Synergy was an awesome buzzword. Not only does it mean something, it just sounds awesome. If you had synergy, you couldn’t go wrong.

People have often asked me – is there something wrong with me? Do I have ADD? (not to imply ADD is wrong, but you get the idea). Why can’t I just *focus* on one thing and go with it?

The answer is simple: having resources in various areas makes it much easier to ‘push’ a product.

Case in point: Blog Flux Local

While not launched, the entire project is a very daunting task – we essentially want to catalog local content, and geocode it to where it belongs. Similar to outside.in, but really – more simplistic.

So one of our initial problems was – how do we figure out where a post is about? We can attempt to parse out street intersections etc, but that is haphazard. We can ask people for GPS coordinates (FeedBurner supports this) – but who the hell is gonna figure that out?

The simple truth is that we associate places with names (or even street intersections). I would say “McDonald’s near Elm and Queen Street”. I wouldn’t say ‘131 Elm Street’ or ‘23.2352, -115,234234′ Now to be able to do something like that, we need both the business data and the geocoder.

And so now in comes iBegin Source and iBegin Geocoder (launching soon). We already have support for linkage on iBegin Source – basically you link to that specific page, and we link back (right now you have to manually add the link, but we are working on a trackback system for that). Example: Best Vet Inc in Boynton Beach, FL.

We know the post is about XXX, we know that XXX is located in YYY – so now we know where all of this is.

The next challenge then is to introduce bloggers into this system. And that is where Blog Flux‘s fantastic reach comes into play. Almost 31,000 blogs approved, and over 72,000 registered users. Throw in Blog Top Sites with another 30,000 members (50% overlap with Blog Flux), and you now have the potential to reach 87,000 users about this service (by the time we launch it should be 90,000). Blog Flux is going from strength to strength (just peaked at 45,000 pageviews a few days ago) – this will just push it further along

I’m not going into more details about how we are presenting the data and so forth (aha!), but this should give an idea on how having multiple established brands can be a good thing. Do remember that both iBegin and Blog Flux have their own staff, so it’s not like you can just setup two brands and enjoy. It takes time to do that too.