It’s really no longer a question of to blog or not to blog, but rather how and what you do with your organization’s blog. Some choose to use the platform as a news and announcements rundown. Others prefer to let outside viewers in on the day-to-day developments and goings on around the office. Some nail a proper mixture of both.

Any way you present it, your company’s blog should provide an underlying message targeted directly at consumers. Whether it’s the “We’re the fun folks you should do business with because we’re awesome!” or the “We’re very serious people, who do serious things, so come and do serious business with us.” you’re seeking to support a position. However, a number of businesses on the market today are blogging away, but with little measurable return on their investment. So what can we do to further engage audiences, provide them with the right materials, and convert them to repeat visitors (and customers)?

Here are five simple features your blog should have up and running from the get go.

About Us

Perhaps the simplest of all the recommendations, be sure to include a prominent About Us link and page on your blog. If your content marketing guru is doing their job well, you’re bound to have a number of visitors that arrive at your blog, perhaps not even knowing a thing about you or your organization and what exactly it is that you do. It’s a lost opportunity when you leave them out in the cold wondering who you are.

But what should a good About Us page include? It all depends on what your underlying message is. Chances are your marketing and/or PR team has a store of press ready “About Us text” already on tap, so why reinvent the wheel? Take the juiciest bits and pieces of these preformed texts and meld them into a powerful message that gets across:

• Who you are
• What you do
• What you can do for customers
• How to get in contact

Please note the last bullet point, as it is crucial that you provide visitors with a quick and easy way to get in touch with you and/or your organization.

Subscribe

Since you’re putting a great deal of effort into creating fantasic content for your blog, wouldn’t it be nice to have more than the occasional drive-by of readers, but rather a dedicated and engaged community? Let’s be honest, isn’t that the goal of every blog?

The first and foremost subscription feature should be via a prominent RSS button. Today, most relatively savvy Internet users not only know what an RSS icon and feed are, but have a favorite client for managing their favorite feeds. Make it quick and easy for them to continually keep on top of what you’re producing.

The subscribe area or box (preferably located near the top of your blog) is also an excellent opportunity to offer your readers a newsletter opt-in. Again, if they’re hitting the RSS button, they’re obviously interested in what you’ve got to say. If they want to take the relationship a bit further and offer you more opportunities to get your message across, specifically via email, make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Social

This should go without saying, but your blog should contain at the very least the prerequisite Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ social sharing options. Remember, your job is only half finished when you hit that publish button. The follow through involves spreading the message as far and wide as possible, and nothing accomplishes this goal better than a few well placed (and timed) social sharing options.

Depending on your blogging platform of choice, there are a number of social sharing plugins available, often requiring nothing more than 3 clicks to install, activate, and customize. Be sure to look for plugins that scroll along with your readers (see TNW’s option above), and provide a number of platform sharing options. That’s not to say that you’ll need all of them, but if you’re going to become comfortable with one sharing plugin, it’s a nice peace of mind to know that you’ve got plenty of room to expand in the future.

Cream of the Crop

One of the easiest and most effective ways to provide visitors with your very best, be sure to include a prominent “Top Posts” section somewhere on your blog. Personally, I’m a big fan of vertical navigation and love to see everything organized in columns. As a matter of fact…if you glance to the right side of this very page right now, you’ll notice a “Popular,” “Commented,” and “Latest” widget in TWN’s right column navigation. Visitors may have arrived via a social share to an article about XYZ, but your analytics show that ABC article is off the charts in terms of time on page, engagement, etc. Make it easy for new visitors to find the very best of your blog.

Speaking of the very best, don’t forget about your top commenters. Everyone loves to be recognized when they add value, so don’t hold back. If you’ve got a regular visitor that’s dropping pearls of wisdom on a number of your posts, go ahead and feature this regular visitor and provide some linking back to their site of origin.

Bonus: If you’ve got a particularly eloquent and knowledgeable commenter, if appropriate, reach out to them and see if a guest post is in order.

