The Business of Blogging

Commercial blogging gets a lot of attention these days, doesn’t it? What with the sale of Weblogs, Inc. to AOL and the like. The latest entry is Federated Media Publishing. "FM works by "federating" authors into topic clusters. Our first federation focuses on digital business and culture, and includes sites such as Boing Boing, Matt Haughey’s Metafilter and PVRblog, Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, Om Malik’s Broadband Blog, Glenn Fleishman’s Wi-Fi Networking News, John Battelle’s Searchblog, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, and many more."

To find out more about FM, I had a quick email interview with Bill Brazell over at FM (who, by the way, said I have a "nice blog"). 

Here’s what I asked:

* How do you choose your blogs?
FM chooses their blogs based on quality of writing, integrity of writer, authority and popularity of writer, and relevance of topic area — i.e., if the blog is about a topic that interests us, we dig a little deeper. Right now we’re focused on technology and culture.

* Are the blogs you picked affliated with your network in some way or are you just picking your personal favorites?
Some authors known to us have referred other authors; some authors have found their way to FM; some we have discovered.

* Does a blog have to be an A-Lister/high traffic blog to even get considered?
The more traffic, the better, obviously, but we haven’t put a number on it; we consider a number of factors as we evaluate each potential FM blog.

* Are you looking for the next instapundit?
While we enjoy reading political blogs, we’re not focusing on them at the moment. We are, though, looking at a few good blogs that comment on media.

* Who’s paying who for what?
FM brings good advertisers to its authors, and pays itself a cut of that revenue.

* What’s your goal?
To enable great authors to keep doing what they love to do, to ensure that those authors’ efforts are rewarded, and to help them reach an ever-wider audience.