Three AOL Blogs Living on Borrowed Time

AOL has put the cabash on three Blogs that have failed to meet expectations: DiyLife.com, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and DownloadSquad, according to an internal memo posted on PaidContent.org. These properties were inherited from AOL's acquisition of WebLogs Inc, a property put together a few years ago by noted Silicon Alley bad boy Jason McCabe Calacanis for about $25 million. In my book, Calacanis is second only to Mark Cuban in being able to talk fat-walleted corporations out of millions for Web properties with dubious futures (Cuban got more than a billion from Yahoo.com for Broadcast.com, which Yahoo doesn't even use anymore).

Anyway, in the interest of historical preservation, here are screen shots form these three doomed Blogs. It seems that a major factor that doomed them was their pay-per-post model, which clearly made them a cost center in AOL's dwindling (some might say hemorrhaging) online empire. Thanks to ValleyWag.com for surfacing this sad story.

Many Good Blogs End Their Lives as Search Engine Spam

Blogger's official Blog has news that the service's "Blogs of Note," a feature highlighting significant Blogs, now has a formal archive area which goes back to early 2001.

It's interesting to look at Blogs that Blogger's editorial team thought were note-worthy and check on their current status. As expected, many of these highly-praised Blogs are now dead or woefully out of date. Quite a few of them have descended from once compelling content conveyer belts into "MFA" (Made for Adsense) sites offering little more than Search Engine Spam.