HotTopics: Blogs: Betting With House Money

This HotTopics separates the noise from the truly earthshaking in the world of blogs and RSS distribution. It describes what's really new from the point of view of traditional publishers and information aggregators: the huge impact they've had in politics, business, and culture in a short period of time; their 'viral' nature and outsized reach; the business lessons found in the 'Giant Global Funnel,' which draws in all Internet-connected users interested in the narrowest of subjects; and the double-edged sword blogs represent for traditional media companies, which can either be done in by instant fact-checking or raised above the crowd by earned credibility. The HotTopics identifies more than 20 companies involved in blog creation (Moveable Type, Google), RSS readers (Bloglines, NetNewsWire, NewsGator), blog search and filtering (Technorati, Feedster), advertising (BlogMine, Google AdSense), blog content mining (Factiva, TechDirt), and others. It concludes with a set of essential actions that information providers can take to benefit from the blog and RSS phenomena, and a table of players.