It's done. blog.ch is sold. To centralway, an investment holding I never heard before (but hey, I don't know many investment companies anyway…)
As I said before, it's Matthias' right to do whatever he wants with that domain. But I'm a little bit suspicious what will happen with blog.ch. Centralway won't invest money in something, where they don't get a return-on-investement and some google-ads here and there won't do it (IMHO and in my experience). So, let's see what will happen, their communicated intentions are a little vague on that.
Furthermore, I think it's a little bit strange to say:
“Wir möchten die Blogger-Community vermehrt einbeziehen, indem sie selber Ideen und Vorschläge einbringt und bei deren Umsetzung sogar aktiv mithilft.“
Maybe I understand this wrong, but that sounds like “let the community do the work, we keep the revenue and thanks for all the fish” to me… Of course, listening to community feedback is very important, but counting on others to do the work for you won't cut it.
Anyway, I don't care much about blog.ch anymore, there are alternatives like blogug.ch and slug.ch and at least blogug.ch is open for everyone to contribute (and won't ever get any ads. Promised.)
And the obligatory disclaimer: We did a lot of work for blogug.ch (Planet, Ping, Top100) and this was partly “sponsored” by Bitflux (meaning that Tobi and Beni worked on their working time on it), but there's no plan by us to make money with that or to “milk” the community somehow. It's there to be used by the community for whatever they like and we really hope there's more coming out of it. And blogug.ch was partly founded, 'cause of all the things which were happening around blog.ch and I'm very very glad we ( Patrice and all the others involved) did it. With the help of blog.ch, by the way, which delivered the initial batch of blogs (and still does deliver new ones).