But others have begun to wonder if the brand itself is a form of compromise. Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers.
"They're pursuing a very clear agenda and they've done very well with that," Boyd said of Gawker. "But they're just an old media company in new media clothes, and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point."
The point, Boyd said, is that blogging is unique because of its spontaneity and individualism, and that bloggers, like dancers and sculptors, are most interesting because they are "pursuing their muse."
Nothing special
The editors on Gawker are talented, entertaining and informative, Boyd said, but also indistinguishable from any freelance writer, with no ownership of what they produce. "These people are hirelings," he said. "What they are cranking out are the 700 words they signed on to produce."
Other critics of the blog movement wonder whether the hoopla over the commercial viability of blogs -- particularly as publishing ventures -- is overstated.
Patrick Phillips, founder of I Want Media, a Web site about media news, said: "I think blogging can catapult unknown writers, and it can give them a platform if they're talented. But as a stand-alone business, I think the jury is still out on that."
There is, apparently, a ceiling on Gawker's expansion. Last month, the company started Sploid, a Drudge-like headline news blog with a tabloid look, and Denton says two more titles are planned for the short term, although he would not be specific about the particular consumer itches he'll be scratching this time. Having covered everything from BlackBerries to Beltway gossip, it's hard to imagine what else looms, but he said writers had already been lined up.
That will bring the number of titles to 14, and Denton indicated that 17 seemed a good stopping point, if for no other reason than that is the number of titles published by Conde Nast.
So, onward goes the nonrevolution. "If you take the amount of attention that has been devoted in the last year to Web logs as a business and something that's going to change business and compare that with the real effect and the real money, it's totally disproportionate," Denton said, "in the same way all the coverage of the Internet in the late 90s was out of whack.
"There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not," he added. "It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of Internet media."
RSS