I’ve been a fan of the site Blogexplosion a site which tries to help blog owners generate some new readers. Some people think Blogexplosion and sites that copy it are low rent and haven’t bothered. I’d agree with this sentiment with the copycat sites, but BE had been above the trash. Like any other community based site, it’s a relatively smaller group of active users and then people like me who stop by and check out what’s happening once in awhile.

Under the original owners the site came out with new features fairly frequently, some of which were interesting and useful for building blog traffic. While I don’t use Blogexplosion much for this site any more, I’ve continued to advertise and support them in the banner rotator across the site. You sign up under that link, my account gets a little bit of extra credits, it’s not a bad deal when everything is working.

Today I removed that banner because the new owner(s) suck. Totally. Not suck so much at BlogExplosion — yet — but at one of their sister properties they are sucking badly. They already axed the podcasting element to BE. My hopes that a larger, more reputable fish might acquire BlogExplosion have been squashed.

When new owners screw up a promising thing
First the original owners sold for $100,000 to somebody who couldn’t put together the financing, a deal brokered by the B5media CEO, Jeremy Wright and then the deal went to some other organization who seems to be killing the site and its properties through neglect. It’s like giving away your pets to somebody who infrequently feeds them.

Take for instance their blog hosting property Blogcharm [Hmm Blogcharm Review], pictured at the top of this post which promised to share the revenue 50/50 with blog owners. This is what our group has been using for group blogging about Massive Multiplayer Online, virtual worlds and gaming since late January 2006. We thought it would be cool to build this idea out on a third party blogging service.

What a mistake that has turned out to be.

For awhile our blog was at least somewhat functional, although it was always slow loading, but lately it’s been completely unreachable. For two days nobody could even get to their blog because of “too many connections” errors. Now you can get to the blog page, but can’t login. Argh.

It gets worse.

The BlogExplosion forums have several people very upset — and rightfully so — flaming the organization because the problem. No or very little communication back to the community using the service. Did they run out of bandwidth? Money? Both? Some comments indicate there is a problem with seeing revenue being credited to blogs too:

“For those saying they have noticed earning slowing -I ask you to check back through this and other threads-payments have been stopped for weeks.
I finally had an answer to one of my tickets-and all they said was that this was a busy time-I replied that I was going to go ahead and file the fraud charges(truth story) if they did not remove the advertising about them paying us.” — theadventureman, forum member since September 2005

“At least I should be able to login my account and copy everything!!! I mean com’on!” — WonderIceQueen, forum member since January 2006

And then a word from OrangeHairedBoy (emphasis mine) which ends with him telling members to fill out a trouble ticket (the ultimate black hole for communication, when the ticket status isn’t publically available for scrutiny):

We are, of course, aware of the BlogCharm issue. I have spent the majority of the morning on the phones trying to resolve this issue. I will be back up as soon as possible.

Of course, we apologize for the interruption in the service. As you can imagine, these things are always completely unexpected, but I am working on it

And OrangeHairedBoy yesterday afternoon and then 8:03pm:

I’ll be sending an email to the BlogCharm users once service is restored … I know there was some database corruption. I am in the process of recovering it now so we don’t have to roll back to a backup. It seems that the same problem attributed to the earnings not showing.

This morning the sites have returned but several people are reporting login problems (same thread). I can’t login to our account either. It appears that the sole savior for restoring the site, OrangeHairedBoy, has gone asleep.

What a mess. I realize that none of this directly relates to Blogexplosion, but it’s owned by the same people which worries me about their flagship service. I’m not going to advertise or promote something, someone and/or some place that I don’t believe in any more. I still like BlogExplosion and will continue using it from time to time to find new voices to read, but I’m not going to suggest that you check it out until the not-so-new-any-more owners get their act together.

Also, I’m getting our group out of there as quickly as possible. We had already been planning a departure for the first of the year. Hopefully our group blog stays up long enough to copy over the data to a new location. We’ll host it ourselves on one of our own dedicated servers going forward as we should have done from the beginning. Hindsight always 20/20, right?

Not learning from history
Should know better because I was burned badly by a third party ‘free’ hosting deal in the late nineties. Still, our group wanted to support a service and owners that we believed were on the right track. And then in a rather bizarre change of events they decided they wanted to focus on something else. 11 months and new owners can change everything.

This is a big part of what concerns me about a lot of these so called Web 2.0 sites/services out there. They build and flip or build and get bored. Either way, the people — not users, visitors, surfers — the people who support and help build these sites all too often are the ones who get left behind.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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