Archived

Visitors to your blog are there for one reason only: content. Granted, content is always relative and holds its place in time, but if you’ve stuck to an overall strategy and underlying message, numbers and figures might be dated, but the information is sound.

As human beings, we search by topic (you do have a search option, don’t you?) and/or category first, and then drill down by date. If you’re simply offering up an endless calendar of posts, you’re offering up an endless calendar of posts, nothing more. Break your archive down by category and make it easy for your visitors to find more information on specific topics you’ve written about. This not only provides a complete digest of your organization’s position on a certain topic, but makes it quick and easy for interested readers to find it.

Bonus: FREE!

Free must be one of the most powerful words in just about any language. People love free stuff. Visitors love your content. If visitors=people, then visitors are going to love free stuff, especially when it comes from you/your organization.

A great way to double down, offer your readers a free content piece in exchange for signing up for your newsletter. They benefit from the knowledge of experts, and you gain another interested party that you can further push your message to. Examples of giveaways may include (a):

• Video Tutorial
• Podcast
• Industry Report
• White Paper/E-book
• Etc.

Sure, the success of your organization’s blog ultimately resides in producing valuable and actionable content the resounds with readers and nurturing a growing community. However, by employing the features listed above, you’re well on your way to expanding your audience, fostering deeper engagement, and ultimately driving more conversions for your Sales team.

The Internet is collectively raging at domain seller Go Daddy for supporting the “Stop Online Piracy Act“, with people like Ben Huh threatening to pull away 1,000 domains owned by his company Cheezburger.

In response, Go Daddy has published a blog post that is as useful as a pile of day-old dogshit.

Many of our customers have asked us about our position on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Below are statements from Go Daddy Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Christine Jones. We’ve made them available here on our blog so all our customers can read our position.

Basically, all Go Daddy has done is copy and paste the statements it submitted to the House of Representatives about SOPA on October 28th and November 15th of this year. You can read them here if you want.

The real kicker is that Go Daddy doesn’t want to hear what you, its customer, thinks. So they turned commenting off on the post.

There you have it folks, this is the type of Internet that Go Daddy supports. Now if you don’t mind, I have a few domain names to transfer.

Back in October, Blogger started letting select users choose to display their Google+ profile with their blog, instead of the original boring Blogger profile. That feature has been made available to all Blogger users today, along with another handy new feature.

If you’ve connected Google+ with your Blogger profile, you will now have the option to automatically share each published post to Google+.

While it’s not the most exciting feature, it’s a step towards integrating Google’s social product into its most popular social product on the web before Google+, Blogger. The team promises more features in the coming months to join the two service experiences together.

The prompt will look something like this, allowing you to edit the snippet that gets posted to your Google+ circles:

If you’d like to go back and share all of your older posts, each of them will now have a share option that looks like this:

If you haven’t switched over to using your Google+ profile with Blogger, you can do that here.

With the launch of Google Music, and iTunes upgrading its solution with a new feature called “Match“, the stream your music vs. buy each track debate rages on.

It’s truly a personal preference, but some artists aren’t interested in having their music streamed just yet. Numbers out of Sweden might have them thinking otherwise though.

According to a report from Swedes And The Internet (PDF), Spotify usage has surpassed that of instant messaging, blog reading, and playing games online in Spotify’s native country. Since Spotify has been available for some time in the country, it could be a tip-off to the type of usage we’ll see in the United States and other countries.

Spotify allows you to pay a premium fee to stream all of the music you like, on any of your devices. The service is built to be social by nature, as it is only available to Facebook users. Tracks are shared on your wall and shown in the Facebook ticker, causing your listening habits to instantly go viral among your friends and family on the service.

