The news today that Silicon Alley Media Inc., a collection of tech and business blogs, has raised some funding is rekindling a debate among various tech and business blogs about the future of--surprise!--tech and business blogs. Commenting on the Alley deal, Fred Wilson (pictured at left), a venture capitalist and widely read blogger, voices one view, which is that blogging, once a largely individual pursuit, is increasingly a team game dominated by media companies.
"Late last year I wrote a blog post suggesting that individual bloggers like me were being replaced by traditional media as the leading voices in the blog world. It caused a bit of a stir and I followed it up the next day by saying that "social media requires real people," says Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures. "My point in both posts is that I really like to read blogs owned by and written by a person as opposed to a team of people being paid to blog."
A few months ago Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington (pictured at right) ranted (his word) about the corrupting 
influence of lucre on blogging, asserting that "all this money flowing into the blogosphere is disrupting the complicated and emotional, but also stable way things are done. Bloggers with money and employees and health care programs and boards of directors and shareholders have to play politics with a whole new group of people, splitting them away from what they do best - fighting the Blog War."
Nothing could be truer and further from the truth. It's certainly true that, as Wilson says, old medianiks are finally throwing their creaky backs into blogging and, owing to their size and rep, hogging some of the limelight that formerly shone on individual bloggers. It's also certanly false that the dreaded MSM is replacing what he terms "real" people. I haven't looked at the numbers lately, but my impression that bloggers continue to spread like ticks on dog.
What's going on here, in my view, is the same kind of navel-gazing visible in the old media's obsession with itself. Wilson's contention is that traditional media companies are crowding out personal bloggers as the leading voices in the blogosphere. That adjective "leading" is tricky because it suggests that to be an important blogger is to have lots of traffic and a large megaphone, and preferably both. But there are lots of superb bloggers, not only writing about tech but about everything else under the sun, who have relatively little traffic and yet solider on in largely anonymous but otherwise excelllent obscurity (The Industry Standard recently published a nice listing of some of the top "B-to-Z" list tech blogs). By virtue of this excellence, many of these bloggers also exert a disproportionately large influence on the blogopshere because of the other "influencers," in the Gladwellian sense, who read them. That's not the kind of thing that translates into a top position on TechMeme's Leaderboard, but it's real nonetheless.
Arrington and Wilson, as long as they blog, will likely remain leading voices in the tech and finance world. What will change, unless they devote the kind of resources to blogging that big media companies are, will be their place in the media hierarchy as measured by audience size and the other conventional metrics of industry success. Obviously, that would affect TechCrunch's value as a business, but does that mean it would be supplanted as a leading voice by some hack at the New York Post? Not likely. Besides, what better way for a blogger to return to his or her roots than by, suddenly inspired, descending into the basement long after the professional writers have switched off their PCs and writing something that moves the conversation forward? -- Alain Sherter
See July 17 funding announcement from AlleyInsider
See July 17 post on AlleyInsider funding from paidContent
See March post on bloggers raising VC from Tech Crunch
See The Industry Standard's list of the "Top 25 B-to-Z List" blogs
For more see The Industry Standard, Mathew Ingram and Furrier
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