Forum Moderators: not2easy
That fits my experience. The sports team boards at the local newspaper, for example, are nothing but super-flame upon super flame. It's sick.
Given these monied failures, it's even more amazing that Brett and the moderators have made Webmasterworld the best forum, by far, that I have seen.
The weblog angle is intriguing. "Weblog Central" will be a portal of weblogs arranged by subject. You pay a fee and MSNBC hosts your blog.
MSNBC seems like the first big player to get into weblog hosting.
Now if they could just kill their apparent need to refer to themselves as "America's News Channel" every five to ten minutes. Funny how they only seemed to adopt that title after sept 11th.
Not being facetious in any way, but hosting and managing weblogs seems to me a better way to make money than charging for discussion participation which is very very hard. Agreed that there is no major evidence at the moment that any of the pay for hosting style weblog schemes like blogger's paid hosting, the new Radio Userland etc, look like becoming viable revenue models.
However im thinking of MSN's major reach amongst web users who wouldnt know how to make a basic web page, may well jump on the chance to create an on-line journal that is instantly published world wide, without any websaavy at all. Weblogs are becoming almost mainstream now, this may probably cement that status, and be a nice profit centre and further change to intergrate users into a MSN world for MSN.
Everyone can now be a publisher, not only those with a web site and a Web design program, as MSN may well have just made it even easier than the first movers on paid hosting for weblogs incoporating weblog software server side.
"a portal of regularly updated lists of blogs from throughout the Web, arranged by subject"...
So it seems that MSN is not getting into the hosting business as i incorrectly assumed, but creating a super subject-based verson of blogdex, daypop, blogrunner, and blog indexing tools.