Spotify beats IM

Here are some of the stats that Swedes And The Internet unearthed during a survey:

• Just over half (57%) of the Swedish people listen and download music via the Internet.
• The percentage of file sharing (21%) have never been greater.
• But the proportion who listen to streaming music using Spotify is even greater.
• Amongst those aged 16 to 25 years, almost 9 out of 10 (85%) are on Spotify and half (55%) listen daily.
• The older people buy CDs and pay per song, while the younger subscribe, share files or listen to Spotify.
• If we compare file-sharers with those who do not share files, we find that there is no difference in how often they buy CDs. However, a larger percentage of file sharers pay to download individual songs than those who do not share files.
• One in three people (37%) listen to Spotify during a month, which is twice as many as file sharing (18%) and many more than those who buy a CD (9%) or pay per song (4%) during a month.
• In Sweden, Spotify usage is even running ahead of use of community sites, IM, blog reading and game playing.

The past, and the future

Spotify launched in Sweden back in 2008, so it had a three-year head-start on the United States. National music revenue grew by ten percent in Sweden at the end of 2009, showing that Spotify indeed has staying power and could be a good thing for artists and record labels.

Will these trends show themselves in the U.S.? It’s too early to say, but traction on Facebook after the f8 partnership announcement has been massive. The Spotify app on Facebook has risen to the top, and surpasses all other music apps by far.

The key for Spotify, I believe, is that it’s not just a music streaming service. It’s a platform that other developers can build apps on top of. That type of platform has never been witnessed on the Internet before, and could drive huge revenue for bands and labels if they just stick with the service and not turn on it. Apps need music, and musicians need distribution. It’s a match made in heaven.

Do you prefer to buy or stream? Perhaps a mix of both? Personally, I prefer to stream all of my music, and if an album is good enough, I go ahead and purchase it. I also spend a lot of money on concert tickets, and that’s where artists make a huge chunk of their money. Maybe Spotify will start offering streams of live concerts, that’s something I’d pay extra for.

If you’ve ever thought above moving your blog from one platform to the other, it can be rather tricky. Importing creates duplications of posts and a long list of other issues.

Tumblr Importer will import all of your Tumblr blog into a self-hosted WordPress blog in a snap.

Tumblr Importer:

• Correctly handles post formats
• WP-Cron based background importing: start it up, then come back later to see how far it’s gotten
• Duplicate checking, will not create duplicate imported posts
• Imports posts, drafts, and pages
• Media Sideloading (for audio, video, and image posts)

Keeping all of your images, audio, and video intact is key, as Tumblr is popular for its media posts. Tumblr Importer even brings all of the stored items onto your new WordPress host. For example, my blog is currently hosted at Tumblr and contains mostly video and photo embeds.

To install, all you have to do is download the plugin, put it in its correct folder, and activate it through your Plugins menu on your WordPress blog.

If you’ve been thinking about making the move to WordPress from Tumblr, this is your best best. Hopefully there will be an option for the WordPress.com hosted blogs soon.

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for the tip.

Livefyre, which you may notice provides the commenting system we use here at The Next Web (this is our full disclosure), announced this week that is has launched version 2.0 of its product, as well as a round of new funding led by Greycroft Partners.

The company tells us that the service has grown to an install base of over 14,000 sites since its original launch, and has been popular with individuals as well as global publishers like ours.

Sites installing Livefyre are seeing some measurable results on average, the company says, including:

• 25% increase in page views
• 52% increase in comments per page
• 20% increase in time on site

Other sites using Lifefyre include BlogHer, and The Sun.

Real-time commenting does indeed keep people on a site longer, because it isn’t static and boring. With version 2.0, Livefyre has added more social features such as profile pictures of users “listening”, meaning people on the page at that moment, as well as up to the second updates on new comments.

We asked Livefyre’s CEO Jordan Kretchmer a few questions about the company’s growth and why its different from most commenting systems.

TNW: What is LiveFyre’s biggest differentiator?

Jordan Kretchmer: Our focus on real-time participation creates a completely new kind of social experience for commenters and bloggers right on site content. That’s really the key here – we differentiate on sparking and fostering participation on YOUR site, instead of pushing it off to a social network. But to go one step further – we bring relevant conversations from around the Web back to your site, too. We help turn blogger and publisher content into the conversation hub.

