The Wardman Wire

Miscellaneous Blogs

A real Friday post. The website bankaholic.com has been sold for $15m.

From Paidcontent.org:

Financial info site BankRate is expanding its financial product listings, as it’s acquiring Bankaholic, which provides info on deposits, savings accounts, and money market accounts. The company will pay $12.4 million up front, with another $2.5 million possible earnout over the next 12 months. Bankaholic’s sole employee John Wu will assist in the transition and remain for an unspecified period of time.

Interesting points

• The blog is built on Wordpress.
• It is run by a single person - Johns Wu, and has been purchased by bankrate.com.
• The traffic is not *that* high, which tells us something about the value of financial niche markets.
• The blog is relatively new (the domain was first registered in 2006).

A short antidote to all the long political speeches. The Renault Robot. For 16 seconds.

According to cassilis.co.uk, Liam has hung up his keyboard.

If he has gone, it is a piccolo tragedy, as Cassilis was a distinctive and thoughtful voice in the blogosphere, and his Think Tank Roundup was one of the two or three most innovative initiatives of the last 12 months. It was also probably the only one that penetrated the big media space as elegantly as a knife in hot butter.

I’m hoping I’m wrong, but I’m not feeling optimistic.

A nagging voice says that he deserves to have been hired by the MSM. I wish him well.

And the Heritage Open Days website is .. er .. down.

Yesterday it was saying “Database Error”.

Today it is just dead:

Weekend IT cover is always a good idea for big weekends, boys and girls.

Ah well - good job heritage buildings last longer.

This morning the Farming Today programme on BBC Radio 4 was about the disastrous 2008 harvest - possibly the worst for 20 years - and the effect it is having on farmers in the UK.

At present, one week into September, perhaps a third of the harvest has not yet been brought in, and already plans for 2009 are being changed as a result.

This segment of the programme is about 10 minutes - you will need to click through.

I’m becoming more and more impressed by the photography the BBC are using for the “feature” space on the Front Page of their new website design.

Here is one set of the four tabs visible yesterday on the BBC Website.

Click through for the set of four and my comments.