WordPress.com, the hosted blog service from Automattic has suffered a major outage today, bringing down millions of free blogs, and a number of well known blogs.

The outage started at around 1pm US PST (8am AEDT), and at the time of writing (2:50pm PST) all sites on WordPress.com remain offline.

“VIP” sites affected include the GigaOm network, TechCrunch, and the entire Cheezeburger network.

There are reports that the front page of WordPress.com at one stage displayed the message “There was a small systems error. Please try refreshing the page and if the error is still there drop us a note and let us know,” however we are unable to get the page to load at all.

As Allen Stern at CenterNetworks points out, the outage comes less than 2 weeks since TechCrunch moved from Rackspace to WordPress.com.

More when available.

Update: back up as at 3:40pm PST.

WordPress.com Suffers Major Outage is a post from: The Inquisitr

Canadian tech journalist Mathew Ingram has forgone for the corporate teet and joined the GigaOm blog network.

Ingram writes on GigaOm that “As the web has filled up with fast-food-style news hits and me-too blog posts, each more shallow than the last, I think the kind of intelligent and insightful coverage GigaOM specializes in has become even more important now, and I hope to be able to contribute to that.”

Ingram and I haven’t seen eye to eye over the years, but although we may have had our disagreements he is one of the smarter tech writers in the space, and certainly up there as one of the best tech writers in Canada. Besides, I love seeing career journalists switch from newspapers (Ingram was at the Globe and Mail for 15 years) to new media outlets; although he is one of many, it’s further evidence that there is there a profitable, sustainable future in new media. It also shows again that there is a future for talented old school journalists, one that pays the bills, away from newspapers, despite the rubbish we hear from those in heritage media who are ignorant of what is going on in the space.

The GigaOm network would appear to be going from strength to strength, and stands today as one of the few companies outside of AOL that is going well with the many blogs blog network model that has mostly gone out of favor in the last 12-18 months.

Mathew Ingram Joins GigaOm is a post from: The Inquisitr

The new white look in blog designs jettisons content borders in favor of no borders at all. Content, advertising and background share the same uninterrupted white, or with some limited background changes/ lines. Visually the designs offer a clean look that reduces visual clutter and presumably helps speed load times by reducing the number of CSS elements required for each page.

Here’s some recent examples of tech blogs embracing white.

GigaOm

In GigaOm’s current template, all lines are removed between background, content and advertising. The header in maintained as a block, a common element in this type of design.

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb goes for a full width block header, and a thin line between content and advertising, but blends the rest.

Mashable

Mashable is an interesting mix. The current template embraces horizontal lines, but ignores vertical lines. The sidebar ad elements get gray individual boxes.

VentureBeat

VentureBeat has taken minimalism differently to the others, embracing it with their header as well as the rest of the site. The sidebar gets a background, but there are no other dividers.

Is white right for your site?

Just because white is in at the moment doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s right for your site. There are advantages, including the potential of increased CTR if you’re not dividing your ads and content. The theory there goes that by not providing a visual barrier to ads, visitors are more likely to see them, therefore click on them.

The problem though with white is that if you do have a lot of sidebar items up that aren’t great to look at, white may actually highlight their nature more than a traditional side.

Also white can appear to be stark visually and may be a turn off. For example VentureBeat has combined white with a gray text color, so the white appears very, very white. It actually hurts my eyes, but that might be a thing with me only. Always keep in mind that you need to maximize readability on your site.

Conclusion

There are many more sites not mentioned embracing white at the moment, so there’s no doubt that it’s a trend that is well and truly in place. It’s this years take on Web 2.0, and it will probably spread a lot further until the next design trend is embraced.

White is the new black in blog design is a post from: The Inquisitr

As we end 2008, the year ahead offers the biggest challenge ever in the history of blogging.

Although blogging dates back to the beginning of the first dot com boom, it truly came of age as the second bubble grew. From the rise of the political bloggers in 2004, blogging became mainstream, and with that came money and commercialism.

Blogging is more than its commercial endeavors, and as a non-commercial platform for networking, global communication and sharing blogging has many great days ahead of it, and may actually boom in 2009 after a dip in popularity over 2007 and 2008 as social networks became a first choice of communications and networking outlet for many.

But the commercial side of blogging is facing a difficult year. The same issues that face the broader Tech and Web 2.0 spheres face blogging: a dearth of VC, declining ad revenues, and even tougher competition as many try to compensate for lower ad revenues by driving even more traffic.

The dangers for commercial blog owners come on a number of fronts, but there’s one trend we’ve already seen begin.

The rise of the Uber Blog

Some may moan at the use of the word uber, so feel free to substitute it with big or large, because the meaning remains the same. An Uber Blog is a blog that combines different content streams into one large blog, with one primary top level url. The Huffington Post is an example I’ve used before. The blending of content can be in related fields, or non related fields; for example, you might blend specialties in tech into the one tech blog.

It has already begun

In a post asking whether the blog network model is dying, I made similar observations on a number of companies, some I’ll repeat here

ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb has gone from a traditional blog network in to the uber blog model. Owner Richard McManus gave away or sold the two blogs in the network, at the same time he was launching new blogs under the ReadWriteWeb brand. The reason given by Richard: a focus on the core brand.

Silicon Alley Insider

Henry Blodget merged the two blogs outside of Silicon Alley Insider into sub-urls on alleyinsider.com. While each blog maintains their own name and heading, they are now all parts of alleyinsider itself as opposed to standalone blogs.

Gawker Media

In between selling blogs, Nick Denton merged Valleywag into Gawker on a sub-url. Valleywag keeps its header and name, but is now a column of Gawker.

b5media

b5media hasn’t yet started blending blogs into larger blogs, but has instead undertaken a variation of the theme: branded portals. Content from b5media’s business and celebrity channels fall under the banner of a larger site, which also acts as a gateway to the content.

