Sam Sethi, who departed ways with Michael Arrington following the Loic Le Meur (Le Web 3) controversy, has launched a new blog called BlogNation that will cover Web 2.0 technology startups from across the globe particularly Asia and Europe.
Understandably, BlogNation will not cover any startups based in Silicon Valley but they do have an army of technology bloggers to cover the start-up scene in most other non-US regions including China, Japan, Australia and Brazil. [content will be in English]
The TechCrunch UK site has been lying defunct ever since the departure of Sam though Mike did promise a June 1 relaunch which never happened. Ironic but maybe TC UK is headed to the deadpool and Sam has big plans to fill that void - he also has VC's to back the venture.
In related reading, Michael Parsons at Times Online has a good analysis of challenges faced by bloggers when they try to expand from being a one-man army to a media empire managing several writers bloggers.
Blogging is a performance art, like juggling. Some people can do it very well, but have you ever tried to manage a troop of jugglers? If the bloggers Arrington attracts are as good as him, they can quite easily set up on their own and tell him to go swivel. If they're not as good, we'll just keep reading Arrington.
And when Arrington is in meetings to discuss the page layouts for additional blogs and settling the awkward personality conflict between two people in his team, he won't be writing great stuff or networking with people to inform that writing.
This is probably applicable to all bloggers including Arrington, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore, Richard MacManus, Rafat Ali and now Sam Sethi who are expanding their blogging empires by adding more heads.
Related: Former TechCrunch Writer Natali Del Conte
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/07/game-on-techcrunch-ex-editor-launches.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Great post - I think there's a lot of people out there who don't realize that managing people is a skill of its own. Brilliant writers (or marketers or programmers or salespeople or etc) don't necessarily by default have great management skills. The smartest decisions these folks can make is to hire others to manage the business side so they can keep up with the writing...
Written on 9/7/07 8:29 PM
You are right Jeremy.
When I was working with a software company, a lot of the programming gurus who got promoted to managerial positions had a tough time.
Rafat and Arrigton already have experienced guys to take care of the business side.. sure others will follow as they grow.
Written on 9/7/07 8:40 PM
I agree with Jeremy, it is a set of people skills you need in any business when you reach a certain stage. It is recruiting the right people, who are better than you, then form a team out of them with you and then coaching them to a high performance team. Only then you can reach more than on your own. But before you hire somebody for that, you need to learn these skills to some extend. Never be depending on people you hire.
Written on 10/7/07 12:01 AM