Is blogging going mainstream or is mainstream socially engineering and taking over blogging?

The Blog Herald had some information links to some background on a bit of research of the Weblogs Inc buy. I added a comment to that post and I’m posting it below too. Below my comment I will have a lot more questions that maybe some one out here can answer. I’m letting my curiosity get the best of me to much here but all I’ve seen so far are a lot of headlines that aren’t making sense to me. I’m not angry. I’m not debating, it just doesn’t compute in this brain of mine. I see headlines like “AOL Buying Weblogs Inc., Media Not So Traditional Anymore”. One question here above is blogging going mainstream or is mainstream socially engineering and taking over blogging?

COMMENT BELOW:

Thanks for the link on this subject and set of information. I was asking some of these questions in my head and on my blog the other day.

It’s seems it would be difficult to price what is intellectual property and then add in the virtual and unknowns. I would still be very cautious investing in this market moving ahead. I would like to see more thorough analysis of these buys and why.

Obviously, the big companies are seeing the value in acquiring these virtual properties and traffic but what are the reasons behind it? Times are economically treacherous with what is going on all around the world. What are the business models and finances behind these purchases? Is it if you own the monopoly you win?

I saw another article that mentioned the last time AOL bought up virtual property was preceding the big DOT.COM bust. Sorry, I can’t seem to find the reference link for exact details on that one.

I’m very suspicious of this whole deal. It is a lot of money for Weblogs Inc for what a big corporation could have worked around and created themselves for much less. I had a site many years ago that had more content and pages then this entire network The links were probably almost comparable in number if you put in ratio to what the size of the internet is now and what it was then. I was a one man band hand coding at the time. I don’t mean to be cynical or conspiratal, but something just doesn’t appear copasetic, especially with the numbers shown in the above link and information.

With the right resources and far less, and I mean far less from the amount spent on this acquisition I could build a much larger network of blogs, linkage and visitor base in six months. Yes, I have the complete confidence in being able to do this. So why did the big guy with the money make this deal?

COMMENT ABOVE


I noticed the extra information I’ve been picking up is not much besides editorials and quick headlines. There really hasn’t been a lot of solid real data, analysis and research that I’ve been able to find in the public areas. So I need to do a bit more research on my own and maybe some of you great people can point me in the right direction.

Now here is this giant corporation AOL that could have built a network such as Weblogs Inc for pennies on the dollar, if at even that much of a cost, almost over night. So why are they paying all this money? Business is not usually about charity in America. That was not meant as an insult to Weblogs Inc they built a rather large useful to many network of blogs. I can’t see the value from the AOL stand point. I’m really not trying to stomp on the parade; something is just not right from my point of view.

I won’t finish this post tonight heading out to the movies shortly but I want to start with some thoughts and questions.

What are we selling the content, writers, links, name, blogs and maybe server and hardware? They are probably on virtual farm servers somewhere with a lease but I’m only guessing. They may own those at Weblogs Inc but that still is a minimal investment for a few blogs in the network. AOL would already have all this hardware and maybe need a couple extra harddrives to build this network. They could use employees but it would be much cheaper for the company to use the same type socially engineering of content providers that Weblogs Inc did. No benefits, not employees less then minimum wage provided to the people providing the content and work. Yes, many of these people did it for different reasons like labor of love or the attention or glory. There are many other reasons I’m sure. “Weblogs Inc., pay rates revealed by disgruntled potential recruit”. Let’s see a few years ago contractors made a lot more then regular employees because they saved the company lots of money. However, the way of the present and future in America is to source it out where you can make it much cheaper. These social networking and engineering techniques are a like marketing pyramids schemes; where a few make a lot of money off the labor of many that are not going to get much of anything. I could be wrong and all the contracted bloggers over there at Weblogs Inc are going to be taking care of either compensated well from the payoff or employed by AOL. Something tells me that will not be the case but I could be completely wrong. I will probably never know because HR of today would never allow this type information to be released and if people involved said anything they would lose their jobs.

That brings me to a few questions question:

Are these workers that helped building these blogs and network being compensated?

Are these bloggers going to move on?

If so I can assume that people weren’t part of the buy when AOL made this deal. Oh yeah that’s right you can’t sell people in a company as part of the package can you? I would think that could be considered indentured servitude.

If they are moving on is that not going to change the product AOL just bought?
Are the faces of this network going to change possibly quite a bit to fit the company policies of AOL?

Is this a little like packaging and selling air? I’m still trying figure out what the money is buying, I guess that is my big question?

OK, I have to run and I didn’t edit this or even come near finishing this the way I would like too. I’m going to post it anyway because I would like to really get a clue on this one, because it has me lost! I will need to do a lot more editing; research and reviewing so don’t slam me to much for my questions and research yet. Please feel free to point me to any data and information that could help me comprehend what is really going on here, thanks.

So is the blogosphere going mainstream or is the mainstream reeling the leash back in on the blogosphere?
blogged by Anonymous @ 10/09/2005