Dana Blankenhorn over at Moore's Lore has some thoughts on where the money from blogging may be coming from:

The question remains whether blogging will become subsumed into other media (lots of high-tech publishers, like Business 2.0, now have things they call blogs), whether new journalism businesses can be built on blogging, and whether blogging will be an individual or community endeavor.

He is intrigued by Weblogs, Inc, but not convinced they have found the pot of gold in their business model.

I have some serious problems with their model:

• There's no credit given writers, and thus no style to the writing.
• They've got a lot of tech, but is there is a lot more to business media than tech.
• While they support user feedback, they don't empower users to control their own content as, say, Slashdot does.

I am not sure what the last point means. What does a user mean? If by user he means a blogger, well, the statement is obviously not true as blogs are the ultimate tool for their users (bloggers) to control their content. If he means readers, well, why should they control the content of somebody else's blog? Blogs are the property of the author and if any of the readers feels that their comments are not sufficiently under their control, whatever that means, they can set up their own blog.

Slashdot has threaded comments, which we tend to depreciate as they encourage digression. Nothing wrong with that as such, but one positive feature of a blog format is that it maintains a fine balance between unstructured content - thoughts, ideas, factoids - and a structure that enables authors and others to build on it. It gives structure to the content and enable it to be retrieved via archives.

The blogging business model cuts the distance between writer and reader, between participant and audience. The best blogging business models will shrink this distance to nearly nothing. The only difference between blog creators and their audience should be their level of commitment to the task. And the task for those who would build blogging businesses is to find the money necessary from somewhere to justify that commitment.

Why? To me, the major benefit of blogging is cutting the distance between good content and audience. I can now read Dana's writing every day! Presumably I could have done that before as he is a business journalist, however, I get valuable content from the likes of Steve Rubel, BL Ochman, Lilia Efimova and many others. There already is an online communication tool that shrinks the distance between participant and audience to nearly nothing and that is forums. The difference between a blog and forum is significant.

Forum is like a collective drawing, each participant draws his own line(s) sometimes without regard for the others' efforts. Who draws most lines wins. The result is a criss-cross of lines, overlapping shapes, in short, a mess that takes too much time to unravel to get any lasting value.

A blog is a painting that has been hung up on the wall and everyone standing around can comment on it, say how they would have done or why they like it. There is a clear hierarchy between the author of the article and the person who comments on it. No drawing of mustaches anywhere but plenty of interaction. To me this is what makes blogs so suitable for communication between companies and their audience.

Readers of blogs get value out of the content provided by the author, otherwise they would not visit it repeatedly. Participatory journalism and participatory democracy enable by blogging does not make much sense to me since blogs are anything but democratic. I decide what goes on my blog, you don't get to decide about it. What the readers and other bloggers decide however, is whether it is worth their eyeball and further involvement in comments. If you want to participate more, start a blog. The only 'democratic' feature of blogging is that anyone with a computer and internet connection has access to it.

The business model that makes money for blogging is not the one that mimics publishing or advertising models. Yes, there is money to be made their as those who place ads on their blogs can attest. Or being paid for PR or any other form of marketing. We think that it does not make sense to blog for money (although some can succeed in building a brand strong enough to manage that) but to blog for business that makes money. That is why we decided to help companies to understand and use blogs for cutting out the middlemen in their communication with customers, markets and industry peers.

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