The business of blogging

There has been recently an outcry over the move of Dubner and Levitt's Freakonomics blog to the New York Times website. The two authors were criticized for being "sold" to a big media company.
In particular, the RSS feed of their blog is now partial instead of full, which means that, in order to continue reading an entry that seems interesting, you need to go to the NYT website (and generate more ad revenue for both the authors and the company).
Dubner discussed this decision here.

At the same time, others worry that the success of social networking website, that make it possible to publish on the web freely and that require less upkeep than a blog, actually means the "end of blogging". Some of the early bloggers are already nostalgic of the good old days when they were among the happy few and could express their enlightened views to an arguably much smaller audience.

But one cannot help but notice that blogging has become quite mainstram, that media companies (and the NYT is just but one such example of adoption of the medium) are starting to see the strategic opportunities of partnerships with bloggers and that many companies are starting to hire bloggers.

This is not the end of blogging, but it is the end of its beginning. Blogging is becoming a profession. It is business, as usual.