TNW: What have you done that others have failed to pick up, what’s your leg up on competitors?

Jordan Kretchmer: From the very beginning, we put a premium on user experience, making commenting an active and surprisingly fun experience. Our social features, like SocialSync™ and FriendTagging are industry firsts, and we have plenty more exciting features like that up our sleeves. We are constantly innovating on how people can interact with site content and with each other.

TNW: Do you find that social media platform comments are pushing Blog commenting away from the norm? ie: Tweets and Facebook comments

Jordan Kretchmer: I think that external social media platforms have changed people’s’ expectations of how they want to interact with one another. Our goal with Livefyre is raise those expectations even higher by expanding on what those external networks have done, all right on the publisher’s site. For example, the ability to tag friends from all of your social networks, and from other people in that site’s community, is unique and powerful. Livefyre in essence connects me, to my friends from everywhere, to the content I like to talk about.

TNW: What is the first thing you’re doing with funding? What is the funding for?

Jordan Kretchmer: First thing we’re doing with the funding is rounding out our product engineering team, and growing our sales and business development practices. The net result of that is that you’ll start to see us adding new features faster than ever, and you’ll start seeing more of the little “Powered by Livefyre” logo all over the web. And soon.

It sounds like Livefyre is ready to battle a war with competitors such as Echo, Disqus, and even Facebook who has its own embeddable commenting system for blogs and publications.

It was only a matter of time before an awesome Tumblr theme developer created a theme that looks exactly like Facebook’s Timeline. That time has come thanks to creative agency Playground, Inc.

In a blog post today, the company announced its new free Tumblr theme Facelr, which makes your Tumblr blog look strikingly similar to what your profile will look like on Facebook once Timeline launches publicly.

The company said:

Sharing on the Internet is getting easier and easier. Social networks and blogging platforms have led the way by helping people all around the world create a home for the content of their lives. We share moments and memories, pictures, thoughts and things that inspire us. We share funny things, sad things and, sometimes, embarrassing things. Today, Playground wants to share something fun.

Imagine if there was an easier way to Tumble. Introducing Facelr: a new kind of theme.

You can install Facelr for your Tumblr blog right now, by going here.

A comparision

Here is Facebook’s new Timeline design:

Here is Facelr, for Tumblr:

You’ll notice that not only are the two similar design wise, the functionality is pretty much the same as well. While I had to do some tweaking and remove the sidebar profile information from my previous Tumblr theme, the install took seconds, and all of my posts were in place.

If you can’t wait for Timeline, you might want to grab the Facelr theme for Tumblr.

Can a company be sued for design infringement? We hope not, because Facelr is pretty well done.

Regator, an Atlanta based news directory and search engine has just launched Regator Breaking News to improve the process of gathering and finding news for journalists and bloggers so they can spend more time reporting and writing and less time searching for the right stories to cover.

“The goal of Regator Breaking News is simple: to help writers spend more time reporting and writing, and less time searching for the right stories to cover. Knowing that we’re bringing the news to them as it breaks, RBN members can focus on creating content rather than digging through RSS feeds, newswires, and social media.”

-Regator Co-Founder Kimberly Turner

Essentially, RBN uses algorithms to analyze a curated collection of social media content, determining the importance of events as they happen. This technology allows Regator to deliver alerts well before the stories can be found on traditional news sites, Twitter trends and other sources. Regator also provides research tools designed to help busy bloggers get stories out quickly including graphs of historical coverage, social media monitoring and image resources.

Watch this video for a proper demonstration here:

The founders of Regator, including co-founder Kimberly Turner, who spent 10 years as a journalist, know that journalists and bloggers would rather spend their time researching, reporting and writing than sifting through Twitter feeds, emails and RSS feeds.

