iPod Nano Lawsuit

My partner and I have personally invested tens of thousands of
dollars into BlogExplosion over the last year. This is not a hobby but
rather a full-time business for us. We wake up and go to bed every
single day making BlogExplosion the best site it can be. I don’t
remember the last weekend I had off… We have put everything we have
as two people possibly can into the development of BlogExplosion.

We have to protect our intellectual property and we have to stop
people stealing membership away from us. In the real world I cant just
walk into McDonald’s and sell Burger King hamburgers and although a poor
example the same principles apply on BlogExplosion.

I can recall in your first big post about BM that it was your only
post for days (or at least the first post on your blog).. That is not a
typical posting pattern for you considering you post so frequently to
your blog. Day after day your top post was about the launch of BM which
you have promoted extensively for weeks now.

Over that time you used BE to refer members to BM and I imagine most
of your referrals are from BlogExplosion. BM being a site that upon our
request added a privacy policy (which they did not have originally) and
that had people spamming our DB to refer new members to BM — BTW I
applaud BM for taking the right position here and getting up a privacy
policy and to put a stop to any spamming. I appreciated that.. but..

In their newsletter BM positioned their entire newsletter to
directly attack the features on BE. Design, BOTB, 1:1 ratio, lottery
etc etc. If this is how they want to market themselves then we have to
address it accordingly. BM should concentrate on the benefits they can
offer rather than comparing services. I have worked in marketing enough
years now to understand their motivations at this point and how they
plan to position their service moving forward.

To compete when we read about their competitive knock-offs in their
newsletter Battle of the Blogs, Rocket and our lottery are all being
re-designed right now as we speak. We will improve on what we have in
place in a very short period of time.

BM 1:1 traffic ratio holds little value in how they will remove
inventory from the system to offer a 1:1 ratio. The idea of replacing
outside traffic at a reduced rate or an outside banner exchange means
integrating low quality traffic to be able to offer a 1:1. As
experienced traffic exchange owners of over 5 years now (200,000
combined members) we were literally outraged when we heard the methods
BM plans to use to displace member credits.

I hope people out there understand the difference between QUALITY
traffic vs. QUANTITY of traffic.. I hope BM provide stats to where all
of the traffic comes from… You should demand this from them and you
should be monitoring your traffic logs to make sure you are getting
what they promise.

You DID pay for advertising with us in the past. That is not lost on
us and we appreciate the support. Without that support BE cannot
continue to improve for the future nor would we have made it this far
without the support of our members. The issue is not whether you are a
paying member or not but rather the issues at hand. Again no matter
what we thank you for your past support and is a separate matter.

Your extensive use of BM screenshots, copying newsletters, "talking
about sneak peeks etc" and generally pumping up BM like a hot .com to
hit IPO payload type of hype is not going to fly if you use BE to
primarily gain referrals of a competitive service. Your magnitude of
hype left us again very little choice in the matter…

BE DOES has tons of competitive links in rotation. If a competitive
blog exchange wants to market their service around our exchange then we
have to protect our exchange. Legally we pursue anyone that "borrows
then modifies" our ideas and have done so for over 5 years. Our traffic
exchange scripts are programmed in-house and largely considered the
best traffic exchange scripts around. But when a company copies our
ideas like Phantom credits vs. mystery credits and to be seen other
features we WILL protect our intellectual property.

I wish all our competition the best of luck but they have to come up
with their own ideas. In the end the best product wins and always does
but more so the members really win in the end as they benefit from
using the best products available to them. But again.. This is a real
business for us. We have invested heavily into BE and we are not going
to let other exchanges leverage our memberbase. We protect our business
just like any other real business out there online or offline.

Any action like this discussion we understand hurts us perception
wise. We understand that in fighting back sometimes and is a price we
have to pay to protect ourselves. We don’t heavily censor members but
there is a limit. You went too far.. Many other people have promoted BM
if you surf sites on BlogExplosion and their accounts are fine..

You went too far.

I hope you post this to your blog so that people can make their own
decisions. It is easy to say allow anything on BlogExplosion and let
chips fall there they fall but if you actually owned BE perhaps you
would potentially have a different opinion as well.

We do not wish bad on anyone, but if we want to keep BlogExplosion a
free service or simply be able to continue to offer it in the future we
need to protect ourselves along the way. We are doing just that.

Sincerely
Jeff
BlogExplosion.com
(permission to post this on your blog)