The internet was once a library. You only needed to enter to obtain knowledge. To remove material for study outside the sounds of silence you needed a card. Privately or publicly a tax was levied by the community to maintain it(the physical structure and its collection).

Eloit Spitzer is right. Elaborate malware takes the pleasure away. We should not have the internet ruined by commerce. Let's just pay a tax to an infrastructure maintainance contractor(we need someone to take down all those sites of losing political candidates) and go home to read, listen and learn. Continue our tax to our provider for e-mail. The idea that you need to be bundle together bloggers, etal so they can stay active is ridiculous. They should be ignored just like all the people whom think my postings mean I am a troll.

They'll get the ad dollars if they can get the bloggers -- the page views are there.

As for "new" journalism -- Pajama Media needs a new model. Something that turns the old model (i.e. one correspondent delivers news from a particular field) on its head. To date, bloggers have been successful at revolutionizing journalism, insofar as they've extended the conversation beyond the traditional MSM, though not to MSM's exclusion.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

I'm saying this is the death of blogging. With advertising dollars will come pressure to increase hits, pandering to the masses, and avoidance of any remark that might offend moneyed interests.

It's only a matter of time before blogs reach the same level of blandness and corruption that characterize the print media and broadcast news.

I would think this idea would force online news services to begin charging for articles, which would start draining the wallets of these bloggers.

Media would then crack down on unauthorized excerpting of articles. It would be the end of blogs as we know them.

I highly recommend the extraordinarily insightful comments from "Lonewacko" at the lavoice link.

I saw this site that appeared to be trying to be an online news site, i.e., it didn't appear to be outright spammy. "National" something or other. Yet, I counted at least nine ads. It was pretty funny. There might have even been one or two ads I didn't see. At a not-exactly-spam celebrity blog they've got it cranked out with the maximum of three adsense blocks total: one on the left and two running down the right.

Agree with joel to the point that the injection of advertising dollars is a double-edged sword - it can denigrate for the reasons he states, but it can cut positive too by allowing some of the bright, talented and creative bloggers out there now the income to dedicate themselves to blogging. As long as the web remains a free media for distribution of content, some of the negative cuts will be mitigated by the ease to which new talent can draw attention and prominance. For me the time of alarms is when physical bandwidth reaches the point that visual media like video begins to dominate the written word on the web. This is the beauty of the web to me, a multi-faceted source of intelligent and creative discourse. The written word contains little entertainment value other than the imagination and interest the reader brings. No pretty face or pyrotechnics to hide a weak arguement or a badly turned phrase.

it can cut positive too by allowing some of the bright, talented and creative bloggers out there now the income to dedicate themselves to blogging.

At the point where you get enough raw traffic and/or a lesser quantity of targeted traffic to become a full-time blogger, you're in the mainstream. If you weren't generally acceptably mainstream in your views, you wouldn't have so much traffic. Note: I'm not calling Insty a pabulum pusher.

I expect to see a pretty substantial law of unintended consequences impact. Money will enter the equation big time. This will mean control of content - No dissing the advertisers. Lawyers will not be far behind. And where lawyers go, legislators follow quickly. Unrestricted comments would be the first casualty.

By the time blogs become a major news source to the general population and actually draw significant numbers of people away from newspapers (rather than serve as an additional source), newspapers should have worked out ways to stay alive and healthy, if not bask in the glory and possibilities of the internet.
My prediction is that newspapers will increasingly drop the "paper" part for two major reasons: first, it costs the publishing company a lot to get the raw materials, print, and deliver the paper; and, second, customers pay more for the "paper" part of the newspaper due to the reasons stated above. Because customers prefer to pay less, and will more readily subscribe to something that is cheaper, most major newspapers should have a majority or strong minority of their customers receiving their news through the internet.

This will actually have an interesting effect on US culture. I don't want to speculate much, but I believe the possibility of finding 100 different sources and perspectives on the same basic story within a second will change the way America thinks about the news. Additionally, internet news will vary from TV and radio in an acute way: it is 'impulse-driven', as I will call it. To read a specific story on the internet, you have to search for it, while television will present a story regardless of your wishes, and you will have to do work to get away from that story. This means that less attention will be given to sensational events like Scott Peterson or Michael Jackson, and more will be given to things which are important to the news consumer. Don't apply what I say to any great extent, because much of the news will still exist for entertainment, rather than informative, purposes. I just hope that I am right, because I am so sick of Jackson, Peterson, and all the other characters that are thrown in front of the American public.

If newspapers are smart, which they are, they will find ways to make considerable profits on the internet. They have numerous advantages over bloggers; mainly money, sources that were involved in the event or are authorities on the subject, organization, money, groupthink (it can be a good thing, too!), money, credibility, and more money. Major news networks have the capital to develop the infrastructure that blogs lack – things like a user-friendly news search engine, software that may automatically update or fact-check (that would either be a blessing or a disaster, depending on if it's made by Google or Microsoft), and host large files. Blogs are not, and may never be, self-sufficient. There is far too much piggy-backing on the existing news media and companies like Google for blogs to even think about being self-sufficient. The major news networks are the backbone of news and political blogs, whether bloggers want to admit it or not, so we can't exist without them. The money that the news industry will pour into the internet will help bloggers. At the very least, we will be able to find better news stories; at the best, we will fuse with the rest of the media and become indispensable, but that would take longer. Mind you, both might happen.

By moving to the internet, news sources will inevitably gain a few traits of blogs. This may mean that the New York Times copies one of my posts into their editorial section (not like they ever would, but that's because of differences of opinion). Why not? I can't think of a blog that hasn't violated copyrights of a dozen or more professional news sources. This seems like the most likely fusion of the blogosphere and major media networks, and it is a natural one. What better way to silence claims of media bias and irresponsibility than to adopt the complainer and their arguments? What better way to publish an opinion worthy of publishing but which the editorial staff cannot produce?

Changes to internet advertising and MSM practices will not end blogs, nor will it limit them. As long as there is a way for blogs to be read, there will be bloggers clamoring for readers. The MSM will pull more news-nuts onto the internet, thereby expanding the audience open to blogs. As a natural result, the blogosphere will benefit.

In terms of new advertising, I don't see much of a sword, no matter how many edges it has. Content-based advertising means that advertisements for a company will not be placed on a blog that attacks that company (software might require some fine-tuning, of course). Also, a blogger may be able to ban some advertisers from their blog, or select the subjects and content (text, pictures, or movies) of the advertisements that would go on the blog. I see little reason not to have this, as there will be hundreds of thousands or millions of different internet ads to choose from, and the blogger would only limit the amount they make on advertisements (if there is a noticeable difference at all). If bloggers only get paid when a visitor buys something from the advertiser, I see no logical reason that a blogger could be sued for what they say about the advertiser. Indeed, some restrictions may be placed on comments, but that would probably only apply to those who rabidly attack the advertiser – those people would be trolls anyway.