Journalists and bloggers can customize their notifications by choosing from more than 30 topics such as entertainment, politics, sports, business, and technology. Once an alert is issued, Regator Breaking News members have access to tools designed to get a story out quickly: graphs of historical coverage, social media monitoring and resources for sourcing photos.

The Regator Breaking News desktop app, an Adobe Air app for PC, Mac, or Linux, also features trends for dozens of niches and, for those on an editorial team, a communication tool that allows members to comment on alerts, assign stories, and communicate with their team.

After giving it a whirl today, I can say that it’s a solid source of news but not exactly a constantly refreshing filter of content. After visiting the web app, news was only posted once every hour to hour and a half, which feels like a century in the fast paced blogging world. But if you’re a casual blogger who wants an aggregated feed of news in a handy desktop or web app, Regator might be a nice choice for you.

If you’re interested, try it here. To celebrate the launch, all members who sign up before June 14 will receive 50% off their first three months in addition to the standard 14-day free trial. For an individual, the service costs $9.99 per month after the free trial expires. For a newsroom, the price is $7.49 per month per user.

So, you’ve decided to start a blog. Good for you. As someone who has started, contributed and edited several over my “Internet lifespan”, it can be a very rewarding experience.

These years of experience may not make me an expert (per se), but they do give me some insight on what one should do when they first get started versus what they shouldn’t. I’ve bought books on the subject and read many “how to” articles on getting started with your very own blog, but it took me a lot of searching and reading time to get to the heart of the matter. I’m going to break down the two most important things you need to keep in mind and act on when starting out. How you decide to tackle these two blogging basics can make a big difference in how the rest of your blogging experience takes shape.

1. Don’t post daily. In fact, maybe just weekly to start.

Many first-time bloggers make the mistake of jumping in full bore. They start by posting every day (including weekends), because they have been told it will draw readers in right away…and they’re really enthusiastic when they enter the blogging realm. Then as time goes by and either certain aspects of their life start to play into how often they post or they don’t see immediate readership results, they slow down a bit. No more weekends posting. Then it turns into posting three times per week. Then just once a week. This is not the way to go.

Sure, the web is forgiving, but you can’t start by posting daily and expect readers to stick around when you start to drop off in posting frequency. It’s always better to start off slowly, despite all of your enthusiasm, because it shows growth rather than decay. Ultimately, keep this quotation in mind when starting out:

“Slow and steady wins the race.” – Aesop, The Hare and the Tortoise

Readers will come if you deliver quality content, but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to be the quality that wins out, not the quantity. If you’re writing a blog on your own, make sure you start off with no more than 2-3 posts per week. Then build from there. It will not only allow you to write better over the long haul, but will keep the endurance of your enthusiasm far longer than writing daily.

2. Use images. Or don’t. But know when to do either.

While I think that there is merit to using an image in many cases, sometimes they can get in the way of the written content. I’ve struggled with this myself, as evidenced on my own site. Even well known blogger and co-author of Content Rules, C.C. Chapman believes having an image is more important than ever, as evidenced in this tweet:

Never seen a visual RSS reader? Check out Pulse on an iPad and you’ll see why photos in blog posts are more important now.#blogchat

I use Flipboard and seeing images definitely attracts my eye, but images rarely keep me interested for long. If the writing sucks, then I’m out of there. I follow blogs that both do and don’t use images. But after a quick look at my RSS reader, I found that most of the ones I follow don’t use images. The quality of the writing is just that good.

I tend to use images for shorter posts and none when I’m writing longer pieces (unless they need screenshots to better illustrate what I’m writing about). Play with it a bit. Experiment. Unlike with posting frequency, this is an area where you can do that and not run the risk of alienating your readers all that much. But if you are going to use images, make sure you give credit where credit is due.

The question you need to ask yourself is whether or not you can deliver top-notch writing that can stand on its own, with no image required. And you’ll need to ask that question again and again throughout your blogging life. Be honest with yourself, otherwise your material will suffer.

