Of course, a few things have changed. 15 years ago, I had a dial-up AOL account, an email address, and Instant Messenger. Throughout high school, although the internet got faster and more of my friends got their own email addresses, the tools I used stayed pretty much the same. I copy-and-pasted some emails, and transcripts of AIM chats with crushes and friends into my diary, but the volume of this content was fairly light: My diary could still serve as an accurate representation of my life (at least, an accurate representation of the way I perceived my life to be at the time — which is, of course, the point of a diary), both offline and off.

Today, it doesn’t quite fulfill that role. With the advent of Twitter, Facebook, digital photos, texting, personal blogs, message boards and apps — and the sheer volume of email that I receive — my diary today can’t come close to fully representing the content I create, because nearly all of that content is created outside Microsoft Word. But does that make a diary any less important? I tapped my contacts — people I know in real life and people on Twitter — to find a group of people who keep diaries and asked them how their diary-keeping practices have changed over the years.

Jack Perry, the owner of book publishing consultancy 38Enso, has been keeping a personal journal for nearly 20 years. He handwrites everything (“I prefer markers and rollerballs”) and said he’s “slowed down his writing in physical journals because of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc., I find I can document events better online.” He also spends less time writing than he used to: “I probably have 100 journals that I have written in over the years. I used to use one up every two to three months. Now it’s every nine to ten months.”

Chronicle of a life, with the help of a few apps

Many of the people I spoke with have incorporated digital tools into their diary-keeping — or are actually keeping their diaries through an app. Several people used Day One, a journaling app for Mac, iPhone and iPad that syncs with Dropbox for backup. (The Mac version is $9.99; the iOS version is $4.99.) Cameron Brister, owner of SquarePlan IT, called Day One “hands-down the best journaling app out there,” and said that because it’s installed on all his devices, “there’s no excuse not to write when an idea hits or it’s time to write.”

Paul Capewell, another Day One user, said he’d “always loved keeping a diary digitally for the ability to search text easily.” He imported his entire diary into Day One, which means “I can open the app on my iPhone, type a keyword, like ‘London’ or ‘depressed’ or ‘amazing,’ and instantly see any posts containing that keyword, whether it’s from yesterday, or nine years ago.”

Caroline Niziol, the digital marketing coordinator at Collinson Media & Events, also uses Day One to write most of her entries, backs them up through Dropbox and sends “important” or longer entries as PDFs to her Evernote account. And out of everybody I talked to, she had the most elaborate system for keeping track of not just her personal thoughts but also her online activity:

“I now send my online activity into a Journal notebook in Evernote — my Facebook status entries, tweets, pictures I’m tagged in on Facebook, and Foursquare check-ins are all automatically saved via a few IFTTT recipes. It’s seamless and just another way to keep track of my days. I will also send images right into Evernote sometimes and bypass Day One entirely. I wish it had direct Evernote integration. When I scan ticket stubs or theatre programs, I’ll edit the date created so it lines up in my timeline. I’m currently expecting my first baby so I’m also saving things like ultrasounds printouts, which I wouldn’t share on Facebook or other social media.”

And one diary writer who chose to remain anonymous told me that her diary-keeping has changed, perhaps, for the better: “I find that my entries now are much less event-focused and more emotional or analytical. There’s no longer any need to record my events, because they’re captured in my Google Calendar, and now also on social media, to a smaller extent.”

Ultimately, private forums still matter

Hearing about other people’s experiences keeping a diary reminded me that the practice is worth it. In 2013, a diary still fulfills the role that diaries have for hundreds of years: It’s a private account of one’s life. In my diary, I don’t have to be nice, funny or interesting; in fact, one thing that strikes me repeatedly as I read past diary entries — including those from this year — is how boring they often are. Most of the entries would make for terribly dull and self-obsessed blog posts, or would make me sound like the bitchiest person on Facebook (and thank god that wasn’t around when I was 13).

In 2013, that completely privacy (assuming that my Dropbox doesn’t get hacked) ranges from rare to nonexistent. While I often cringe at the stuff I’ve written in my diary, it’s still a place where the only person I have to answer to is myself. And I, like others, see my diary as a reassuring reminder: I was here.

“I doubt anyone will ever read my diaries, but I feel as if I have some ‘proof’ that I lived the life I am living,” Perry said. And the novelist John Sundman told me, “The benefit of keeping a diary is that it helps me figure out what the hell I’m doing with my time on earth.”

