Online Money Order - Blogging Bliss: Bloggers and News Sites to Marry Web Content

Web content for newspapers online has been limited to
repeating what paid staff writes for the print editions of
their papers or material coming from one or another of the wire services
to which the parent organization subscribes.

A new service called
BlogBurst has emerged to help bring blogging and news
together on the web sites of major media. Imagine a news wire service for blogs which could
syndicate your blog to appear on online news sites. We're all familiar with seeing Associated Press or Reuters
stories running in our local paper and posted online at
various news organizations.

http://www.blogburst.com/

The news organizations can apparently choose from
among the topic areas and bloggers offered via the BlogBurst
feed. Blogburst makes the writings of a select group of bloggers
available to news organizations by aggregating the musings of
selected blog writers into a feed made available to major
papers.

Relevant links below: There already exist several
attempts to popularize what has become known as "Citizen
Journalism" by such notable groups as "We the Media and Dan
Gillmore's Bayosphere which seems to have been taken over by
BackFence. Some bloggers have launched news commentary blogs with groups
of bloggers commenting on news.

http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism

[http://www.bayosphere.com/blog/dan_gillmor/]

[http://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/index.cfm?mycomm=BA]

Since people can't read what they don't know exists, struggling to gain readers is the bane of
blogging. Which are otherwise unknown to the world, those experiments mentioned above have been available on small sites. What is often lacking for bloggers who provide commentary on the news is an
audience.

But most
bloggers toil away daily for the pure love of a topic while
gathering small and loyal followings, others gain
that audience through connections or through fame. Some well known bloggers have found their audience through
writing compelling content and being discovered by major
media when they break their own news stories.

It's an interesting
experiment and may be the route to bloggers earning a living
from their blogs by gaining an audience they previously had
little access to - major newspaper web site visitors. So accuracy and truthfulness is
maintained and the blog can be trusted, blogBurst promises to make web content from the blogosphere
discoverable by the media by limiting the availability and
vetting the sources.

Or some
other agreement with individual advertisers, blogads, whether that is Google Adsense, blogBurst will allow those bloggers to both reach
an audience and capitalize on their own traffic via their own
advertising, since a lack of income
is what haunts many bloggers hoping to earn from their
commentary. BlogBurst is filling that need, since unknown bloggers appear to need the media in order to
spread the word (becoming well known in the process) and
newspaper web sites appear to want blogs associated with
their site.

ZDNet is currently offering bloggers in popular
technology topic areas and is apparently providing payment
from advertising revenue generated by those blogs. Staffers have little incentive to blog without
pay and comment sections are subject to abuse by comment
spam, but volunteers appear
unreliable. Others have tried
allowing "Comments" from readers, some
have offered staff journalists a blog, news sites have launched blogs written by volunteers.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/

San Francisco
Chronicle and Houston Chronicle news sites, gannet News sites, such as the
Washington Post, this content will be
available directly on the news sites, presumably. BlogBurst is taking an interesting approach by offering
online news organizations filtered and verified news
commentary from bloggers.

To see
if this will be a long lasting marriage, stay tuned. BlogBurst appears to be offering to serve as
minister to a marriage made in heaven. Will the love of blogs by major media result in a
spring wedding? BlogBurst is reviewing proposed blogs currently and will
announce the engagement in a live trial with major news sites
in May.