Weblog Portal for Business Draws Excitement and Skepticism
What's hotter, business weblogs or weblogs about business weblogs? CBS MarketWatch fires back today [REGISTRATION] at yesterday's Wired magazine article about Rafat Ali's PaidContent.org postings on former Silicon Valley Reporter editor Jason Calacanis' plans for weblogsinc.com, a portal intended to profit from hundreds of B2B weblog providers. While Rafat Ali sees this as an extension of About.com's (partially) successful topic docent model, MarketWatch quotes from Nick Denton's weblog, which warns that webloggers are not going to want to make their personal brand subsidiary to an aggregators' brand. On balance, I have to weigh in with Nick on this one. Weblogs are very powerful as personal communication tools, but they lack the elements of community, context and perspective that the editorial process brings to breaking news. News as we know it definitely is being reinvented via weblogs, but that's not to say that weblogs per se are going to reinvent media or reinvigorate branded aggregation. Dot-com era concepts of aggregation are largely outdated, superceded by search technologies that favor premium value being provided in much more specific and context-driven communities.