Skip ahead to early 2010 and that one site turned into a network that now spans almost 60 cities around the world. The team of 10 or so bloggers we hand picked has grown into the thousands. We’ve seen some of our blogs become the focal point for their communities after major disasters and have seen some of our bloggers move on to some amazing careers because of doors these sites opened for them. We’ve won awards and been served cease and desist letters. We’ve traveled the world and met more amazing people than we had ever hoped to. It’s been a fantastic journey.

We’ve also seen the landscape change considerably. People no longer look to newspapers as the premier source of local news and most cities are filled with passionate bloggers covering their own aspects of the city in ways no one else ever could. It truly has been a local revolution and we’re incredibly proud to have played even the smallest part in that. That said we know this is only the beginning. National publications are taking a renewed interest in local and every news site is waving their local flags around, and trying to get people from those communities to help them do it. If you think things have been interesting thus far, and we do, just wait and see what the next 24-48 months will bring.

We know this is just the beginning but for the past 7 years we’ve busted our asses trying to fuel this revolution. We’ve tried things that have worked out perfectly and things that have blown up in our faces. We’ve stuck to our guns and if given those opportunities again would do the same thing. We believe in the power of local, and that is why we’re now looking for someone to help keep Metblogs moving and take it to the next levels that we have yet been able to.

Our collective talents span a broad range of expertise but business development has never been our focus. On many levels we’ve built a kick-ass global network but our ability to grow into what we really want Metblogs to become and what we deeply believe it has the potential to be has reached our personal limits, and we are aware of that. We’re looking for the right people or organizations to keep Metblogs alive and to take it where we were unable to so we are putting out this call.

If you know a thing or two about blogs and local media and think this sounds interesting, we want to talk to you. If your company is already doing something similar or complimentary and could benefit from a closer relationship with Metblogs, we want to talk to you. There are many shapes this might take, from something as simple as a new CEO or GM, to a full acquisition by the right company. Our deepest concern is for the future of the network and all the content our amazing bloggers have spent years creating, and finding a relationship that is respectful of that is extremely important to us. What that means is if you are interested in turning the sites into an SEO linkfest we are likely not interested in talking to you. However if you are interested in making some real headway and think local is the future, we definitely want to talk.

We know this is an unorthodox approach but we’ve never been the kind of guys to follow the well beaten path. Are you the person or company we’re looking for? Let us know. (we can be reached at sean or jason @metblogs.com of course)

But since we’re talking about it, might as well point out some of the changes:
- open comments (yes registration free anonymous comments are back!)
- massively reduced page weight for faster load times
- higher content to ad ratio
- less space for ads overall
- easier to understand self-serve ads
- return of the blogrolls
- and more!

Hope you enjoy, and expect more fun soon!

Behind the scenes here there is so much being worked on and I’m really excited to launch something we’ve been working on for a few months in one form or another. After reading Emergency and spending some time really looking into a lot of the issues it brought up, Jason and I realized that most of the “survival” info that was out there was focused on being in the wilderness or jam packed with “The Dems are in the white house now, clearly the country is going to fall apart any moment, let’s all buy ammo and pray until that happens.” Not that there is anything inherently wrong with either of those approaches, but they just aren’t very appealing to me as someone who lives and frequents major cities the majority of my time.

Due to this, we felt there should be a site with a strong focus on big city survival and disaster prep. With Metblogs we’ve seen a lot of things happen out of no where in our cities and seen what people had to deal with through their own eyes. This often made us think of how we would have responded if we were in that situation and more often than not we would have been very unprepared. So today we’re launching Urban Journal – a site that will both chronicle our own journey to become more prepared as well as provide useful info and tips for other city dwellers who don’t want to be caught by surprise. It’s a little bit of a different direction for us at Bode Media but we’re excited about it and looking forward to seeing where it leads. Hope you enjoy it!

If you look on the individual post page for any entry on any city Metblogs site, just above the comments you’ll see a simple line of code you can copy and paste into an entry on your own website or blog.

You can see this in action on this test on my own personal blog. Pretty cool eh?

This is super Beta at the moment, and we don’t know how it’ll work under stress or if we overlooked any bits, but as far as we can tell it’s working and we’d like to invite anyone who wants to to go ahead and try it out. If you find any problems with it, please let us know and we’ll try to fix them right away. This is really exciting for us as we think this is the first time a feature like this has been offered online, and should be a fun way for people to bring conversations from Metblogs that they find interesting back to their own sites, while still keeping a single cohesive comment thread on the main post. Enjoy!

Feel free to leave support comments directly on the site as well as on this thread on the hub.