TechCrunch is reporting that secret merger talks between blog search engine company, Technorati, and Canadian blog network, b5media, have collapsed.

The reason given was a personality clash between b5′s CEO, Jeremy Wright, and Technorati’s Richard Jalichandra and, according to b5 “a lack of transparency on Technorati’s part during due diligence.”

Judging by that, this “merger” didn’t really stand a chance. One wonders if Technorati took it seriously.

Toronto-based b5media has apparently been looking for “merger partners or acquirers” after failing to raise more VC money — it has so far received stage-one funding of $2 million. It seems Technorati has also had its financial problems.

The notion of a mass roll-up of blog networks to make ad sales more attractive and economical has been around a long time. Personally, the dynamic of that approach has still to be proved to me, especially in the current financial gloom.

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.

No “blog” network has really scaled up to the point where direct-response ads can be replaced with brand advertising. To sustain a company the size of b5 in personnel terms alone, that’s what it takes.

I’ve no doubt b5media will disagree, but they are faced with a double whammy : the brick wall of scaleability in the middle of a credit crunch.

Declaration of interest : I worked for b5media for a few months when it started up, and I am now the owner of a rival content network, Syntagma Media.

Have you noticed the increase in pingback comment spam recently? Our mod panels are full of the stuff.

Much of it seems to come via a gentleman by the name of Elliott Back, who is listed as having a legitimate web design and software business, and writes a blog about Cornell University.

All very respectable, you might think. Then why write the kind of software that monitors keywords in other people’s posts, presumably through Technorati, then scrapes a section of the post automatically onto an untreated WordPress install and sends a pingback to the unfortunate author?

Some sites now lift whole articles for reprint, without permission. Inevitably, the posts are surrounded by great wodges of Adsense blocks.

This is what his website has to say :

I’m not some city slicker looking for a fast buck, or a country boy who’s never seen w-e-b-twooo-point-oh. I do what I like, and I do it well. Whether it’s branding, web presence, search engine optimization, blogging, coding, service-oriented architecture, java, php, facebook development, rich internet applications, mobile developement, web services, thick-client guis, debugging, q&a, testing, or documentation, I’m your man.

He’s obviously a man of talent who could be a useful presence around the web, especially for bespoke pieces of software for particular tasks. Why then the dark side, ripping off other folk’s work for personal profit?

Oliver White at Knee High to a Grasshopper has a word for this flighty freelance :

“People like those who use the plugin that Elliott Back distributes are destroying the web, site owner by site owner. Its impact may be low, but it is those small-time publishers that make the internet such a diverse and wonderous place that it is. Tell me, why the f**k do you get to repeat my hard-worked content for your own f***ing gain? And without my permission?”

He now has many imitators, but his name crops up time and again in the pingbacks. These are all caught in the spam trap, but by then the content appears as duplicate material in the search engines.

Of course, quoting a segment of another’s post with link back is standard procedure on the web, but only as part of a freshly written piece which develops the original’s argument. It’s the machine-like mass production aspect of his method that makes it so pernicious.

Has anyone successfully scuppered this software’s ability to scrape their sites?

Update : Elliott Back has emailed me to say, “I wrote a plugin to import RSS items as blog posts because I wanted to aggregate my and some families members’ blogs into a single feed. I released it, spammers picked up on it, and now it’s killed but some people are still where did they get it from?) using it for spam. If you find spam sites, please DCMA them and get rid of them for good.”

Good news for those of us in Britain delicately poised between buying a Blackberry (I know I’m behind the curve here) and waiting for Apple’s iPhone to arrive. O2 is about to sign the much sought-after contract for the UK and may have it out for Christmas.

It means switching mobile networks for me — I’ve always bought Richard Branson’s Virgin-Motorola phones, and stuck with BT for broadband and landlines. O2, which started off at BT when I worked for them, is now owned by Spain’s Telefonica.

The BBC posted this at midnight last night, after spending most of yesterday at the top of Techmeme :

The agreement with O2 is reported to include Apple receiving a continuing share of the revenue generated for the network operator. The handsets are expected to be sold for about £300 and O2 will be hoping that the lure of the fashionable phone is enough to win customers from rival networks.

It certainly will — has done in my case — and will be a terrific boost to lacklustre O2.

I’ve been watching the hysteria around the iPhone in the states, and read so many reviews of it through the usual suspects, it would be hard to ignore the tiny beast when it arrives. And £300 is only $600, a smallish premium on the U.S. price. Normally, we can expect to pay double.

I wonder though why we have to be so far behind America in these launches?

Update: The Register has just published a piece claiming that the components in the 8Gb iPhone cost $220. That makes the expected UK price of $600 pretty fair taking everything into account. The $220 doesn’t include the cost of assembly, shipping, marketing, or the price of the software that makes the iPhone work. Clearly Apple is relying on lifetime revenues from O2, and sales of other media to make its fortune with this gadget.

Update 2: Bob Cringely is now reporting, “It is my understanding that Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service.” Let’s hope O2 is up to speed on that one.

Jason Fry of The Wall Street Journal mulls over the current meme that blogging is on Death Row. Its demise has been grossly exaggerated, he concludes.

The conversation has centered around some very dubious statistics. Technorati’s 28 million blog index is known to be far short of the true picture. The Blog Herald has estimated a figure of 200 million — this takes in the astonishing number of blogs in China, plus other non-English-language blogs.

Moreover, if you go with the Technorati numbers, only 10 percent of them are regularly updated. Many more are just abandoned. One of my own abandoned blogs, ditched five months ago, still has a PR of 5 and appears on Google’s search page for the name, above that of the blog which replaced it. Lack of reliable statistics dog the blogosphere and attempts to make sense of it.

