The site is now live. YEAH! The newsletter mailing lists are working. The discussion boards are open and mostly seeded properly. All in all, I’m pretty pleased with how everything looks and functions thus far.
I’ve got 4 guys lined up for the motorcycle tour on Sunday. And Mike Fraase of Arts and Farces is going to co-teach the “How to Weblog” online workshop with me. Cool beans. So tomorrow I’ll start contacting individual Beta Joes and inviting them to take a look and help set the tone in the discussion boards.
Cnet’s reporting the demise of TheMan.com today. Burned through $17M in a year. Jeesh. “The e-commerce and content site, which positioned itself as an alternative to sex-and-sports magazines online, offered men guidance on such topics as how to make up with a woman after a fight and sold related products.” The company’s chief executive, Calvin Lui said the site helped “men get things done in their personal lives.”
I looked at the site a few months ago, and by “personal lives” they pretty much did the same as the personal sections of magazine’s like Men’s Health and Men’s Journal… and even GQ and Esquire. Ah, well, I should expect to be asked the question “How is Real Joe different than TheMan.com?”