An important update to my recent post about b5media, which is below. In addition to getting some financing, they are also getting the skills and abilities of my friend and former journalism colleague Mark Evans, who just quit his job at the National Post to join b5media as their vice-president of operations. His announcement is here. Congratulations, Mark — and to b5media. Rick Segal of J.L. Albright pays tribute to Mark here, and Om gives some props as well, while Kent Newsome has some thoughts about the challenges confronting a blog network.

Original post:

Congrats to Jeremy Wright and the rest of the gang over at the blog network b5media, including Duncan Riley and a host of others. Rick Segal broke the news earlier today that he and J.L. Albright co-led an investment in the company with Brightspark, which is Delrina co-founder Mark Skapinker’s shop. In response to some questions from interested onlookers, Rick — ever the iconoclast — even announced how much the two had invested: $2-million U.S. in total. As he put it:

Lots and lots of people are going to go, yeah right, bunch of VC lemmings chasing flavor of the month, pissing away gobs of cash on another me too blogger pile. In the words of Seth Godin, I can only respond; so?

In an interview with the Blogging Times, Duncan discussed what the team plan to use the money for, which appears to include a salary for Mr. Riley, among other things (b5 also plans to spend some of the money compensating its bloggers). More on the deal from Problogger and b5media partner Darren Rowse.

Update:

Phil Sim of Squash isn’t convinced that blog networks really make sense as a business, or as an investment. And Nick Douglas at Valleywag heads straight for the jugular, as usual, although coming from someone at another blog network he might be protesting just a wee bit too much, methinks. Plus the capitalization thing is totally offside :-) Shel Israel has some thoughts here, and Syntagma (a competitor) has some more critical thoughts.

Congrats to Jeremy Wright and the rest of the gang over at the blog network b5media, including Duncan Riley and a host of others. Rick Segal broke the news earlier today that he and J.L. Albright co-led an investment in the company with Brightspark, which is Delrina co-founder Mark Skapinker’s shop. In response to some questions from interested onlookers, Rick — ever the iconoclast — even announced how much the two had invested: $2-million U.S. in total. As he put it:

Lots and lots of people are going to go, yeah right, bunch of VC lemmings chasing flavor of the month, pissing away gobs of cash on another me too blogger pile. In the words of Seth Godin, I can only respond; so?

In an interview with the Blogging Times, Duncan discussed what the team plan to use the money for, which appears to include a salary for Mr. Riley, among other things (b5 also plans to spend some of the money compensating its bloggers). More on the deal from Problogger and b5media partner Darren Rowse.

Update:

Phil Sim of Squash isn’t convinced that blog networks really make sense as a business, or as an investment. And Nick Douglas at Valleywag heads straight for the jugular, as usual, although coming from someone at another blog network he might be protesting just a wee bit too much, methinks. Plus the capitalization thing is totally offside :-) Shel Israel has some thoughts here.

Looks like our mesh conference in May might have stirred things up a little in the blog network marketplace, to judge by a recent post from Jeremy Wright. Jeremy is part of b5media, a multi-national blog network with principals in Australia and Canada (Jeremy lives in beautiful St. Stephen, New Brunswick), and in an earlier post about the schedule at mesh being finalized he mentioned that he was particularly interested in the keynote by Infectious Greed blogger and VC advisor Paul Kedrosky and a panel on whether Web 2.0 startups need VCs or not.

Jeremy said he was interested because “b5media is about to announce we’re going after funding.” This set off a small bombshell, it seems — and a cross-continent one at that. Paul Montgomery of Tinfinger wrote about it, and so did The Blog Herald and alarm:clock. John Evans, who runs a British-based blog network called Syntagma Media, also wrote a post about how b5media was going after VC money, and he gave the impression he didn’t think that was a good thing to do.

He wrote that:

“After a buccaneering but bootstrapping beginning, it seems b5media has decided to go down the venture capital route after all, with a round of VC funding. But you have to read between the lines of a Toronto conference agenda to find the reference.”

He goes on to say that he’s not in favour of this approach because:

“The sheer effort involved in raising money… and the complexity of contractual arrangements, deplete your time and energy which should be concentrated on selling value to customers.”

In Jeremy’s post in response (he also responds to John Evans in the comments on Syntagma’s blog) he says that b5media.com is looking at a couple of offers, but he doesn’t want to get into it in public.

“Yes, in the last few weeks 2 key opportunities have come our way. Opportunities that we’ve decided to open the door to, to see what’ll happen. We’re not going to put the business on hold. We are not going to chat the way we do business day to day. Yes, we’re looking at the funding options available to us (including early stage, obviously) in order to see what makes sense for our bloggers, readers, partners and the future of the industry.”

Sounds like plenty of fodder for some interesting discussions at mesh — and just to add one final plug, tickets are going quickly so get in there and get one. Or two. Or 12.