Blog network Shiny Media and LG has joined forces to create a moblog by the name of City Clickers. From the Shiny press release:

Just take a picture on your mobile, e-mail it directly to the site and you could be in with a chance of winning one of ten LG Viewty phones plus free phone bill for two months. The winners – as voted for by a panel of judges comprising the main European blog networks – get to become our official photographers for 8 weeks.

Two heavyweights of the blogosphere, Know More Media and b5media have announced a partnership. According to the press release, KMM will license the publishing technology and utilize the advertising sales network of b5 in exchange for equity.

To quote Know More’s CEO:

“This partnership enables us to focus on our audience, our quality business content, and our writers; and we believe it will lead to a more stable publishing platform as well as substantial incremental traffic and revenue growth.”

Blog network Splashpress Media has just partnered with Contec Innovations, Inc. for the mobile distribution of blog content via BUZmob, as announced in The Blog Herald by J. Angelo Racoma of SP Media.

Splashpress Media’s mobile portal includes feeds from its various blogs and other content-generating sites. When accessed, the portal will automatically detect a user’s device and browser type, and will serve the content in a format that is readable by that device, and organized according to topic, with easy navigation links. This includes full fledged web browsers, WAP browsers, mobile browsers, and the like.

It is evident that this new wave of advanced marketing strategies using blogs and content writing has been the new resort of most companies in the world of business today. These are the new elements that have helped businesses evolve into better managed companies aimed at attaining set goals.

Marketing is the life stream of any business entity and all marketing people will exhaust all means to use any advanced and new ways of making marketing strategies work. Hence, the new age of marketing has turned to these technology driven gifts called blogging and content writing and have had headway in doing so as we can see today.

In a time where marketing automation is a big focus, it’s important not to forget that your website is, “...the place that brings everything together in a unified place…” This is a very important point. Think about the times you’ve received marketing communications from a company, gone to their website, and been confused because what you encountered there was nothing related to their marketing communication. Consistency of story is hugely important to having your content drive action. – New Rules of Marketing & PR

[tags]blogging, blog marketing, marketing practices, marketing strategies, advertising, promotions[/tags]

Finding no sense in continuing the ever flopping world of Yahoo photos, rumor has it that this portion of the search engine empire will be shutting down soon in favor of Flickr, a growingly popular photo image hosting site.

Yahoo photos was never really able to reach and achieve its goals. A lot of players entered the scene such as Flickr and sad to note that they had done much better as far as performance and preference is to be gauged. Hopefully, people would be aware of this soon since there are still people who use them and are totally unaware of the impending shutdown of the Yahoo Photo category.

The news is out (all over the place) that Yahoo is shutting down its stumbling Yahoo Photos site in favor of Flickr. But unless you’re read the tech blogs, you wouldn’t know it.

Here we are more than 12 hours after the news broke, and there’s no announcement on Yahoo Photos, Flickr’s news page, the Flickr blog or any Yahoo site. I’m a member of both photo services, and I haven’t received an e-mail or seen a blog post. What gives, Yahoo? Why are you keeping your users in the dark?

I don’t have many pictures in my Yahoo Photos account (I switched to Flickr long ago) but I do have some photos there. What’s going to happen to them? Am I going to have to migrate them to Flickr myself? More importantly, what steps is Yahoo going to take to ensure I don’t lose any photos in the migration?

Updated @ 3:19 PDT: Still no e-mail announcement, but Yahoo has posted migration instructions for Yahoo Photos users. See our post on the topic. – Hey, Yahoo—What’s Gonna Happen To My Photos?

[tags]yahoo photos, flickr, yahoo photos shutdown, yahoo photos migration, yahoo photos closure[/tags]

To help push their efforts further, Venture Capital invested $4.5 million to help heave the promising UK blog network which draws close to 3 million readers daily. Such investments made from generous donors who see a promising future for aggressive blogging investments done today has been the obvious reason for such an enormous investment.

Wagner told the Sunday Times: “There are businesses that could have been massively successful but they were denied the resources to fast-track a fabulous idea. There’s got to be a different way of doing this.”

With the investment, a lot of things are being heard here and there as to what would be the next move of Shiny Media and where the money will be going to. With so much plans architected by Ashely Norris, answers to such rumors and queries are sure to be answered in the next couple of days.

I’ll be speaking with Ashley Norris tomorrow to find out more on Shiny’s plans. Commenting on his blog he says: “We have come a very long way in a short space of time with no money. The investment will help us make some of our more ambitious dreams realities.”

[tags]blog network, shiny media, mergers, acquisitions[/tags]

David Krug recently interviewed b5media president Jeremy Wright on 901am.com. Wright talks about the recent deal between b5media and Glam network for the syndication of b5media blog content into the various Glam publications (online). Wright says the primary motivation for the deal was revenue.

The point of this deal for us was revenue. I honestly believe b5 has done a pretty kick-ass job at bringing on great writers who write fantastic content. These days they produce somewhere between 150-300 posts per day. Since we launched a year and a bit ago, we really have focused on creating valuable content – and effectively figuring that if you have enough traffic it’s hard not to make money with it.

Wright states that the relationship is a simple one, in that Glam benefits by getting exposure from b5media, and b5media benefits by its bloggers likewise gaining exposire via Glam’s own network. Glam apparently “sell[s] ads really well,” and b5media gets Glam “more revenue by virtue of having a greater reach.”

So it’s a win-win situation. In these cases, relationships between blog networks can be beneficial rather than adversarial.