With a lot of confusion and questions plaguing the incipient stages of the network, I feel that it behooves us to post an FAQ about Dash Media.
Who comprises the Dash Media Team?
Being that I'm the ring leader of this entire circus, I'm going to go introduce myself first. I will try to provide a short introduction of the other team members and let them tell you more about themselves in their own blog posts.
My name is Mike “Fucking” Villar, I am 24 years old and I live in The QC. I have been consistently blogging here and here for a year and a half now. I have a degree in Business Administration with a major in Marketing. I spent two years of my life working as a Business Development Officer for a pioneering BPO company that specializes in Directory Assistance. I also spent a year working for the Philippine Domain Registry (dotPH) primarily handling sales and marketing for Calliope, the first locally developed blogging platform.
The other members of the team are:
Get to know more about them as we go along.
Oh noes! You are exploiting bloggers to drive traffic to your site and earn monies! You suck!
Oh noes! You're an idiot! If you look closely at how the site and RSS engine is designed, you'll see that we do nothing of the sort. One of the primary reasons why we started Dash Media is to create a community and give more exposure to those some might call 'underexposed blogs' with excellent content by evenly spreading traffic within the network. The way it works is that summaries from the most recent entries within the network are displayed on the main page, the traffic of which comes from the nifty little badge that is displayed on our respective members' blogs.
How do we do it? Well we simply connected the blue wire to the red wire and– I think I'll let the tech guys explain that to you.
How do you plan to monetize? Do you plan to plaster your members' blogs with ads?
What makes you think we need to monetize? Between the four of us, we make enough money to feed a small South American country for 5 years. In fact, we have so much money, we solve everyday problems like how we solve all our problems—by throwing money at it.
Nah seriously, we're not thinking about it yet. But rest assured that if we do, we're not going to slap ads on member blogs, only on our core blogs and we're going to do it in such a way that ads are not going to, in any way, compromise usability and user experience.
Sweet! How can I join?
Our next round of submissions will be sometime in November. Watch out for the official announcement.
Are you single?
Very. Send me an email at mike [at] dash-media [dot] com and if you're cool with me taking pictures of you wearing my clothes, then you just might be who I'm looking for.
Selection
Whenever I talk to people about Dash Media, one question that pops out more often than others is a question about our criteria and our process. I think such inquiries are warranted because we went out on a limb to describe the type of content we are looking for as 'Decent', a criterion which, by itself, is both vague and subjective.
Let me reiterate some of the principles this network is built around on: Popularity doesn't always equate to quality; limiting one's reading at what every other popular blog is writing about puts one in an echo chamber, and the realization that there is a plethora of excellent albeit, underexposed content outside the echo chamber just waiting to be discovered.
Take for instance Qwerky, one of the blogs included in the pioneer batch of blogs we are including in the network: There's an assload of sites out there which talk about Web 2.0 but exactly how many sites are out there that actually analyze the etymology of Web 2.0 web app names?
Point being is that the heaviest criterion that influenced our decision in this round are content which we deemed interesting.
Of course we expect the selection process to evolve, be democratized and require more involvement from the existing pool of blogs come the next round. People can go on saying how arbitrary our selection process is but we can always say: “Hey, we have to start somewhere.”
Mike "Fucking" Villar
"a Manila-based blogger made famous by his Atrocities of Friendster series, a regular feature he publishes on his blog where he mercilessly criticizes and mocks pictures of ugly people he stumbles upon on popular social networking site, Friendster. Although a lot of people are offended by what he writes, long-time readers of his blog regard him as a brilliant satire writer."
-Taken from my WikiBios page
