BlogFrog launches to serve 50k blogging Moms who overwhelmingly use open source
BlogFrog is a company that is seeking to enable communities around blogs of a common theme. They just announced their official launch with a first round of funding. However, they have been at it for a while now, cutting their teeth with the mommy blogger set. Blogging moms, 50,000 strong are using blogfrog to build communities for their readers to participate in the discussion. Overwhelmingly these blogging moms are using open source platforms like WordPress to blog. As a result, BlogFrog has had to make sure their community building widgets and applications work with the various open source blogging platforms.
You can smirk if you want about the idea of blogging mommies, but make no mistake about it. This is a community that is 5 million strong! That is a lot of eyeballs and a very attractive demographic. But being the community builder for moms who blog is just the beginning for BlogFrog. The Boulder, Co based company is the brain child of CEO Rustin Banks who left his aerospace engineering job to marry “bulletin boards to his wifes blog”. I had a chance to sit down and talk to Rustin about his vision for BlogFrog. Here is what he said:
While BlogFrog has grown organically with mom bloggers (50,000 mom bloggers to date reaching 5.5 million women online every month), BlogFrog’s long-term vision is to own the interest social graph. BlogFrog’s vision is to ultimately become an interest-based social network for affinity groups across verticals such as politics, travel, religion, fashion, and more. Facebook has locked up who we know, LinkedIn has locked up who you work with, Twitter has locked up celebrities you want to follow, but where do you go to find like-minded communities of people you don’t know? BlogFrog.
Certainly an ambitious vision. But then again no one gives you funding for thinking small.
While BlogFrog caters to open source blogging platforms, it is actually built on a Windows infrastructure. Rustin and team will be continuing to build out the functionality as they bring more communities under the BlogFrog umbrella. What people will be able to do as part of these blogging communities will decide how successful BlogFrog becomes.
It is interesting that while the numbers for blogging are down, BlogFrog thinks they can build these communities. Twitter, Facebook and the like have reduced the amount of bloggers (if you believe the numbers, but also my own subjective findings), can BlogFrog bring about a revival of blogging numbers. I would be happy if they did.
I am personally going to start a BlogFrog community for my Security Bloggers Network (http://www.securitybloggersnetwork.com) and see how it goes. Stay tuned I will let you know how that goes. In the meantime could all of those Mom’s really be wrong?
