Blognetnews.com - gone, at least for now

I've been meaning to mention this for a few days now -- uber-aggregator blognetnews.com mysteriously disappeared a few days back.  Apparently owner (and former Bush speech writer and conservative Washington Times editor) David Mastio has killed the project because it was not taking in enough ad revenue to sustain itself.  Of course, right-wing blogs that were big supporters of the project are calling this the fault of Obama's economic policies.  Personally I also blame Obama economic policies for the fact that Penelope Cruz married Javier Bardem rather than me -- I mean, if I was rich and handsome and famous and an actor ---

I've alwys had mixed feelings about this service. It clearly had a right-wing spin to it, and it kept promotiing its raniking systems of blogs in each state, which seemed to be fairly arbitrary.  Also, they've had any number of run-ins with bloggers whose content they appropriated without permission, and they apparently often refused to remove blogs even if the blogs involved asked to be removed. This seems in keeping with Mastio's general attitude toward pagiarism.

I've recently started a new aggregation effort.  We're hoping to help rebuild the old 50-State Blog Network by having an opt-in aggregator of progressive blogs from around the country.  It's off to a slow start, but you might want to stop in at http://50stateblognetwork.com if you'd like to start reading collected blogs from around the country.  Soon this will include a weekly 50-state blog roundup.