Or maybe I’m reading the graph wrong…

I have to completely disagree with this. Great blogs are always welcome. There are great bogs that add a lot of value to you and there are dozens of millons that don’t add any value at all. For the ones that don’t add much value, they better be done for reasons other than bringing in money, otherwise they will eventually flop.

Individual blogs (professional or not) will fail or suceed and that does not mean the end of blogging is anywhere near. The blogosphere will not stop growing because somebody is on a bad mood. Even if that somebody is supposed to be a blogging king.

Just as a reference, I don’t blog professionally, but I love Darren’s stuff.

Brad: Dude, we are a tabloid news site. Of course we post stuff that our readers might want to read. What do you want us to do, post tax tables or charts?

And who are these people typing stuff on this site?

I don’t want to be a “stick in the mud” but a blog should inform the reader about a particular subject or issue – not post gross pictures just for shock value.

When I update my blog, I try to give my readers something they can take away with them long after closing their internet browser.

Denton is a smart man and he has always kept his network fairly tight. His approach has been to go after “big fish”, and this restruturing reflects that.

The problem with Screenhead and Sploid was a lack of focus. It just looks like a bunch of random crap strewn together. The whole Gawker approach is also a little odd, if you ask me. I’d bet they’d have a lot more readers if their sites were written and designed normally — but instead their whole concept has been built around wacky writing, so i guess that’s what they’re stuck with now.

But back to the issue of blog networks and succesful sites — blog networks are a GREAT way to fund and promote new sites. You can have huge sucess if you do it right. But it all comes down to being GOOD. A site has to be good in its own right or it won’t take off. If you have a great site and you promote it with a big network, it will get huge. If you have a lame site, no network — not even plugging on the front page of AOL — will make up for that.

They shouldn’t complain about stickiness when they almost shove new users out of their site themselves.

And what kind of silliness is this: “The world does not need more blogs”. I think what he meant was that “the world does not need more blogs that pull articles from other sites and then don’t even allow comments”

Like others, I’ve been thinking hard about this tipping point recently and the question distils down to: will the eventual returns equal the effort and costs required? If you have links into companies like AOL, as Jason Calacanis had, maybe it’s a good move. Otherwise … I don’t have the answer at this point.

“Sites need to be well-managed and well-designed and even then it is harder and harder to launch a site. The world does not need more blogs,” adding that if you count all the pages on MySpace, “there is approximately one reader for every blog out there.”

An existing (and popular) blog network allows new blogs get an artificial “leg-up” that independent blogs are unable to avail themselves to — while the leg-up’s upside is obvious, the down-side is it can be a rather expensive way to find out something won’t reach critical mass…

“The world does not need more blogs” — now that’s a great t-shirt slogan