Blogcasting

Nice coverage of blogad mininetworks by Juan Cole in CNET. (One correction to note: the liberal network is doing a million impressions a day.) Will advertising ruin blogs?

But because with blogging the price of entry is so low, you can never have ownership consolidation. It will always be a distributed medium and therefore very difficult to control. If professional bloggers emerged who came to be unduly beholden to their advertisers and started not covering certain stories or spinning them for the sake of their sponsors, other nonprofessional bloggers would just step into the breach. If corporate media bought up a few big bloggers, they would still have to compete against literally millions of independents. And if any of the independents were providing what the audience wanted better, the traffic would shift to them. In the world of blogging, any form of censorship actually creates opportunities for those immune to it.

Technical limitations and expense make it almost impossible for anyone now to start up a new 24-hour-a-day news channel. But anyone can start a blog. I expect journalist cooperatives (both professional and amateur) to emerge over time and do podcasting, and eventually Webcasting with video, finally breaking the current semimonopoly of broadcast news.