'A year and a half ago a lot of the news media was struggling with the web, you can see a clear strategy and some success now'

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Over the last month Shiny Media has launched a US blogging network, at least half-a-dozen other blogs and announced a deal with Roo Media to expand its already healthy video output.

Launched in 2000, the publisher now boasts over 40 separate blogs - mainly in the tech, fashion/lifestyle and football space - and expects to pass four million unique users across its network sometime in the next month.

It appears to be in rude health. So what's the magic formula for getting eyeballs to your blog?

"You have to continually be producing content. Some of our sites are doing 20 stories a day, we're a mini content factory here," Ashley Norris, co-founder of Shiny Media, told Journalism.co.uk

"I think if you look at some of the mainstream media organisations, more specifically a year ago, they'd launch blogs and then only write once a week. It's not good enough.

"My passion is Arsenal Football Club, I want to read a blog where I'm getting ten stories a day, getting the latest news, intelligent opinion on the latest news, top ten players from 1979 so that I can argue the toss about whether Alan Sunderland was better than Willy Young or whatever.

"It's all that kind of stuff that is going to keep me going back to that blog two or three times a day.

"If you have a blog that is only updated once a week or once every two or three days, no matter how great the content is people are not going to find that, apart from people who stumble across it because it's on a mainstream media homepage."

Norris is critical of the way some newspaper publishers responded to the hype that surrounded blogging in online publishing circles.

"The Times and Telegraph did some blogs that were frankly quite awful in the early days, The Mail did too.

"This was the bandwagon jumping of about a year and a half ago. They weren't blogs really. The whole thing about a blog for me really is that you are open; you encourage debate, comment, and link to other people.

"The only thing you were getting from those papers was comment posed as blogs because it sounds a bit hipper and it might attract a few younger readers."

He conceded that there had been steady improvements in blogging on national newspaper sites - 'All have upped the ante now.'

"A year and a half ago a lot of the news media was struggling with what it was doing on the web, you can actually see a clear strategy and some success now."

So is a good blog one that just mixes news, opinion, and extra background material?

"It would be really arrogant for us to say that's how you do the perfect blog, but I would say that's how Shiny sees blogging.

"Because we are doing blogging in a commercial way we do see it as that mixture of what blogging started out to be initially, the diary approach, as well as being the first person with the news and offering some comment on the news, but at the same time doing the top tens and the more funny stuff and video has also offered a wealth of opportunity."

Video, Norris added, will be a substantial part of what he sees as the focus for Shiny now it has gone through its great expansion - aided by a round of funding at the start of the year .

Consolidation and strengthening the commercial side of the business with advertising, sponsorship and working with larger, established media companies on video would dominate the foreseeable future, he said.

Despite this development of its existing blogs, Norris said, there was still a huge opportunity to launch commercial niche blogs.

"The economics of producing magazines is just going to get more and more difficult as time goes by. In 20 years time if Horse and Hound still exists it's going to be online.

"There is a massive opportunity, part of me thinks that at the moment we should just continue to churn out blog after blog after blog in different verticals, because virtually every time we have done it, after a time it has reached a point where it's getting a significant amount of UK traffic and interest from UK advertisers, all that and blogging is still only in its early days."