At a recent Engadget meetup, editors Peter Rojas and Ryan Block, along with Jason Calacanis announced that they will be adding their own Engadget lab which will conduct PC Magazine type exchaustive reviews and benchmark testing.

Niall Kennedy comments on the venturing out from the WIN network aspect:

…that sounds like a nice departure from the typical pay-per-article model of weblog networks. Editors Peter Rojas and Ryan Block will work out of their new office in New York with possibly a few other members of the Weblogs Inc. network. The new office space will include a special podcasting room for interviews with visiting companies as well as the weekly Engadget podcast.

Last week I slammed on blogging networks pretty hard as being writer exploitation primarily due to their low pay, but there are clearly exceptions to the rule like this one. This blog under network seem to be offering opportunities and expansion well beyond the mother ship. If a writer could join one of these networks and grow their time and energy into something like this, well that’s a pretty darn good gig for both parties, not only the network owner(s). Also, I’m guessing the pay is significantly better for this gig than the typical deals these networks employ. Somebody in the know please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

And Peter Rojas is a writing machine, producing 5000+ mostly high quality posts a year himself. Wow. This must be all he does (?). I’ve been writing in this blog regularly (my most updated blog, actually) — but definitely as a part time gig — for just over two years now and am approaching 2,500 posts and nearly 600,000 words. A long, long ways to go to scratch Rojas territory. If one measures his output to success, it pretty much needs to be a 10-12 hour day, 6 days a week at least primarily on one blog. Kudos to him on his hard work, dedication and high quality ratio. He deserves it.

I’ve also been hard on Dear Jason in the past too, but I genuinely give him and the Engadget crew big props and wish them great success on this. Calacanis also said that last month’s bandwidth bill was $12,000. I’m sure, however, that advertising has that well covered.

So congratulations to the Engadget and Weblogsinc crew on this new venture. Wonder when or if someday I’ll be able to read Engadet as a full blown magazine in Zinio just like PC Magazine? Hmm …

(shaking crystal ball)

• Gawker blog network puts Sploid and Screenhead up for sale
• [site news] Average post length numbers
• Another sweatshop blog network emerges
• Engadget working Treo birthday cake
• Simply Dumb and Wacko Jacko
• Day 276: Current office main configuration includes Tablet PC, 3 PCs, Mac