This week a PR company sent samples of Jolt Energy Gum to 451 HQ. The gum is loaded with caffeine and will give you quite a “jolt”, but we are buzzing because they told us our Watching 24 site is one of the top 10 24 sites on the web! Way to go Aaron, keep up the great work. And don’t eat too much of that gum at once, you’ll get a serious headache! That stuff packs a punch.

This week was also “451 Press owns Netscape.com” week, with 3 stories hitting the front page. For 3-4 days there we had at least 2 stories on the front page at the same time. Our bloggers rock!

Anna, From Watching The Office started off the Netscape trend this week with her post Tuesday’s The Office Guest Star: Sanjaya Malakar.

JM, from Fiction Scribe, had Thoughts on Paid Blogging hit the front page, which is a great topic and one I talk about pretty often.

Tracey, from Hot or Not Beauty, posted Halle Gets Banged! which was on Netscape, but those punks pulled it! Why Netscape, why do you hurt our feelings this way?

Steve also put together a report on growth over the last 3 months, and our top 10 most improved blogs in terms of growth are:

Watching Survivor (277%)
Dating Outlook (196%)
Tom Cruise Watch (185%)
MS Talk Online (162%)
Scrapropos (118%)
Hot or Not Beauty (110%)
Watching The View (110%)
Bargin Styling (108%)
Xbox 360 Rally (106%)
My Friendly Pets (104%)

This was a long week for us here in the office with lots of catching up to do and planning going forward as well as an amazing week for our bloggers, who always do a great job and we are glad to see them get the notice they deserve.

451 Press

Someone recently asked what I thought our biggest strength was as a company and I always have to say our writers. We really are fortunate to have some of the best writers. Here are some high lights from the last week of what they’ve been up to:

Congrats to Kelly from Tiny Treasury who was approached by Disney to blog for their new Family.com site. Kelly will be covering family, finance and tax over at Waiting Upon Fortune (But never sure of dinner) so check it out and support her new writing gig!

JM over at Fiction Scribe has an interview up with one of our own 451 Press writers, Bobbi Chukran from Earthly Garden. The focus is on writing, something I think our bloggers are very qualified to talk about and this interview well worth checking out, so head over to Historical Mystery Maven for a good time, er, read. Bobbi has had a great run lately, she was just recently featured on the Google News site which lead to lots of links!

Erinn from Parenting Our Children was also interviewed by StorkCalling so be sure to check that out.

Winnie is having a Watching The View Comment Contest, the winner will receive the new spring version of The View mug. Winnie’s blog is so good that several people have mistaken it for the official web site of the view!

Our poster boy for great TV Show writing, Aaron from Watching 24 was mentioned in a recent blog post over at USA Today!

And our bad boy of gaming, BB from 1P Start landed on the front page of digg with his post New Screens - Brunswick Bowling for Wii.

451 Press, Hot Off The Press

451 Press just returned from Austin spending a week participating in SxSWi. We attended a lot of fantastic panels and met a lot of great people and businesses that grace the internet today. We hope to use a lot of what we’ve learned to better the network as the months go by.

And here is an exciting note for you Guitar Hero fans: 1P Start is having a contest where they are giving away a brand new copy of Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360. Essentially, the more you comment on 1P Start, the more chances you have to win! So, hop on over there and participate in the discussions going on so that you can increase your chances of winning.