Daniel Lyons, who runs, or used anyway, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, argues in a post at Newsweek that there is no money to be made in blogging and chronicles the ~ 2 years of engagement that he has invested before getting burned out and deciding to quit.

The whole article strikes me as a good example of a case where one misses the forest for the tree. I consider blogging to be a medium of communication and a platform for engagement in self-expressions. The value in the process or the final product is not the intrinsic revenue that may be drawn from the distracting ads buried inside the content. I do not think it is even the content of the pages where these expressions are being poured in. I believe it is in the connection that is established between the audience and the creator. It is the establishment of a two-way dependence of attention-giving; the dependence of the creator in the interaction with the audience to draw inspiration for further creative endeavors and the dependence of the audience on the creator to obtain the intellectual and artistic stimulation of self, and hence draw pleasure from the experience of viewing and reviewing contents of the pages. When this interdependence is successfully established it has a way of resulting in rewards, monetary or otherwise, for the creator.

I think there needs be a paradigm shift in the way monetization of content on the web is accomplished. All the current models rely on the expectation of and banking on the distraction of visitors of a given page by clicking through ads to generate revenue. I think the working model for the future is one of interdependence and loyalty that is established between a creator and an audience. If I am sold on the stimulation that I receive from a given blogger or author, the likelihood of I spending money to see him/her speak in person and buy a published content by him/her is high. In this sense, the future of paper and web publishing will find a way to complement one another and co-exist with out friction. I suspect that the ease with which information can be spread and low-cost publishing can be accomplished through the internet allows for it to be used as an enticing tool. I think a blogger or a web-based newspaper at large should focus more in becoming more relevant and almost indispensable. The one consequence of the explosion of Null Information is that there will always be a tremendous amount of value in the gathering, consolidation, and synthesis of information. The more effectively one accomplishes this task, i.e. the more valuable the content of a blog is, the more meaningful following it garners and the easier it will be to translate it in to a source of sustenance.