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September 23, 2007

AOL Quietly Cans Weblogs Inc Life Sciences Blogs

Duncan Riley

13 comments »

AOL quietly canceled the Life Sciences blogs of Weblogs Inc last week, bringing the total number of blogs canceled to 60% higher than the number of blogs still operating.

Blogs canceled included the Weblogs Inc titles The Cancer Blog, The Diabetes Blog and The Cardio Blog.

No official statement was made by AOL/ Weblogs Inc regarding the decision, and unlike previous cancellations the blogs have not be added to the Retired Blogs list.

The total number of retired blogs at Weblogs Inc now totals 55 (including the 3 not on the official list) with 33 blogs still remaining, although 7 in the 33 are translated versions of Engadget and Autoblog. The count does not include the Blogging Stocks sites that operate under the AOL banner but use the created-for-Weblogs Inc CMS Blogsmith.

(thanks to Hsien for the tip)

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. JoeTech.com

    September 23rd, 2007 at 9:01 pm

    There’s too many individuals in the game who aren’t afraid to say how they feel about things. Too much competition, I guess.

  2. lawrence

    September 23rd, 2007 at 9:03 pm

    those blogs suck.

    blogs are meant to be relatively intimate, with the authors and it’s respective communities.
    those are all encompassed within the great wall of aol, so to speak.

    the power of blogs lies primarily within the front lines of its authors - not behind some big corp.

  3. * MISS UNIVERSE

    September 23rd, 2007 at 9:26 pm

    There is also a possibility that the older baby boomers have not embraced blogs like the generation x or generation y or even the younger spectrum of the baby boomers have.

    The older ones are most likely ones to get these illnesses. So those types of blogs would not attract a general audience like some successful political or celebrity entertainment or business technology blogs do.

    It is one of those topics you don’t want to really focus on, unless it happens to you or a member of your family.

  4. steve ballmer

    September 23rd, 2007 at 9:52 pm

    AOL should quietly can AOL!
    http://fakesteveballmer.blogsp.....night.html

  5. Eliot

    September 23rd, 2007 at 10:06 pm

    Blogging Stocks is part of Weblogs, Inc. Many Weblogs, Inc. blogs carry the banner of their related AOL sections: Joystiq, Autoblog, and TV Squad all do this. I’m guessing most of the life science blog readers will be interested in the more general blog http://www.thatsfit.com/

    Many sites outside of Weblogs, Inc. are powered by Blogsmith now too: TMZ, Switched, Stylelist, and Vegas Popular are all examples.

  6. Thushara

    September 23rd, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    one of best blog i have ever read. keep posting

    Thushara

    http://www.dreamphone.tk

  7. phenom

    September 23rd, 2007 at 10:38 pm

    those blog sucks
    http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

  8. Fabian Schonholz

    September 23rd, 2007 at 10:57 pm

    @2: Lawrence … to some extent I agree with you, having my own blog and using it as a way to share my thoughts, some intimate some not. But why couldn’t a corporation provide content through a blog? At the end, a blog is just another medium to share information, personal, educational, etc.

  9. Patrick Quek

    September 24th, 2007 at 12:57 am

    What is your take Duncan? Do you think streamlining is better for blog netoworks? Hehe.

  10. Paul Chaney

    September 24th, 2007 at 6:03 am

    I was one of the early editors of those blogs. In fact, for a period of time I blogged for all of them single-handedly! Even though I did not suffer from any of the debilitating diseases, I had loved ones who did, so blogging there was a labor of love.

    That being said, we never did see a healthy amount of traffic. Their presence on the network may have to do largely with the fact that Jason’s mom was a nurse and a cancer survivor. (My opinion)

    I tend to agree that these blogs never took off due to the fact that, with the exception of childhood type 2 diabetes, these are diseases that come with age.

  11. AmyT of www.diabetesmine.com

    September 25th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    Hey Paul,

    Actually, TheDiabetesBlog.com had quite a following. And I can attest to the fact that the potential audience is HUGE. We in the diabetes community were really surprised that they had a good thing going, with a catchy URL and all, and they just dumped it.

    See my coverage here: A Blog Lost, While Diabetes Thrives? at http://www.diabetesmine.com/20.....t-whi.html

  12. Jason

    September 26th, 2007 at 8:50 am

    AOL is about big, wide brands… sites that can get to 250k people a day visiting them, hopefully 1M+ (like Engadget, Joystiq, and Autoblog). So, it makes sense to me. These niche sites are great, but they don’t fit into the mold of AOL’s advertising system. Doesn’t make sense from here, but it does from a focus/management issue.

    Sad. I would have kept them going as long as they were over 100,000 page views day (which I’m sure they could get to).

  13. Valentin

    October 2nd, 2007 at 5:14 am

    Just today AOLs election blog (http://news.aol.com/elections-blog/) also closed - one year *before* the election it was supposed to cover. Seems there’s someone at AOL very disillusioned with the idea of blogs …

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