Red Herring, the tech industry’s essential source for Silicon Valley venture capital news and buzz during the go-go ‘90s but since fallen on hard times, has just rolled out a new beta online platform that it hopes will reduce computing costs and attract new readers and advertisers through the addition of a number of social community-building features and a new video channel.

“Developing and maintaining a web site like Red Herring can be very expensive,” says webmaster Chris Heimbuck.  “Typically, you need a team of developers to build it and then you are pretty much dependent on the team to keep things up and running smoothly.  That adds up.” 

In addition to cutting costs, editor Scott Morrison wanted to add community-building functionality that would allow readers to engage RH and its writers and editors directly and to add content.  He also wanted a solution that would support RedHerring.tv, a new channel of video interviews with leading venture capitalists and CEOs of hot technology startups.

The solution they chose was to move to the Blogtronix platform, which already had the desired social networking and video capabilities built in, and to work with Blogtronix’s development team in Bulgaria to create the more conventional content management system they needed for landing pages.

“The Blogtronix crew did a lot of custom work for us,” Heimbuck says.  “They really went that extra mile.  As a result, our new site is far more functional and attractive than our old site and it cost far less to develop and maintain.”  

Morrison agrees and says he’s looking forward to building a committed and engaged Red Herring community.  

“By adding social networking capabilities—like allowing readers to create profiles and blogs–we hope to enable users to engage our brand more deeply and essentially drive the content,” he says.  “That’s when it really gets exciting for us.”