b5media’s drive to strengthen its roster seems to know no bounds, as proven by two new additions in the past few days:

• Bravo Fan—“For a channel dedicated to reality programs with spunk, like Top Chef and My Life on the D-List, it’s only fitting that our writer be a spunky ball of energy too.”


• Traveling the Green Way—“Liz will have all sorts of useful, helpful, and practical information and tips to help make your travels on the planet as eco-friendly and carbon neutral as possible.”

Two days are all that it took for blogging giant b5media to introduce two new sites:

• Viva El Negocio—“Aill keep the Spanish speaking business community “in the know” with news, commentary and tips in their native tongue. It is a first for the channel – and for the network”


• The South Florida Traveler—“Will bring you the inside scoop about what’s going on in South Florida, in between all the time she’s spending trying out new restaurants, tasting wine, and being pampered at the spa”

The press release we received from the yaBloggy network:

yaBloggy Network launched new ChicChannel, including 3 cool blogs about fashion, glam and chic:

• ChicLooking (our new blog about beauty, makeup and cosmetics)


• ChicBuying (our new blog about shopping)


• ChicShaping (our new blog about health and fitness)

The b5media blogging network has recently opened two entertainment blogs:

• Handheld Age—“While handheld games are physically small, they generate big fun and big news. Handheld Age covers all your portable gaming needs, from the Nintendo DS to the Sony PSP, and just about any handheld gaming system that ever made it this side of Game Boy.”


• Grrl TV—“All about the fabulous women holding strong roles on television, in everything from Army Wives to Lipstick Jungle to some new shows such as Fringecoming this fall. With spoilers and recaps, show news and more, Grrl TV will bring you all the latest on some of the best shows on television.”

Splashpress Media has recently retooled 17 of their sites, including:

• Biziki


• Parenting Blog


• Study Driving


• Downloading Legally


• Biz Crunch


• The Health Blog


• Zero Value

For the full list (and background info) of the relaunched properties, read the SP Media press release.

The b5media network has welcomed three sites—one on a comeback trail—to its fold:

• The Hawaii Traveler—“Jody divides her time between the mountains of Colorado and the islands of Hawaii, but it’s the latter expertise that she brings to her blogging.”


• Starked DC—“DC’s political news and gossip is back. J-Michael claims that while he has a political slant, he’ll cry foul on all parties.”


• Thoroughbred Fever—“Blogger Jarrod Horak writes about everything and anything related to horse racing in this new blog.”

The Blog Herald’s Andy Merrett reports:

The BBC has launched its blog network, effectively centralizing and promoting its fifty-or-so home-grown blogs.

The BBC embraced blogging, at least in its simplest form, several years ago but seems keen to push them into the limelight. A number of the BBC’s journalists, DJs, presenters, and other staff maintain blogs, usually to support live events and programmes.

Secret merger talks between blog network giant b5media and Technorati fizzled out recently, TechCrunch reports:

Blog search engine Technorati was days away from merging with blog network b5media when the whole deal blew up earlier this week, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

The talks with Toronto-based b5media (they’re big in Canada) indicate that it is taking the blog roll-up idea more seriously than we previously thought. If the merger with b5media had gone through, Technorati would have gained a network of 340 blogs.

Technorati has a big name, but is largely associated with a failure to live up to its billing. B5media has relentlessly stuck to its remit and expanded to 340 blogs.

I’ve long since lost faith in this horizontal model, which basically claims that small-scale content sites multiplied n-hundred times add up to a better business than three or four wowsers, or a tight-niched, product-based network, like Glam or TechCrunch. In this case, less is almost certainly more.

Over the past few days, the b5media blog network has added three new blogs to its roster:

• Ultralight Delight—“Caters to the phoenomena started by such devices like the ASUS eee, Neo Xplore Classmate, MacBook Air and the OLPC”


• Austin Sound Check—“Will cover the influential and breaking music scene of Austin, Texas”


• Pop Music Scene—“Will cover arguably the largest segment of the current music industry. Popular Music is an exciting genre in music as it provides vast amounts of variety and entertainment”

In contrast to Gawker Media’s recent shedding of three properties, b5media has launched a new pair of blogs:

• Gamerlite—“b5media’s casual games blog. All the genres you can think of are here: puzzle, action, card games, board games, and many more! You name it, we have it.”


• Manscaping-101—a Beauty & Style Channel blog for men that is b5media’s venture into the “world of grooming-blogging”.