Mar

20

What’s so new about rolling up blogs?

March 20, 2008 |

Michael Arrington wrote a short follow-up to his late-night rant today:

What’s my secret master plan? The secret is I tend to speak plainly and I already said exactly what I wanted to say. I believe bloggers should be careful about raising too much money and thereby killing opportunities to work with others. I believe the politics of linking is at times distasteful, but necessary for any blog to thrive (that is something I’ll write more about later). And I believe the rollup of big blogs is about to begin.

It’s a bit of a disjointed paragraph, but it sounds a bit as if TechCrunch is going to put some if its money in buying up a blog or two in the near future (why else, I wonder, would he be so fascinated by the blog rollup topic these days?).

I guess I don’t quite get some of the premises of Arrington’s issue with raising money. How does raising money kill the opportunity to work with others? Because of the politics involved? I’m not sure that really counts - even when there is no money involved, politics are always in play. As long as you get a couple of egos together, there are always politics. But working with other bloggers isn’t driven by having or not having money.

As I said yesterday, I think it is pretty much inevitable that the best blogs and the best bloggers will become part of bigger, more commercial networks. There is hardly a way to make a living as an individual blogger, so the lure of getting a paycheck for doing what one is passionate about is always there. There is nothing wrong with that.

To keep on growing, TechCrunch has to keep adding new sites to its network. The same is true for all the other blog networks.

At the same time, I wonder what is really so new about this. Haven’t the big blogs, including TechCrunch always tried to hire the best and the brightest? Didn’t formal and informal networks of bloggers always exist?


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