June 4, 2013
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I’m assembling a team. Here’s why you should to.
Let’s say Xanga decide to go ahead and use WordPress. Keep in mind that WordPress is NOT like Xanga, its a blogging technology and not necessarily the kind of platform you’re used to. With wordpress comes a ton of tools and an incredibly powerful and customizable engine. I think Jon, and the Xanga team have the right idea with switching. With that being said, here are a few random thoughts that crossed my mind.
Xanga needs to come up with something revolutionary to keep going. Either that, or they need to come really refine a couple of good ideas and make them profitable. Not just profitable for Xanga, but profitable for the bloggers as well.
With that being said, one comment the Xanga Team made hit me like a ton of bricks;
“Group blogging – At long last, you’ll be able to allow others to blog on your site… and share moderation rights on your blog.” -Xanga Team
That’s not a new idea, in fact, every single [profitable] blog on the planet, with very few exceptions, use aggregate posting. Multiple users on each account, combining to form one themed blog, is the pinnacle of modern blogging.Taking this one step further, Xanga already has a built-in community, and if done right, could have the means to push a LOT of traffic to a LOT of different paid Xanga sites.
Sites that could, theoretically, provide their own revenue from ads.
I know a LOT of bloggers here on Xanga who have never had to worry about paying hosting fee’s or membership fee’s for their blogs, I also know there are the same EXACT amount of bloggers here on Xanga who write incredibly well and have never once been compensated for their talent and efforts.
I think a re-launch of Xanga could change that.
I am going out on a limb here, and I want you to climb out on it with me. I took the plunge and paid the $48.00 to “reserve” myself one of the first re-launched Xanga sites.
1. I need a team of 10 writers.
2. The short term goal is to have 1-4 posts a day written by multiple different people. Long-term goal is 6-10 posts a day.
3. My sites theme will be politics and tech.I will pay for the Xanga site for the 1st year, all I want is to gather people to write for it. After the 1st year we will split the cost among all of the writers and split the ad-revenue among all of the writers!
I love writing, I love this community and I want it to thrive. Aggregate blogging is just one of the many possibilities of a new Xanga that will allow us to continue doing what we love. And hey! we can all make a bit of money doing it!
*IF YOU LIKE THIS IDEA PLEASE RECOMMEND THIS POST.
**IF YOU’D LIKE TO BE PART OF MY TEAM PLEASE LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS.
***FEEL FREE TO STEAL THIS ENTIRE POST AND USE IT AS YOUR OWN, PICK YOUR OWN THEME, GET YOUR OWN TEAM… LET’S ROCK AND ROLL! (let me know in the comments what theme you’d like your team to have!)Love you guys.
Comments (41)
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic but this is not a bad idea. I thought about it at one time. The way to grow a site is to use the power of many. A person who knew how to drive traffic could use this new platform to do it.
I think this is an awesome idea!
@TheTheologiansCafe - not being sarcastic at all. This idea may be a way to not only save the Xanga community, but get some of these writers paid!
This is what the ‘ISH’ site are all about – and glad you caught that line they talked about with group blogging. I think you have a fantastic idea – I say go for it.
@edlives - the “ish” sites were a mess of butchered posts. This is a chance to be yourself.
Good luck with this idea! I think it’s a great idea
I’m not interested in earning any money or making a profit, but the concept of having several like-minded people write topics of interest and build their own custom -ish site does sound appealing.
I would certainly like to see fiction-ish for those people who like to write stories.
@justfinethanku - well, some of the sites – I agree.
Still – awesome Idea – looking forward to it already.
@dw817 - That could be a great site and get a lot of great writers noticed that otherwise wouldn’t. Why don’t you assemble a team and have everyone pitch-in for the first $48.00?
I don’t know much about tech but I used to care a lot about Canadian politics and now I’m all about world economics.
Not too bad of an idea. I think I could do electronics/ product reviews (if I can get my paws on things) as well as music news/talk or reviews. My main genre is electronic music.
@justfinethanku – I know no-one personally in Xanga at all. In real life I have about 4-friends total, that includes the doctor I see every week. My Father died and my Mother is not permitted to ever see me again because of her delusional schizophrenia.
Outside of that – I would need to see this future Xanga fully running and active before I shell out any MORE money as I was already signed up for a year as of a few months ago.
If Xanga does indeed NOT receive the donations it is requesting and vanishes, I will be found on Writer’s Cafe and finishing publishing my first science fiction novel in Amazon Books. Likely I will find other Xangans there too.
There are going to be people bitter over the shutdown of this domain in any case, especially those that have purchased lifetime memberships only to see them go to naught because of Xanga losing their lease.
I don’t expect a refund, but I have yet to hear an apology from Xanga for all the people that did pay them for a premium membership, and apparently none of that is being totaled into the $60,000.
I was honored to be invited and, I would love to join your team! A very dear friend of mine has already said they would pay for my first year of the new Xanga if this thing works, so I know I’ll be here then if it does. Thank you for the invitation! Sounds like fun!
Hey dudem count me in. I will be on your team.
so…they never answered your questions
@godfatherofgreenbay - not yet, but I have an inside source that pointed out some promise.
@dw817 - I would team up with you in writing. In return I hope you have enough memory space on one of your storage drive to put my xanga archives in for storage.
Definitely it is possible to do team blogging. All you have to do is share some passwords and voila, it is possible to have more than one person on a blog.
Still though it will be hard to share subscribers and you could confuse folks when you submit comments that are slightly different than what the reader expects.
Can a religious person exist with a person with little religious feelings? maybe not but a lot of times in writing using religious terms can convey meaning that an atheist or agnostic won’t choose to use.
So @dw817 - you want an apology? I will see if I can come up with one from maybe John? Who knows if I have asian connections.
