One of the biggest tech blogs from the UK is obviously Cash’s Mashable, I know Pete well and I know he puts all his time possible into the site and with working with him in the past I know he only chooses the best people to involve with the project and the best topics/story’s are generated in the blog.

Blog’s are now mainstream media, for sure… Blogs + Social media is the best place to break or.. read a breaking story right now.

Good luck to every other UK blog network specially ShinyShiny… Allthough I guess other notable mentions are.. Splashpress media too, based in London, I think ShinyShiny are based in London too… So’s Mike Butcher from TCUK, although sadly UK Blog networks now have a bad name from themselves… Thanks, Sam Sethi.. Cough cough…

See, Creative-weblogging, there a US, China and German based blog network, there doing pretty well, have some good niche blogs, but sadly no UK based blogs right now. I see the guys from PopSugar there slowly starting to open UK blogs. All major UK blog networks are based in London it seems, only us who are located in Leeds, up north.. Although there are many bloggers and readers located all over the UK. Remember as well though:

A) Gawker, Popsugar, B5media ect.. All have had big VC/Angel investment
B) There located in the US/Canada ect.. They get the best storys right on there doorstep
C) As Vinay says above, UK web users are pretty clueless about what the hell social media / RSS ect.. is
D) UK Blog networks are only fresh, there new… ready to grow

Being like a parochial local paper, you only feed UK audience but not tech-savvy or global audience. The reason they don’t rank on Google.com better than other sites do are not because they have a .co.uk or hosted in UK its just the way they use the language which most of global population tries to search for (Optimisation vs Optimization) .. if you know what I mean.

Engagement with local users, I really hope a large network of UK blogs miss this.. I haven’t seen much UK blogs which receive comments to their Blog Posts including TechCrunch UK. SEO & SEM blogs are different, most of the time the comment and engagement they receive from users are due to the fact they belong to the same industry.

A typical UK visitor notices a Blog as just an other Portal/Site with loaded information… they really miss the part of RSS & Social Media is play as the other commenters have explained here.

It should be 5%.

: )

Utter rubbish.

I came across this just last night, a business owner in a UK business forum with 32,000+ members, asked in the SEO sub-forum about learning more about SEO to improve his website; two themes to the response; do a course or read a book.

Nobody suggested he monitor some blogs (like this one of course, all flattery aside he would learn loads).

I have read that book, it gives a good grounding, but many of the tips and links went out of date so quickly. Blogs are live, today, and therefore the perfect source of now News.

Therefore, my hypothesis would be that it’s not too late, that we won’t miss the boat all together, but that the UK mass market (the public) is simply lagging behind (ask your non-techie friends & family if they know what Google Reader is). Of course they might never get it if we don’t explain the benefits …

I recently introduced some business associates who write blogs to using Google Reader – they hadn’t known about that, they didn’t understand RSS, they just thought it was a neat way of producing jounal entry web pages …

Maybe the concept of Really Simple Syndication passed by the British public without them noticing it …

Maybe we need to explain it in our blogs …

Maybe the British Blog Networks would then see more action???

Or they go the other way and be too UK-centric. No harm in that explicitly but it is going to limit the growth of the blog and ultimately the network too

1. Poverty of ambition. Compared to their US cousins, many of the UK network blogs look low-rent and read like a parochial local paper.

The Gawker Media or the big Weblogs Inc titles can hold their own against ‘big media’. They are entertaining, compelling, outspoken and at times set the news agenda in their niche. The content would work in any context, but is perfectly suited to blog publishing.

I’ve not seen any UK blog network sites that pull this off. And I’ve seen a fair number that miss by a country mile.

I simply cannot imagine friends in America making the effort to read the UK competition the way I do with Gawker’s blogs. They are not in the same league.

2. No commercial nouse. You don’t need to be Donald Trump to realise you ain’t going to get rich running a blog about Coronation Street. Alas, no one told Shiny Media.