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A History of ConnectBlogs
I was having a conversation with Steve Spencer the other day about ConnectBlogs. He was surprised to learn that I was one of the guys behind ConnectBlogs. I thought I’d tell the story here for your enjoyment/enlightenment.
The first business model for 10Speed Media involved us going out and doing what we called “renegade” video. They were short videos on local companies that were hardly edited and intentionally rough. Here are a couple of good examples:
Judd Bagley interviews Shawn Nelson and takes a tour of Lovesac (pre-bankruptcy blow up):
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Here’s Winter @ Westminster:
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Here’s Pears (”We’re a shoe store…we sell mostly shoe’s”):
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The whole idea was to create a new Web 2.0 public relations play. Part of our challenge was getting distribution for the video. My idea was to partner with local news outlets and create channels on their Web sites for our video along with any other video the news agency wanted to distribute. Judd Bagley and I put our heads together to try and figure out who we could run a test with. Judd came up with the idea of contacting Colin Kelly at Connect Magazine to see if we could partner with them and test the idea. Colin was more than happy to get together.
In the late winter of 2006 we met at the Tucanos in Provo and hashed out the plan. Colin had already wanted to create some kind of blog network for Connect. We convinced him to just aggregate a bunch of local blogs to one site. We told him that we’d pay for the development if he let us put up 10Speed videos. It was a deal.
So I grabbed Blake Snow and he built the first iteration of the ConnectBlogs. Judd and I compiled the list of the first bloggers that would be aggregated to the site. It launched sometime in the spring 2006 (if I remember right). By that time, 10Speed had changed its business model to a video-based affiliate network and no longer need media partnerships. So Connect Magazine took ConnectBlogs and ran with it. At some point, Jordy got involved and now runs the thing.
So there you go. That’s a brief history of ConnectBlogs and how it got here. Now you know. To all the other people involved - if I’m missing any details or got something wrong please feel free to sound off in the comments.  Â