I was interested in the group-blogging option mentioned in the announcement as well. It was suggested to me, however, that each individual blogger contributing to the group blog might have to have their own individual paid blogging account. I don’t KNOW if that is truly the case – but the thought was rather depressing!
I can not join your team but I want to commend your approach. I think it is abrilliant way of making Xanga more profitable while working for the bloggers. Xanga must be seen as an asset to bloggers and not a cost. Xanga itself must see its bloggers as resources and not just as customers. These are the mindset changes needed. A great feature of wordpress is that one can set up multiple theme specific blogs under one account. I have recommended that to Xanga more then three years ago and they have conveniently ignored it. Our Xanga blogs are a mixed of all things but when you drive themes..arround topics of interest you can get more people involved in the areas you are pasionate about
It sounds like a good idea, but I am not inclined to Tech or Politics. I would definitely come read this blog though!
@PPhilip – You’re a good person, Philip. I don’t know – when I wrote that, today I feel a little guilty like I got mad for something I shouldn’t. My moods swing violently up and down even if they don’t show it in my writing.
I’m bipolar and on meds as you know and somedays I can’t even remember what it was I was upset about or even what I was thinking the day after.
I get angry at too many small things and forgive too many things I shouldn’t. I’m holding up over at Writer’s Cafe right now but it will be difficult. In Xanga I could have neat stuff like tables, page counters, CSS buttons, and streaming music and the like.
I can’t do any of that cool stuff there.
As far as backing up your pages, Xanga has opened up the ability to recover your work, all pages and media. [Image]. You can find that link [HERE].
This one feature alone I am sorely gonna miss. Xanga was one technological marvel clearly outweighing the other guys.
As far as religion and theology goes, Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek said it best I believe:
“Considering the marvelous complexity of the universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that, matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension, I believe that our existence must be more than either of these philosophies. That what we are goes beyond Euclidean or other “practical” measuring systems, and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.“
i’ll join!
Fantastic Idea!
Politics seems really broad to me though, I’d suggest streamlining a bit, or having your core team of 10 writers, and then having “experts” in particular fields write guest articles when necessary or you could refer to when writing…
As for topics I’d be interested to see, I guess religion, education, baking, fitness stuff, good books… =D
This is a great idea!
Good idea.
Hope it works out for you and your group.
Who knows I could end up starting an Economics blog somewhere, maybe on Xanga. The money isn’t a particularly issue with me. It’s just a distrust of the XT being economically sound.
Someone want to do this is the theme being ‘religion’ or ‘spirituality’ something of that nature. Cause I got nothing on politics and tech =]
Interesting idea. I couldn’t do politics or tech, but if one subject is sucessful, I’m sure more will follow. I hate change, but it’s a-comin’! And I’m going to start giving random minis to use up my credits.
I would love to be a part of something like this. :D
I can do some Tech writing. Been itching to use the technical writing degree I have for SOMETHING.
@bloggicus_maximus - I’d love to have you on board.
shoot all I have is random unimportant crap and celebrity gossip
It’s an interesting idea. I could jump on board!
This is a fantastic idea! I’ve been writing at a “group” political blog site on the WP for three years. It is quite successful. I seem to have the jester role in our group, but it keeps it light. I would write for you as I love politics. That said, I don’t know what you envision. Were I to have my own site, (and now you’ve planted the idea in my head) I would have opposite views of the political spectrum so that it does not become an echo chamber. Dang! I may have to think about gettin my own xanga site!
I could probably make time for official blogging on your uber-broad topics of “technologies and politics.” How often are you hoping team members contribute?
This is not a bad idea IF it will work.
A friend was on a site that paid her to blog and she got peanuts.
For this to work you would have to pay pretty good I think.
And even if it is a great idea, where is the money coming from to pay people, because the ads can’t cover it all. Bro. Doc
@Cearce - Pay would come from ads, and for a while it absolutely would not amount to much at all. I have a format for the blog that I want to start that will make posting easy and nearly mindless. I’d like at least 10 contributors posting at least an article every day/other day.
@BroDoc - AD revenue IS a good if you can do it right. I have the right formula. Nobody will be quitting their jobs, but they won’t have to worry about paying for their blogging.
@justfinethanku - I was here one day and paid for my site, because the ads were offense and to have them on my site would say I approved. I think the ones that I saw should not have been here in the first place.
I think you really should stay at the 25 dollars you charge now, because there are people here that still will not get a free site and will not be able to afford the 48 dollars. Bro. Doc
Any room for an ugly duckling like me?
UNFORTUNATELEY
I GOT HACKED INTO FOR THE MILLENTH TIME ON FACEBOOK!!
I HATE FACEBOOK WITH EVERY OUNCE OF MY HEART!!!
I TRYED TO GET IN AGAIN! I GAVE UP! I’M DONE WITH FACEBOOK!!
I QUIT!!!!
I LOVE YOU XANGA!!! I’M GLAD I HAVE XANGA ON MY SIDE!!!
THANK YOU XANGA YOUR THE BEST!!!
SINCERELY YOURS,
XANGA MEMBER
Laurel Ann Tyler
I WILL NOT BE RETURNING TO FACEBOOK! XANGA IS MY WEBSITE FOR NOW AND ALWAYS UNTIL THE VERY END!!!
XANGA WILL BE WITH US AS LONG AS WE KEEP DONATING UNTIL THE END!AND THAT WILL A WHILE BECAUSE I AM STANDING WITH XANGA! ANDFIGHTING TO KEEP XANGA GOING!
DON’T LET XANGA SHUT DOWN LIKE MOVIES THEATERS. THE MORE WE DONATE THE MORE XANGA WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO KEEP ITS SITE GOING AND THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A PLACE FOR ALL XANGA USERS TO COMETO AND ENJOY!