Why one large blog?

The reasoning behind the move is remarkably simple: it’s easy to sell ads on one blog vs many blogs, for a couple of reasons. The biggest is simply traffic: having one big blog means increased traffic to the core blog making the sales pitch more appealing. Second, advertisers will often want to target the one blog and not buy the subsidiary blogs; maybe not always, but none the less common in my experience. If you have one big blog with various streams you’ve got better odds of getting high value advertising against all the content.

Expanding outside the niche

Having sub blogs within a large blog, or amalgamating smaller blogs gives commercial blog operators the ability to broaden their content range outside of a specific niche, often with the advantage of not necessarily polluting the core product. The content for example on Silicon Alley Insider and ReadWriteWeb’s sub-blogs is complimentary, and allows both sites to increase content outside the core sites focus, driving growth and new visitors to the product as whole.

Three companies that haven’t blended blogs but could or should

TechCrunch

Michael Arrington followed the typical blog network route with the TechCrunch blogs, launching new sites on new urls. The problem with the network is that it has never produced a hit that has come close to TechCrunch itself. Excluding the country specific sites that site on the techcrunch.com url (except Japan), sites like CrunchGear haven’t delivered (for reference, with a yearly budget that wouldn’t cover one months wages at CrunchGear, we have more traffic according to Quantcast). CrunchGear though isn’t a bad site, it just lacks for eyeballs because it’s not part of TechCrunch itself. Perfect candidate for a sub-blog, like crunchgear.techcrunch.com. The same goes for Mobile and Enterprise. Despite his dislike of me, Arrington is a smart bloke, and I’d bet we see at least one of these sites blended this year, if not all of them.

GigaOm

Om Malik has been buying blogs in a tight market, expanding his network at a time most others aren’t. The unique thing about the network is that gigaom.com doesn’t dominate it, accounting for 31.7% of traffic vs second place TheAppleBlog with 26.9%. However, a number of small blogs would appear to be struggling alone, and would make prime candidates for folding into the leading site.

AOL Weblogs Inc

AOL has continued to go wide, aggressively expanding the network they acquired from Jason Calacanis 4 year ago. AOL does have a couple of obvious strengths: the ability to sell ads across the network, and the leverage of AOL.com to pump new sites. They have already though started to group sites around key brands such as Engadget, and I’d suggest in a tightening market that grouping, being it masthead or subdomains/ sub blogs could come into play in 2009.

Conclusion

In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go wide in content but focused on one brand and one url.

The rise of the uber blog will also mark the beginning of the time new media starts to surpass old media. The thing holding back new media to date has been its obsession with niche plays that didn’t naturally lead to scale that sets them up well to compete with old media titans that went wide online as they did offline in print. The new media uber blogs of 2009 and beyond will offer real substitution of old media like we haven’t really seen before, and with lean structures that are best placed to last the recession, could ultimately emerge on top.

2009 Will Be The Year of the Uber Blog is a post from: The Inquisitr

In what can only be termed as a warm and mushy goodbye post GigaOM has joined the number of big name blogging properties that have left the Federated Media stable for other pastures. As Om Malik said in his goodbye post to the Federated Media crew

 

Progress is often accompanied by a divergence of ideas and ambitions within partnerships. At Giga Omni Media, we have been developing a network that revolves around niche verticals. As our needs became more specialized, we sat down with the folks at Federated to try and figure out how we could continue to work together. But both sides quickly realized that instead it was time to wrap up what has been a successful business relationship.

Now we have teamed up with the IDG Group to represent the sales of advertising on our properties — seven today, and many more in the months to come. IDG has a growing blog ad network and I look forward to working with them. Of course, we will continue to supplement their work with our internal sales team, which has been instrumental in selling sponsorships for both our events and specialized weblogs.

 

GigaOM: Goodbye FM – Hello IDG is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to reports of the meeting, first reported by GigaOm, and confirmed by VentureBeat, attendees were greeted by a gravestone with “RIP Good Times” written on it. The meeting lasted several hours, and attendees were given a bleak message, including things could get a lot worse than people think, and it will be a more protracted downturn.

Companies were told that they must immediately cut costs, and to figure out ways to survive and emerge at the other end of this downturn, which could last years. Speakers discussed ways of cutting costs across various sections of each business.

Om Malik points out that Sequoia has held an identical meeting before: right before the first tech boom went bust.

There’s opportunities and risks in this marketplace, as we’ve covered previously, and this could be a case of Sequoia being overly cautious, after all, it’s better to make these calls now and prepare for the worst, rather than waiting for it to happen. However, who am I to argue with a team like Sequoia. The sky is falling. Start panicking.

Now is the time to start panicking: Sequoia is a post from: The Inquisitr

Giga Omni Media, the Om Malik run vehicle behind sites including GigaOm and the excellent NewTeeVee, has taken $4.5 million Series C in a round led by Alloy Ventures that included previous investors True Ventures, Rakesh Mathur, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. As part of the deal, Alloy Ventures general partner Ammar Hanafi will join the Giga Omni Media board.

Giga Omni Media’s previous round of $1 million was announced in November 2007.

According to Om Malik, the company will use the new investment prudently, through a mixture of investments in technology and content creation, acquisitions and for an expansion of their events and briefings business.

The emphasis is mine, but it’s key to the investment. The company hasn’t been the loudest in the space, and has instead focused on quality content and smaller strategic acquisitions that complement existing titles, without competing with them. Previous acquisitions include jkOnTheRun and the TheAppleBlog.

If ever there were such as thing as a safe investment in this space, with a company with steady hands that considers each move wisely, this would be the one. Congrats to Om and the team.

Steady Hands: Giga Omni Media takes $4.5 million is a post from: The Inquisitr