up the corporate ladder

Thursday, April 01, 2004, at 01:16PM

By Eric Richardson

(Update: Heh... So, uhhh, it's the first and I'm tired and uhhh... I still agree with what I said.)

So today blogging.la announced its sale to LA.com, and therefore to some conglomeration of Gannett/MediaNews/whatever they are (hereafter BigMediaCo). Sean and co. get an office, paychecks, etc, all in exchange for a few more ads. The announcement comes straight out with plans to expand the concept to other BigMediaCo cities.

I'm not sure I like this.

Looking back, it's not that hard to see the signs leading up to this. Back when the la.com thing all went down, one of the main b.la responses was "hey, we're already doing this."

But I don't think they were.

la.com's "blog" has a paid staff. b.la's write because they can. A month or two ago the sentiment I heard was that if anyone's going to make money off of people's writings, it should be the people themselves. Now b.la's making money, does that mean they're going to start kicking a little of the wealth back to the people that are powering the boat?

Tell me how this whole thing is different than a record label. You can go do your own writing, doing your indie thing off in some corner of the web. That's all good and well. Or you can sign up with the big dogs, putting your work on a site where BigMediaCo is going to pimp it out and use a flashy ad budget to pull in more eyeballs. And if BigMediaCo happens to make a little cash for the stockholders along the way, all the better. Sign your deal and sure, maybe you'll make it big, but what you're really doing is just putting a little more money in a few more pockets that most definitely aren't your own.

I'm not anti-money or anti-corporate, that would be stupid. I'm all for making money doing cool stuff. I just paid my rent today, and I most definitely would prefer to continue to keep doing that. What bothers me is the trend toward finding ways to let other people make money for you. It's like, hey, let's create/buy/put in place this framework and then sit back and watch as these unpaid people create our product for us. I mean, what is b.la? Well, it's a movable type installation. But BigMediaCo isn't buying that. They could get that themselves. Ok, so it's a name, and a URL people already know. Ehhh, sort of. BigMediaCo already bought a name, and their ad budget can get people there. So then really it's the people writing. BigMediaCo comes in and buys "the rights" to the site's writers so that it can make money off their content.

Which is cool, I guess. I don't know that I'd want to keep writing, but seeing as I wasn't one to begin with, that's really neither here nor there and my opinion on the matter doesn't mean much.

I guess the success story for this model would be Slashdot. When Rob and co. sold the farm to OSDN, people made a bit of a stink. But then life went on, the site really didn't change any, and by now people just accept that that's the way that life always was. But will it be the same as the corps assimilate blogs? Gregory Block made this comment on onlineblog:

That hits the nail on the head, pretty much. While we're all happy that blogs are a big success, we've already watched one medium - the WWW - turned on its head by money. Unlike last time around, more people use blogs today than used the web then before it went commercial - so a commercialization of the style and scale that reshaped the WWW from what it was then to what it is today would affect a lot more people than the aforementioned transition.

I don't know how this plays out. The money's coming, but are the right people going to be getting it?