Forum Moderators: rogerd
Over the last couple of months I have been experimenting with some ideas for a new site. Right now, I am thinking about building a syndicate of blogs, where bloggers would participate in a revenue-sharing business model. Each blogger would get their own sub-domain (e.g. games.example.com, fashion.example.com, etc.), and would participate in the revenue for their blog and out of a pool that I would set aside since every blogger will be supporting each other in the network.
If I go ahead with this idea, I have a couple of questions:
1) Where or how would be the best way to recruit top-notch bloggers, who can attract a large following?
2) Which CMS platform is most appropriate for this type of model? I would need to have a platform that has good spam protection, and also allows me to manage the site with multiple bloggers each subdomain being associated with a category. I am considering MoveableType (which seems to have quite a few large sites written in it), ExpressionEngine (seems to be well designed), Drupal (possibly to costly to build on), and Joomla (1.5 is a question mark). Wordpress is a possibility, but the architecture does not seem to be extensible enough for what I am looking for.
I am also considering using Pligg to build a Digg-like homepage, but I am not sure whether this is long-term a good business model. It doesn't seem like the content of the site itself has much long-term value.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Rich
[edited by: rogerd at 6:56 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2007]
[edit reason] no specifics or URLs, please [/edit]
If you go the latter route, look for bloggers with a reasonably long posting history (lots of blogs flame out after a short time) and who seem to have good insights on the topic. See who links to them - if they've been around for a while, you would expect them to have at least a few dozen links. Links from prominent blogs would be a vote of confidence.
Thanks for the hints. Do you know if there is a forum somewhere, where bloggers might hang out? I like your idea of visiting Technorati and just start watching who is doing what. Thanks.
Rich
