HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

I came across Clive Thompson's blog yesterday and saw that he wrote an article for New York Magazine. It's a well-written article that provides a different perspective on stories most of you already know about. The excerpt is from the end of the article, so avoid reading it if you prefer.

Blogs to Riches
The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom.

... Will professionalization turn blogging into media-as-usual? Or will the idiosyncratic voice of the lone blogger prevail? Elizabeth Spiers thinks that both statements are true. After she left Gawker, she learned about the power of the first-mover advantage the hard way, by trying to repeat her success. Last year, she spent three months launching eight media-gossip sites for Mediabistro, a career-development site for journalists. They amassed an impressive 1 million page views a month, a healthy amount, but hardly Gawker-class. Then in January, Spiers jumped back into the blog pool with a splash, announcing that she was launching her own blog empire.

When I call her, she is at her desk in her new company’s offices in Tribeca. She’s being backed by two angel investors—Carter Burden, head of the Webhosting company Logicworks, and Justin Smith, president of The Week, a news magazine. Their first blog, launching in March, will be called Dealbreaker, and devoted to Wall Street gossip. Her advertisers would be? “For Wall Street? Pretty much everybody,” she says. “It’s a high-income demographic, pretty attractive.” The start-up money lets her pay for a full-time blogging staff, which she’ll need since she wants her writers to actually do reporting and break news. And this, she argues, is the future of the professional blogosphere... (full article)

New York Magazine also has some good related articles. One is "Linkology" which is an overview of the top 50 blogs and their connections. It comes with an infographic of these 50 blogs and how they link with each other. I might feel geeky enough later on to print out the PDF file they provide of this graphic and post it on our office wall.