In truth, media sites can’t gather and publish blog content without a contractual relationship with each blogger — which is a huge hurdle for any company. They can’t easily move that content onto their site or into their content management systems without creating a lot of new technology. And when an interesting story breaks or a new topic arises that their existing bloggers aren’t covering — they are out of luck. And most of them don’t have the staff to even contemplate these kind of activities.

Last week we met with one of the largest technology media companies in the world — who had just spent a couple months individually signing up 20 bloggers to contribute content and they were fed up. It was too big of a task, and in fact, they were just getting started because they wanted many more bloggers than they were able to corral.

But rather than continuing to debate whether or not media companies will want this, let’s just see how this plays out over the next 90 days. I suspect that the four names you see on our current lighthouse customer list are just the tip of the iceberg.

Now that I understand what BlogBurst actually is, I continue to think it’s not a good idea. Why would media organizations go through a middleman when they could easily gather this content and cut favorable deals themselves?

Good luck, I suspect you’ll need it.

- Amy Gahran
RightConversation.com
Contentious.com

When bloggers can leverage the audience reach of big media sites, its a compelling value proposition for everyone involved. “Sea change” is a word that’s being used by many to describe the idea.

Hence the big name lighthouse customers and hundreds of quality bloggers signing up in the first couple of days.

Who thinks media professionals need to have a select handful of blogs spoon-fed to them?

Journalists are finding blogs among the search results almost every time they check Google. They’re getting word of mouth recommendations. Many of them are even using feed readers and Technorati. At the very least, they’re reading Jim Romanesko.

Also, why would journalists want to pay much attention to a select group of blogs that are being pushed to all their competition?

I am amazed that projects like this make it past the, “Hey, I’ve got an idea…” phase.

- Amy Gahran
RightConversation.com
Contentious.com

中野です。 昨日はポストできなかったので、21日・22日の2日分合わせて…という…