Under New Management

If anyone ever tells you that running the internet’s largest blog traffic exchange and community website is easy - they’re lying. On the other hand, it’s getting easier with every passing day and it is a LOT of fun. Before we get started, I wanted to introduce myself and the owner, Stephen.

Many of you know me already - I’m Lewis Johnston (a.k.a. orangehairedboy). You might also know me from my blog which I had to temporarily discontinue due to lack of time. I’m a programmer living in Chicago, Illinois and a geek at heart. I started working for BlogExplosion about 10 months ago, and I continue to enjoy making our site even better. You can often catch me in the Shoutbox, and I can also be heard on BE Radio.

Stephen: “My name is Stephen Sartain. I live in the UK and have been happily married for 16 years and have two children. I am the owner of a number of websites, including two of Jeff and Thomas’ previous websites. BlogExplosion represents, to me, the next evolution of traffic exchanges. Instead of the webmaster doing everything, the members themselves grow and evolve the site. I am hoping you all will complete Lewis’ survey. Information analyzed becomes understanding which will lead to new awareness of what you - the members - would like to see happen at BlogExplosion.”

Stephen’s username is StephenS so look for him around the site.

Who are you…really? We Want to Know

As we make prepare to make changes to BlogExplosion, Stephen and I would like to get to know you. You make our community great!

We’ve prepared a short survey that we’re asking all members to take which will tell us who you are, what you like and what you don’t. Don’t worry - it will only take 3 minutes to complete.

The information that results will enable us to build a bigger and better BlogExplosion.

So, now is the time to be heard. I promise that I will read every single response! Use this URL to take the survey:

http://www.blogexplosion.com/survey/

Update: BE Radio is up and running!

Well, this isn’t the first post I was hoping to make here on Help Me Blog! We’re having a little trouble with BE Radio, but we’re working to get it resolved.

We have our backup music playing right now, but there are no Mystery Credits, nor is the bi-hourly news played.

Note: During the outage, the BE Radio website is unavailable which means no requests either for the time being.

Stephen has bought two sites from us previously with great results and has extensive experience running sites like BlogExplosion. Our final closing price was in the six figures and well beyond our minimum bid of $100,000.  We also want to extend a huge thanks to Jeremy Wright for doing an amazing job brokering the sale of BlogExplosion for us.

This will be my last post on helpmeblog.com as Lewis aka Orangehairedboy (one of our lead developers) will be taking over as we make the transition to the new ownership group.

There are a flurry of new features already scheduled to launch over the next few weeks as the development group has been working this whole time in preparation for the change. BlogExplosion will be launching BE Experts where experienced members will be helping new members with any problems they might come across, a new support ticket system will be implemented, tutorials will be updated for newbies and the blog approval system will be re-vamped as well. This will make it easier for members to get the information they need on a timely basis and make BlogExplosion a friendlier site to use.

Now that the new management team is in place, BlogCharm will now confirm sponsors and advertising deals that will be shared by all participating members. BE will also look to offer value-added services such as podcasting hosting with a deal close at hand and other features that will make an immediate impact moving forward as well.

Thomas and myself will be taking a short break now that BlogExplosion has been sold and then looking at new projects that we will be launching by the end of the summer.

BlogExplosion has definitely been a very rewarding and interesting experience since we launched back in September 2004. We never imagined that BE would become so popular or develop such a devout following. We leave BlogExplosion as one of the leading blog communities on the internet and a top blog destination website. We want to thank all of our members for the support and encouragement to keep us going each day as we met some truely amazing people along the way. There is no way we could have done it without our loyal members and again a sincere thanks to everyone that were always there for us.

Congratulations Steve and group and we wish you the best of luck in the future! Blogosphere out!

Sincerely

Thomas and Jeff

As many members know we are in the process of selling BlogExplosion to take on other projects later this year.

After dozens of conference calls and email conversations to potential buyers over the last few weeks, we have completed the first round of bids last week and now in the final round of closed bidding that will conclude this Friday. We have met our minimum asking price of $100,000 and now negotiating the final deal to purchase BlogExplosion.

With several companies still in the running during the final bidding round this week, we want to thank everyone that expressed interest in BlogExplosion and we will be announcing the new owners of BlogExplosion early next week.

Related Links:

BlogExplosion is up for Sale

Jeremy Wright to broker the sale of BlogExplosion

Now on BlogExplosion, members can instantly rent their blogs without any approvals!

Look for the Instant Rental tag and immediately rent blog space for more blog traffic! RentMyBlog continues to be one of the most popular ways of generating additional blog traffic for members, so take advantage of this new BE feature!

Now on BE you can add your blogmarks directly on your blog!

To add your favorite blogmarks to your blog it’s a simple matter of cutting and pasting a couple of lines of code and within minutes you can list all of your blogmarks on your blog!

Check out how to add blogmarks to your blog now.

This week we got a bunch of podcasts and videocasts approved in our Podcast Directory.

We have been working on getting playlists generated to get all podcasts working properly by tweaking our scripts to allow different feed types to work in our players.

Looks like we have another 50 podcasts to get approved still and we will look at finishing those approvals for the the remaining podcasts next week.

Next week members will be able to add their Blogmarks to their blogs. Blogmarks work like online favorites, where you can add your favorite blogs to your BlogMarks list for later viewing.

We are testing the BlogMark scripts now and will be launched sometime next week.

Just a quick note that when visiting blogs on Blog Rocket, you can add blogs to your personal BlogMarks. This means you can visit the blog later at your convenience as you can check out your favorite blogs at any time.