As you might have noticed, VOIS.com recently acquired Rev2.org, and Craig Agranoff, who has been filling in for me for the last year or so, has now taken on the blog full-time as Editor.
The decision to sell Rev2 came as a difficult one seeing it has been a part of my life for the last five or so years, but given my lack of time and neglect for it, it was either a case of watching it die a slow death with the lack of content and missed hosting bills, or hand it over to Craig who would attempt to resurrect it with fresh, regular content, with the freedom for me to move on freely with other projects.
Rev2’s history has been an unconventional one, and there have been too many ups and downs to count over its existence. In 2005, I decided to evolve my personal blog at the time, The Daily Rundown, to review web apps and services and cover note-worthy web news. Something I found after I started my personal blog was that I was much more in touch with particular happenings when I got to write about it, so having it evolve to Rev2 was my own way of saying to myself, “this web 2.0 thing is going to be big, and I need to start keeping up with it.”
I wrote around 3 posts a week throughout 2005, reviewing some of the apps that released over the week. While there were other, better blogs such as ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch budding at that time, I could never find myself doing what I did full-time, so I was happy with learning a thing or two by covering something I was passionate about, and informing a couple readers along the way.
As things got serious through 2005 with services like MySpace and YouTube just getting traction, I noticed TechCrunch and some of the big blogs at the time putting out 125×125 ad inventories on their websites and having it full within days. First reluctant about putting advertising on the blog (this was a big point of debate back then), I decided to offer a couple myself and was able to attract a couple of sponsors within the following weeks.
The financial support allowed me to look for writers, as some of the other blogs started to do at the time, and by 2007, Rev2 had around five to six part-time writers posting fantastic content, with a traffic graph relatively small but up-hilling (at our peak, we were close to doing 260,000 pageviews for a month, FWIW.) Through the writers I hired for Rev2, I got to meet and work with exciting and fascinating people, most of whom I’m still in touch with and one of whom is my business partner on a startup I’m working on.
Obviously, great things don’t last forever, so by the end of 2007, things started to get a little hectic on the financial side, with me having to let-go writers and the flow of content coming to a halt. After my one month-long trip to U.S. at the end of the year, I found it difficult to return to blogging having little or no chance to do so in that couple of months. After some months of writing on-and-off, Craig stepped in, and he’s been at it since then.
If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you would have noticed Craig’s writing style grow in the past year or so, and with the content he’s been putting out lately, I have no doubt in believing that Rev2 is in capable hands and here to stay. There’s no question that Craig has taken the blog much more seriously than I have in the last year, so his taking over only reflects what has been true all this time.
This is my final official post on Rev2, but I have always found the blog a fantastic place to talk about my achievements, or scramble out a 2,000-word essay on a topic I know little about, so as long as Craig allows me, I’ll hopefully be able to step in once in a while and give the Rev2 audience their much-missed (or much-loathed) words of wisdom.
Meanwhile, you can check out my personal blog, follow me on Twitter, use my micro-diary service Memiary, and keep up with my startup-in-stealth Nincha (we’ll be launching soon, I promise.)
To keep up with updates from this blog, I also recommend you follow @Rev2 and @Vois.
