Corante Is Dying?

As many know, I wrote a blog for several years at Corante called Get Real, which is, sadly, still live there. I say 'sadly' because the blog looks like an abandoned building now: the last bunch comments are porn spam which Corante is apparently uninterested in deleting, although they keep the blog live for the trickle of traffic (I guess) that it brings in. Note that my requests for them to either take down the blog or clean up the spam have led to no response and no action by the publisher, Hylton Jolliffe.

I recently followed a link to one of the active blogs at Corante, Strange Attractor, written by my friends Suw Charman-Anderson and Kevin Anderson; this was the first time in a long while I had clicked on the pulldown found on all Corante pages showing a list of the other blogs: Corante seems to be down to 10 active blogs, including Strange Attractor and Many2Many.

Anyway, turns out that Corante's overall readership is falling, here plotted against /Message:

SnapShot of corante.com (rank #34,981), stoweboyd.com (#43,570) - Compete, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The last post at the Corante company was a note on the tragic death of Russell Shaw, dated 16 March.

Many2Many was once a hotbed of leading thought on social software, but the last post is a 28 February announcement by Clay Shirky about his book. danah boyd's last post there is 13 November 2007, David Weinberger's 25 July 2007, and Ross Mayfield, 10 March 2007. The blog is now ranked 49,486 on Technorati, while I know it was in the top 1000 blogs only a few years ago, and once upon a time Get Real was ranked about 1200 at Technorati.

Corante as a whole -- the aggregation of the dormant and live blogs -- has a Technorati rank of 1,322 (as a baseline, /Message along is now ranked 4,024). While there has been a lot of movement in the blogosphere, as mainstream media have moved in, it still is sad to see a promising media company turn into a slag heap.

Comments

[Paul Chaney]

Can you provide an explanation as to why this is the case? Neglect, yes, but what's the underlying reason? Is it a relic of blogging's "good old days," or did it just wear out its welcome? Finally, do you see possibility for things to turn around, and how would that happen?

[Jevon]

I have seen Corante's business model changing in the last few years, but I wouldn't call the company a slag heap. I'm going to guess that Hylton's current projects are netting the company a lot more revenue that a bunch of ad-driven blogs ever provided. Plotting Corante.com isn't exactly accurate either, because they are running blogs on different domains now.

That said, I agree: Comments on inactive blogs should be closed and the spam removed.

[Stowe Boyd]

Jevon - What projects?

Paul - Just never really converted to ad-based revenue model, I guess.