Keep these two important blogging basics in mind when you start blogging and you’re going to have a great foundation to build your readership, deliver quality content and — best of all — have fun doing it.

This post is a designed meditation on publications that are strictly digital, and their future under the new reality of agglomeration through acquisition.

Yes, the great landscape of blogs and digital media is a-changin,’ and there is no more conspicuous face in the matter than AOL. AOL, a hulking relic in the very definition of the phrase, coming back from the dial-up grave, is on the warpath with a checkbook. It is, quite literally, redrawing the map of online content.

This is not the moment in which digital publications have ‘come of age,’ or any such nonsense, but it might mark the instant in which a media empire can be built with purely online elements. AOL is trying to do just that.

While that might seem almost laudable, there are cracks in the armor. Two trends outline changes in content under an AOL led future that might not be as wholesome as the company wishes to appear: the AOL way, and recent, seemingly new, standards for contributions to the Huffington Post following its purchase by AOL.

The Huffington Post: Clearinghouse of the Internet

The Huffington Post’s tagline, ‘The Internet Newspaper,’ was more fitting than most of its readers probably knew. It wasn’t just a newspaper for the Internet, it was one done in the style of the Internet. With thousands of contributors from every walk of life blogging away, it had a feel of barely controlled chaos, something that helped to foster its vibrant community of reader commenting.

As the Huffington Post grew, it took on a status all of its own; it still holds to this day the number one influence rating of all blogs as denoted by Technorati. To contribute to the Huffington Post became a mark of having ‘made it’ in one topic or another. And as the publication added new sections, including city specific pages, a Religion forum, and soon, Canadian and UK editions, more and more writers became interested in adding to its pages.

After all, the Huffington Post had what everyone who writes wants, and it’s not money, it offered access to an audience. And so on it went, with new topics, writers, growth, and increasing revenues, until all of that was turned upside down in one fell swoop.

AOL buys the farm

AOL turned out its pockets, found some $315 million to spare, and cut a deal. Rumors have HuffPo founder Arianna’s share at around $100 million of that total.

Of course AOL’s homepage remains massive, holding onto the 17th spot on the most trafficked US site list, 16 slots higher than the Huffington Post today. But if you examine those charts, one is going down while the other is rising. AOL bought the upward graph.

When any publication is purchased, especially one in which the founder is still on board, people fret about the effects of the takeover; will the character remain the same? Will the new owners beat the life out of it? Will its best and brightest leave and find new homes if the new corporate environment is stifling?

The list goes on, and in the case of AOL there is precedent to ground such worries: the AOL Way. The AOL Way, in case you missed the controversy, is AOL’s plan for the future of its publications, including its purchases, not just the ones that it has grown.

The AOL Way is a method of streamlining and SEOing content to make it, borrowing from Daft Punk, “harder, faster, better, stronger.” But what it does not do is bolster author autonomy, or anything along that line; it is a method designed to extract money from content, not to build great publications.

When the AOL Way leaked in full the media, our own Courtney Boyd Myers asked the question that was on everyone’s mind: “Is AOL destroying journalism for page views?” While that headline is a touch loud, and what headline is not, she is pushing a real point: is AOL going to use their Way to turn down the levels of personality and quirk at the publications that it owns and will buy in the future?

This question is why I called this article “Content control in the Age of AOL,” and took the time to write it. AOL has not just purchased the Huffington Post, but other, quite dear publications, that have long had reputations for the individuality of their authors. And we worry about them.

But in the case of the Huffington Post, are we seeing any changes thus far that might be cause for alarm for fans of the publication’s past form as an independent publication?

Big changes afoot?

The answer to that question is maybe. According to some Huffington Post contributors, a good number bloggers that helped build the site were uninvited to the party without being informed.

One such ex-Huffington Post blogger, Joe Favorito, claims that ever since the AOL purchase of the site things have gone “quiet.” This is what he had to say on the matter:

Then as most know, Huff Po was sold for a huge sum of money, and all went quiet. [Submitted] Posts were never answered for weeks. Email addresses bounced back, phones rang and rang with no voice mail. A “citizen journalist” site disappeared for its contributors.

