Blog networks

Blog networks appear to have a life cycle. Today it is Scientific American that is blowing up its blog network.

Dave Winer, one of the medium’s pioneers, once defined a blog as, “the unedited voice of a person.”

sure.

It’s an honorable notion of what a blog should be, which suits independent bloggers just fine. News outlets, however, have unique responsibilities to their readers and to the public and as such their standards must differ.

So… maybe don’t pretend to have blogs? Just call them columns like you used to?

First, we are publishing a new set of Blog Network Guidelines so that everyone, bloggers and readers alike, is fully aware of our basic operational ground rules and protocols.

To make the most of these new guidelines, we are also reshaping the network to work more closely with our blogggers, create an improved balance of topic areas and bring in some new voices.

One of those statements is believable, anyway.

On down to a comment from what I guess is a staffer?

The reduction in the size of the network is not a statement about the quality of bloggers’ work—any more than any periodic update in any magazine’s content offerings is such a statement. Our decisions involved a variety of factors, including frequency of posts and traffic.

and adherence to the new Guidelines?

ah well. Like I said at the top, networks appear to have a natural life-cycle. The ones that are tied up to a traditional publishing entity perhaps are on a short burn from the start. They are just waiting for enough little kerfuffles to build up into a profound nervousness on the part of the suits upstairs. Then down comes the hammer.