Jeneane Sessum on The Mainstream Media IS the New Blogging A-List

Jeneane has a great post on the changing complexion of the blogging A-list — it’s becoming dominated by blog consortia:

[from The Mainstream Media IS the New Blogging A-List]

When I look around at the most subscribed to blogs in Bloglines, and not coincidentally many of the new breed in the Technoriati Top 100, I see the effects of RSS and ‘consumption-based reading’ — I see how so many real bloggers who used write in a real, human voice have slipped off the charts, replaced by ‘conglomerate’ news blogs like gizmodo, engadget, wired news, etc. — all well written, but not so much blogs as relentlessly updated zines — and I realize that THESE are the blogs that mainstream journalists who cover similar or related beats are subscribing to. That’s where a large portion of their readership is coming from—and with authority comes the masses, following suit.

With so many in the mainstream news business subscribing and linking to, and getting their news from, these new breed of super-news blogs, what happens to the individual voices?

The blurring between individual blogging and the blog machinery that is emerging — blog consortia like the Huffington Post, the search solutions that feel more and more like media, like Google and Technorati, and the memetrackers like tech.memorandum and Tailrank — means that there will be more and more readership in blogland, but less deep involvement. There will be less active ‘readering’ and more passive audience, as the mainstreaming of blogging becomes more evident.