I was not alone in this experience. At least 15 or 20 others have gone through the same thing. Finally two weeks ago I received an email back from “Becky”…n. last name, a generic email, no phone number…saying that a post I had sent in weeks before “didn’t fit the focus of the site.” I asked what the editorial guidelines were, who I could speak to just to get clarification. Nothing. Not a word.

In a similar vein, a request for comment submitted by The Next Web to the Huffington Post on their editorial guidelines has thus far not been answered.

The end of truly indie big-media online?

The constant struggle between causation and correlation aside, based on other anecdotal evidence and stories like Favorito’s it seems that on some level the contribution guidelines for the Huffington Post have changed under AOL.

And that makes sense. After all, AOL is a company that has deeper pockets than the Huffington Post ever did, making it a much higher profile target for lawsuits. And what what company trying to build an empire would care too much about a few thousand bloggers who are, now that the Huffington Post has all the momentum in the world, riding its coattails a touch?

Such submitted content from unpaid, non-contractual writers is perhaps just too much of a risk for AOL to take on. Even more, now that HuffPo is so large, individual blog posts are hardly big drivers of traffic to the site.

But recall that we called the Huffington Post more than just a newspaper online, but one that embodied the core elements of the Internet: egalitarianism, participation, and so forth. Even if AOL has made the changes that it seems to have made in good faith, they are still transformative in a way that is counter to the old core of the Huffington Post.

TNW checked into the blogger backend of HuffPo and can confirm that, according to what the website says, the blogging guidelines have not been updated since last year:

On the Technorati 100 list, AOL owns three of the top five publications. You have to ask the question, is this the end of truly massive independent online media? If the company continues to purchase as it has been, the top 100 blog list going to become its fiefdom. That level of concentration, coupled with the capitalistic plans of the AOL Way, paints a future in which the biggest media publications are snapped up, and then commoditized.

Happily, there are signs that go contrary to that future. We half-mentioned TechCrunch earlier, another recent AOL acquisition, and a publication that is a TNW competitor. TechCrunch has not suffered, so far as can be told from the surface, any harm except for the occasional forced meeting since they were bought out. Now, TechCrunch is full of spunky writers and is headed by a slightly acerbic captain, which must help in defence of its culture, but I have been surprised at how little meddling has been attempted by AOL.

So there is hope. But dollars shout and most digital publications that are important are quiet; online media has never been a salad fest. So long as AOL, and others, it must be said, want to grow by leaps and bounds they can, and they will. That coupled with a corporate strategy as stark (almost robotic) as the AOL Way and the future of online media looks slightly boring, if nothing else.

What this means for readers, and for writers

Ever since the AOL Way came about, flagship AOL publication Engadget has had a very hard time holding onto its key staff. In fact, they have been leaving in droves. It’s sad to see a blog that everyone so loves and enjoys hollowed from the inside out.

But there is rebirth. Many of the Engadget-exiles have banded together and formed a new, if temporary, home. It is already scorching other blogs and is racking up headlines by the bushel. It’s about the writers, silly.

But it’s also about the readers, who are going to pull up their trusty sites in the future only to realized one day that many of them have been homogenized.

Perhaps the current, and near-term future of digital content can be summed as follows: big interests are snapping up many of the best online publications, but their management plans for those companies are going to force out many of the writers that built them, or they will be forced out as we have seen with the Huffington Post. This will take away much of the spark from those publications, even if it won’t hurt their flagship reporting overmuch.

The very dynamo that built the publications that are, to bend English a touch, under purchase, still exists however, and that is the zero marginal cost of distributing data through the Internet; the people who built what is being purchased can do it again.

That is why when you peer far into the future, past the Age of AOL, things are as bright as ever, even if certain lights are today being extinguished.