’s coverage of AOL? Do you really trust ABC News to report on Disney? Even if these media outlets are doing a good job, and many of them certainly are, it is difficult to believe that you are getting unbiased news when journalists are working for the companies on which they are reporting.
We believe participatory journalism is a better model than one-way journalism. Of course, participatory journalism is harder, more work and still developing as a discipline. We sincerely hope to help this field mature.
Talent wants to be free. One of the after effects of the dot com boom and bust is that many of the most talented journalists want to work for themselves. After the bust everyone realized that a) no company is loyal to them and b) that they can often make a better living on their own and have a better lifestyle.
Let’s face it, working from home and having time to spend with your family, go on vacation, visit the gym in the middle of the day, and to pursue your interests is invaluable. As a journalist you get little to no security working at a big company. So if you can make the same living (or better) working independently with a better lifestyle, then why wouldn’t you do that?
Partnering is better than owning. Our goal is to partner with individual bloggers, letting them do what they do best (writing, creating community, researching) and support them with what we do best (upgrading the software that drives their Web site, generating revenue, running the business). We split the profits 50/50 with each of our bloggers taking out only hard costs (i.e., sales commissions, credit card fees).
We also allow bloggers to leave our network at any time, for any reason, and take their content with them. The concept behind our agreement is that if you partner with us on a Weblog and leave a year later, you can take all your content with you and do whatever you want with it. Our only condition is that we keep our copy of the content that is already in our archive. We think this is the fairest arrangement possible and that it promotes the kind of partnership we want to have with our bloggers.” Link

Weblogs, Inc. is an add supported network (banner and adsense), with adsense revenues recently reported at $2,000 daily by Jason Calcanis, the co-founder.

Weblogs, Inc. is the largest blog network, with over 80 blogs and 1,000 weekly posts covering 75 industries.Nick Denton‘s Gawker is the second largest blog network (wonkette, a Gawker blog, is one of my favorites).

They also have a “best of” site/feed here.

Weblogs, Inc. has a terrific network of blogs that we read daily. We’re hoping they allow direct trackbacks again soon to become more “web 2.0″ish

Screen Shots:

Founders:

Brian Alvey, CEO & Co-Founder
Jason Calacanis, Chairman & Co-Founder

Relevant Links:

Weblogs, Inc. corporate blog
Joining WIN

Jason Calcanis Weblog
Brian Alvey Weblog
BlogHerald on Blog Networks #1
BlogHerald on Blog Networks #2
Work boxes on weblogs, inc v. gawker
Web pro news on weblogs,inc. trackback policy (on trackback issue)
Mostly muppet open letter to jason calcanis (on trackback issue)
April fools on cnn acquisition (and here iBLOGthere4iM)
Furl search weblogs, inc.
Technorati tag: weblogsinc
Delicious tag: weblogsinc
Technology Review on Weblogs, Inc.

Tags: weblogsinc, jasoncalcanis, web2.0, techcrunch, blogs, blogging, gawker