Gallup claims that 66 percent of Internet users say they never read blogs at all. But, says Fry, “Internet veterans may spy the factory-standard Blogger header or see Comments, Permalinks and Trackbacks and know they’ve landed on a blog, but this isn’t obvious to everybody — including, one imagines, Internet users being polled.” Gallup has admitted this distortion in their poll results.

Fry, who himself runs a successful baseball blog, concludes, “Reports of blogging’s demise are bosh, but if we’re lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.

“My bet, he writes: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening …”

He also thinks that big blog acquisitions were always destined to be a passing phase as media companies sought to jump on the bandwagon. Deals like Time Warner’s $25 million acquisition of Weblogs Inc. “will be emblematic of a brief, bygone time”. What he sees as “the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money” won’t be the last word on the subject.

” … blogging will no longer be a phenomenon. When people talk about it, they’ll often be referring to tools for putting up simple Web sites easily, or a certain style of Web publishing: brightly written, frequently updated and inviting reader conversation.”

And that last bit is what attracted me to blogging in the first place. Just because the dilettantes, the ships who pass in the night, and the simply-curious pass away from the scene, leaving a hard core of serious writers and publishers, doesn’t mean blogging will fade away. It will, in my view, be stronger. Good blogs will have larger audiences and attract better-paying advertising.

Blogging will become a true industry based around personal media techniques. We may have to change the name, though, and generically merge with other Internet information providers.

Then blogging really will be dead. But, as with Kings, we’ll cry, long live blogging.

I wrote this post for Problogger’s 12 Days of Christmas series but, as I’m pushed for time today, I thought I’d reprint it here:

Most book publishers who have been around for a while will tell you that more than half their income comes from the backlist. These are older books no longer found on bookshop shelves but which are listed at the back of every publisher’s catalogue. It’s classic Long Tail stuff, because buyers usually order by post and sales are typically small and steady rather than spiky, as with new books.

Bloggers too have their backlists. These are archived posts which have been indexed by the search engines and continue to draw search traffic months and even years after they were written. Many bloggers will have forgotten all about them. Some will be unaware that all manner of folk are still poking around in their archives. These posts cost you nothing in effort, but continue working for you long after they’re done. They are the hardworking posts : the carthorses of the trade.

One example from my own experience was a post I wrote on Blogsmith, which is the in-house blogging software developed by Weblogs Inc for all its blogs. I noticed it was still in beta and asked Jason Calacanis if the blogware would ever be put on the market. He replied that an announcement would be made shortly. I wrote a very simple post about this tiny scrap of information.

Months later I was still getting scores of visits each day to this post, particularly from Technorati and Google. I could never quite work out why it was so popular. Then Jason announced that the blogware was being offered to businesses. Naturally, I did a short follow-up post.

But the endless stream of traffic to the old post continued, and one day it occurred to me that if I inserted a link to the new post in the old one, visitors would get two for the price of one. Almost all of the visitors clicked the link onto the new post.

It’s good to have a stats package which gives you this information and allows you to follow the pathways of search traffic to your blog. Sitemeter is particularly good as it includes all the details of a visit on a single page.

Now why did this post become a hardworking one? Because it contained unique information. All other posts written on it referred back to mine. The post also ranked highly for the keyword “Blogsmith” which apparently interested a lot more people than I’d imagined. Although I closed the blog down a while back, there must still be a lot of search traffic chasing Blogsmith.

Another “unique” post which generated lots of traffic for months, was one I wrote on the mysterious Google browser. Rumours had been going round for ages that they were working on this at the Googleplex. As usual it was fairly top secret.

Then one day, my stats showed a visitor who used a browser called Google 4.0. I wrote a kind of fantasy post about a mythical monster landing on Syntagma’s shores. From that moment until I closed down the Blogspot site, there was constant search traffic to the post. Again, it was unique information, not just commentary on another blogger’s post. So uniqueness makes for hardworking entries. And interlinking within the archive makes them more hardworking still.

What other qualities create hardworking posts? If we look at the way we read our newspapers, we might get a few clues.

Generally, we turn to the hard news first, especially in our interest groups. So it might be the sports section. We’ll skim down looking for our team by name and digest the facts. The same with politics and general news. We’ll look for hard facts and create an image in our minds of the shape of the day.

Then we’ll turn to the op-ed pages and search out our favourite columns, usually written by a big-name journalist. We will, at this stage, be seeking a pre-digested version of the news, with special insights from somebody in the know.

Thus, we want hard facts first, then additional commentary to make sense of them from a trusted source. These are the basic elements of a hardworking post.

1. Hard facts.
2. Unique information, wherever possible. You’ll need to seek this out or it won’t be unique.
3. Your take on the facts. This is your op-ed moment, when you add value to the baseline information you’ve assembled for the post. If readers begin to trust your opinions, they’ll come back for more.

The electronic marketplace is flooded with content, to the extent that the price of it as a raw commodity is next to zero. However, your content will rise in value when it attains a permalink which is indexed by the search engines. Now your post is not just a transient bit of fluff blowing away in the wind. It becomes a stable part of the Internet conversation, accessible by anyone, and a store of value for the blogger or blog owner.

So, don’t be fooled by the apparent flimsiness of blog posts. The two I’ve used to illustrate my points here were very flimsy indeed. But they contained unique information, hard facts, plus a little op-ed added value. It doesn’t take much to make a hardworking post … and then make it work harder still.