How power laws deflowered blogs

The blog aristocracy gets feature treatment in the latest issue of New York, where Clive Thompson weaves together tales of mostly NYC-based characters who’ve plugged away at establishing a parallel universe media world – where the only thing they have in common is hostility toward anyone else squatting on their topic space, even though getting linked from other sites is deemed the most effective measure of what any site is worth. The face on the front cover belongs to Peter Rojas, who bailed from his slave-wage job running Gizmodo – the first of the Gawker Media blogs created with money-making ambitions – to his co-owned knock-off Engadget, becoming a millionaire when company Weblogs Inc. was purchased by AOL. A newfangled version of the dot-com gold rush? Not if a newcomer can do a better job of filling a niche, although the article concludes that the era of blog success seen as something serendipitous – even when it was entirely calculated – has come to an end. Between all the hucksters huddling together to calculate ways of making a quick buck off personal publishing tools, and bigger media eager to harness online spontaneity toward making and breaking news, this should be the last package viewing weblogs as one homogenous phenomenon.

Blogs to Riches [New York]