I just found this, and read the comments. Wow. It's a site in London, complaining about our London Metblog. There's a lot of comments there by many of the people we have writing for the site. Needless to say I was a bit shocked to read it.

This is my reply, which I posted there as well.:

It's pretty awesome that you all have these problems with the site and never bothered to mention it to me, to maybe make it better. It's much more useful to sit around and complain to other people I s'pose.

Everyone on the site has my e-mail address.

I set up a mailing list so anyone could discuss anything with all of us.

The first I heard of any of this was when Smacked Face quit.

Let me attempt to clear up some gross missconceptions:

- Sucide Girls.
There is NO suicide girls "connection." The people who run the site live about a mile from me and offered to help pay for the first month of hosting while we got everything up and running. That's it. And not that I need to justify what they are doing, but the site really is owned and opperated by the girls. I've been to the office and seen it. The girls on the site are the ones writing the code, answering the e-mails, filling orders, etc. As for their politics, as far as I can tell everyone there has VERY different views on everything, which I happen to think is very cool. Liberal Vegans working with Conservative Republicans, working together. That is bad?

"Based in LA"
- What is based in LA? Me? Jason? The server's aren't even in LA. What the hell does that have to do with anything? I'm not offering editorial advice on the site. I'm not deciding what should be written about, or how posts should be structured - I set up ONE rule - posts have to relate to London. Period. If the posts don't sound like they are being written by people in London, then you should go talk to the people in London who are writing them. Or come on board and write better posts.

"I picked crappy writters"
- They applied. We turned some down and accepted some. We're *still* accepting some. You want to write, let me know I'll set you up with an account. You don't, then don't.

"the mountains of cash that isn't being paid to the writers"
- Right now we're spending about $140 a month on each of the sites, we've made TOTAL $200 from ads. Do the math. We're losing money. But this is brand new, and I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe that would change.

Look, I could go on and on but I won't. It boils down to this - Jason and I set up blogging.la for bloggers in LA because it's a site we wanted to read but didn't exist. After a few months we started hearing from people who didn't live in LA saying they loved the site and wished there was something like that in their town, and from people in LA saying they went on a trip to another town and wished there was a site like b.la that they could reference while they were there.

So we decided to set up the network of other cities. The city sites are run and written for by people in those towns. As we get interest from other cities, we're adding those. There's not some crazy conspiracy or anything - it's simply an idea for a project that I (we) thought was cool and decided to dedicate some time and money to try to make a reality. I don't expect everyone to like it, or agree with it, but at least try to back up your complaints with actual fact rather than just making things up.