With the launch this week of Bloggingbaby.com, Gothamist has begun to wonder if Weblogs Incorporated has jumped the shark. Jason Calacanis' 40th blog is dedicated to "pregnancy, baby care and parenting", which means lots of posts about baby products, lactation, and diaper-changes. The design features bright colors and a duck logo. Now don't get us wrong: Gothamist loves babies. Especially baby pandas, baby cats, and ravers sucking on pacifiers. But as with the launch of Nick Denton's Nike Blog, the launch of the "poopydiaperblog" does raise some questions:

- Scale: Jason has announced his intention to create 500 blogs within the next two years. It's only blog #40, and already we are reading posts about how to calculate your due-date. Weblogsinc already has blogs devoted to such scintillating subjects as Tablet PCs, Magazine Design, and Outsourcing. By the time Jason gets to blog #50 or blog #60, will the content be so mind-numbingly specific or mundane that it loses all coherence and the entire enteprise collapses into some unspeakable information black hole? Maybe.

- Quality: As the number of blogs approaches 100, Weblogsinc starts to look a lot like About.com. The credibility of any one site on the network seems to decrease as the network expands: can anyone explain why this effect exists? Perhaps its the dilution of the brand name. Perhaps its the difficulty of finding great writers to write about things like lactation. [Gothamist deleted a line in this paragraph. It went something like "Already Weblogsinc has recruited Jason Calacanis' mother, the wife of his partner, and a number of his friends. Surely not all of these people were born to be great bloggers."] If the quality of some of the blogs is subpar, how much will that impact on the reputation of the whole enterprise? Certainly, some of these blogs do not support a sexy, risk-taking, hipster-oriented, bi-coastal brand. Jason has said he wants to create blogs for middle Americans- but are there enough middle American blog readers to support Weblogsinc?

- Finances: Gothamist is also concerned about rationality of the Weblogsinc business model. Let's say Jason gets to 250 blogs in the next year (Unrealistic? The man is a machine!) Let's say each writer is paid $500 a month (Nick Denton's going rate is $2000 per month- and Pete Rojas surely would not have gone to work for much less). That's $125,000 a month in expense, or $1.5 million per year- without counting any other expenses. Now Jason is very generous, but this seems like an awful lot of expense to bear! Gothamist has seen Jason work out the math for us many times, but we just can't get it to add up ourselves. Can the average blog be expected to generate more than $500 a dollars a month in ad sales? Our experience says no.

- Agency Problems: Jason has said that his interests and the interests of his bloggers are well-aligned, but we see some potential problems. For instance, Jason has held out the carrot of advertising sales to all of his bloggers. Many of these sites will not see ads for a very long time, if ever. As Jason devotes most of his time (and the time of his ad sales staff) to the best performing blogs, will some of his bloggers get the short end of the stick? Will Jason be able to effectively manage all of his bloggers, and keep up any reasonable standard of quality? Our experience says no, and the Gothamist collective has only twenty writers.

Just to be clear: Gothamist jumped the shark with its first post on pandas, back in 2002. Our doubts about Weblogsinc are grave, but Jason Calacanis is a winner, and most likely every blogger in America will be working for him or for Nick Denton in five years time. While he drinks mai-tais outside his blog powered mansion in Bel Air, we'll be slaving in the basement of some Chinese restaurant on Pell Street, just trying to raise enough money to replace the fan on the Gothamist server. So you might want to ignore everything we just said. [Read some of Jason's thoughts on recent events]