Blogsmith hit my project radar recently so I started doing some elementary research on the platform.
A search in Google for “Blogsmith” took me off on a tangent and revealed how imperfect Google search results are. Here is what I found in the first 10 search results and beyond.
Result #1
If you visit http://www.blogsmith.com/ you will find the Blogsmith logo on a blue gradient field. Nothing else.
Result #2
https://cms.aol.com/signin/ will actually allow you to login securely if you already have a Blogsmith account.
Result #3 (2006)
http://www.brianalvey.com/news/2006/11/10/aol-and-blogsmith/ is where Brian (a founder) tells a brief history of Blogsmith and Weblogs starting back in June of 2003.
Result #4
Is Brian Alvey’s Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Alvey which shows that AOL bought Blogsmith in November 2006.
Result #5
Is the Blogsmith Twitter account https://twitter.com/#!/blogsmith which has two followers, is following three other accounts and protects its Tweets. The bio reads: “I am the most advanced blogging platform in the world”.
Result #6 (2010)
Is a Blogherald piece about AOL purchasing TechCrunch and whether AOL will move TechCrunch form Automattic’s WordPress VIP hosting to Blogsmith or not.
Result #7 (2007)
Is a TopRank blog post discussing whether Blogsmith could be released to the public in 2007.
Here is where Google entirely loses the Blogsmith blogging platform scent.
Result #8
Is a Brookline, MA bookstore blog hosted on Blogger.
Result #9
Is a general interest blog also hosted on Blogger.
Result #10 (2008)
Is a video search result. The Vimeo video shows you how to use the Blogsmith administrative panel, by Jonathon Morgan.
Towards the end of the second page of search results news articles about Blogsmith begin to appear. Moving further into the search results there are many listings where the term blogsmith was used like the term blacksmith, but about blogs.
The small amount of information available about the history and use of Blogsmith is surprising. However, this could be because Blogsmith is still privately owned by AOL.
Brian Alvey’s work history is impressive. He has worked on some pretty huge projects and they seem to have scaled really well.
I wonder how many blogs are running Blogsmith? Royal Pingdom showed in 2009 that Blogsmith was running 14 of the 100 largest blogs.
I wonder whether any Blogsmith blogs exist outside of AOL?
UPDATE: Strangely, this post now ranks number one for the search “BlogSmith”.