Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Blogging Ohio Signing Off

Speaking of ill-fated media ventures, BloggingOhio announced that they are ceasing operations. The blog was part of Weblogs, Inc., an AOL-owned collection of for-profit blogs. Unlike George, I'm not terribly sorry to see them go. Over the course of it's nine month or so history, B.Oh went from a venture that annoyed me to a blog that sat on my RSS reader but was hard to care one way or the other about.

I don't want to pile on as I'm sure the people involved put a lot of work in and are hurting now. But I note the passing of the blog to underscore one part of their undoing. B.Oh did little to be part of the blogging community. Occasionally one of us (including the Pages) would end up in one of their "Around the State" posts, but the mentions were infrequent and they had no permanent blogroll. All the permanent links on the blog steered you to other AOL properties.

Anyone who has had even a modicum of success attracting an audience to a blog will tell you it's all about links and comments on other blogs. The corporate masters running BloggingOhio appeared to think they could build traffic independent of all that. Apparently they were wrong.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Pho --

I never heard of them, sad to say, until longer-time dwellers in the Ohio 'sphere (like yourself) began the eulogies. Were they about politics, economic development, promotion? AOL, or TIME, seems to be too corporate to grasp the free-wheeling nature of things today.

Scott Piepho said...

Bill:

They were about Fun Stuff About Ohio!! There was a kernel of a good idea there, but it sure came off as some suit's idea of what blogging should look like.

Tobias Buckell said...

Well, we weren't really about 'any one thing' that some mythical 'suits' wanted :-) I've been a blogger online (www.tobiasbuckell.com) since 1998, and have been an author and freelancer for a while (though I went fulltime recently). There was no mysterious men in dark suits overlording the blog, just an assemblage of Ohio bloggers and writers who AOL hired to do what we were geeked out about. Tom Barlow, as the Great Ohio Bike Tour planner/adviser knew more about Ohio than anyone I know, and Chriz Barzak has focused on Youngstown's amazing revitazlization for the last month, Jamie Rhein was a travel writer for many magazines, so she wrote about cool stuff.

I know many decided to hate us from day one, particularly as we didn't do 'political blogging' about Ohio :-)

Tobias Buckell said...

I should say 'were no mysterious men' :-) Typo. Other typos and whatnot in there I blame on morning lack of coffee...

Jeff Hess said...

Shalom Scott,

Oh. There was a Blogging Ohio?

B'shalom,

Jeff