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E-mailDuring the last nine months or so, many networks have popped up and gone strong. B5media, Instablogs, KMN, Syntagma Media, Blog Media have been successful in craving a niche for themselves. Although some have died too, including FineFools, which was launched with a lot of hype.
However, the fact remains, most of the networks were able to get good traffic and were able to monetize the blogs associated with the network. Any blogger wishing to join a network looks primarily how the network can help him/her to monetize his blog further, get more traffic, or provide him greater visibility.
Most of the time amateur bloggers and newbie gets to learn the essence of blogging quiet fast by using Blog Network resources which otherwise would have taken him quiet a long time. Chartreuse is one exception out there.
Anyways back to the post, Blog Networks no doubt have been successful in empowering the blogger, even making his readily available to the audience. But the evolution of blog networks in social networks is not yet taken place. Jason Calacanis has launched Netscape beta, another Digg clone backed by in house reporters and editors. It is a great improvement after the problems we saw at Digg.
However, I would have rather like to see an integration of the Weblogs Inc with it, hence putting its audience in a more powerful state and contributing more effectively with the writers of the network.
A better audience experience - that is the next phase in the growth of Blog Networks.
RSS 
9rules isn’t a traditional blog network in the sense that we start new blogs and hire writers to populate them, but I would say that our model is closer to a social network or a community than others are. Many independent blogs write about how their goal is to join 9rules ”some day”, and almost every single one of our members is also an avid 9rules supporter and evangelist, almost to the point of where Apple fans are. If you do some quick Technorati or Google searching, you’ll see that the magnitude of results for ”9rules” is between 3-10x larger than the blog networks you listed in the post, which shows that it’s not just our members who are talking about us, it’s everybody. It’s not often that somebody not affiliated with the space (aka, not a network owner, not a paid writer) sings the praises of one of the blog networks you listed, but that happens with 9rules all the time.
One of the factors facilitating this is what Mark touched on: that people love to be associated with 9rules because our brand recognition and values are finely honed and people see value in our company. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a random blogger clamoring to be part of Blog Network X, but with 9rules, our affiliation means something deeper than simply being paid $Y per month. Joining 9rules is like joining a social club, whereas ”joining” another network is basically a job, and people don’t normally like to hang out at their job after work is over :)
We at instablogs are also going to evolve into a social network than a simple blog network, where audience will be particpating equally with the bloggers themselves.
I agree joining 9rules is like joining a club. But how much beneficiary is it to those who are looking to take blogging as a living as compare to other networks. I think this is still an open debate.
I will be watching with great pleasure to see you evolving into a social community. Blog Networks are getting boring, lets see how different you could be.
Cheers!
Mark
Blog Network, Digg and Newsvine are different products for different people.