“Whether anyone other than me ever reads my diaries is immaterial,” Capewell said. “They’re kept for my purposes and sanity alone. If they provide value to my offspring or academics in decades and centuries to come, that would just be a bonus.”

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In his post, Karp (who will be joining us at our paidContent Live conference on April 17) said that the idea behind the project was to create an editorial team of “experienced journalists and editors assigned to cover Tumblr as a living, breathing community” and to “tell the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way.” The Tumblr founder went on to say that:

“After hundreds of stories and videos… we couldn’t be happier with our team’s effort. And as Tumblr continues to evolve, we’ll always be experimenting with new ways to shine light on our creators [but] what we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on. I want to personally thank them for their great work.”

The Storyboard team included Sky Dylan-Robbins, executive editor and former Newsweek/Daiy Beast staffer Jess Bennett — who posted on her own Tumblr that the group had “redefined journalism” and that she was “drunk on a plane” — editor-in-chief Chris Mohney and Christopher Price. A number of outlets wrote about Tumblr’s ambitions with the unit, which did what Mohney called “marketing as journalism.”

Although Tumblr has posted some fairly large traffic numbers, with more than 140 million unique visitors and 20 billion pageviews, the company has struggled to generate revenue — only recently launching an advertising program for its mobile app, after a long period of rejecting such money-making measures — and has promised that the network would be profitable this year.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Pinar Ozger

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Before blogging became a big business, Stern created a tech blog called Center Networks, which became a go-to destination for many in the early Web 2.0 movement. Later, he sold that business and shifted focus to a new startup called CloudContacts — and more recently, he moved from his home town of New York to Austin, Texas to start a company called Let’s Talk Fitness.

My good friend @allenstern has passed. Founder of @centernetworks back in the day. The original blogger king, and a heart of gold. :(

—
Louis Gray (@louisgray) April 07, 2013

Having struggled with his weight for much of his life, Stern poured his energy into becoming more healthy, and had lost more than 125 pounds in the past year or so, according to his friend Louis Gray. His most recent business was aimed at helping others achieve similar results with the use of fruit and vegetable smoothies and other products, and he had built a large following for his newsletter.

Here’s what Om had to say about Allen:

“He was a stand-up guy and always spoke his mind. He never took to fools and as a result always found himself defending those who couldn’t defend themselves. I met him once, briefly at a Techcrunch 50 event, but we were internet friends and often exchanged Facebook and Twitter messages. He was always in good cheer, ready to share a moment of sadness and spread the happiness. As a fellow Yankees fan, he and I would often talk baseball during our exchanges.”

Tech and health blogging innovator Allen Stern has died. He was a kind man with a lot of integrity & hustle. facebook.com/allenstern/pos…

—
Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) April 07, 2013

Louis Gray, a startup advisor who now works at Google and wrote a remembrance of his friend on his blog, had this to say:

“I’ll miss Allen. I missed it when he stopped posting as regularly to CenterNetworks as he once did. But more, I’ll miss the fun email threads and fun phone cals that always left me laughing and feeling better. Death sucks and tonight, I’m sad. Bye, Allen.”

So terrible to hear that @AllenStern, a longtime NY tech fixture, passed away this week: bit.ly/14NHAq9 (via @DanDotLewis)

—
Caroline McCarthy (@caro) April 07, 2013

Others have also posted their memories of Stern, including Dan Lewis — who founded the site ArmchairGM and is now the director of new media for Sesame Workshop — and another early blogger named Duncan Riley, who said Allen would be sorely missed by friends who “came to appreciate a big guy with a huge heart who spoke as we all should: honestly and from the heart.” Author and entrepreneur Jesse Stay posted on his Google+ page:

“This is devastating news – even though we never met in person (but I sincerely hoped to, and have had numerous remote video conversations with him), I considered Allen Stern a dear friend of mine. He always knew how to lift people up and make them laugh. I sincerely enjoyed his health posts as of recent, and am very sad to hear of his death. This was way too soon, and many, I’m sure are mourning with me.”

Oh my. My friend @allenstern has passed. A big loss to our community. Very sad.

—
Micah Baldwin (@micah) April 07, 2013

As tech blogging became more and more of a cut-throat business, Allen remained a personal friend to most, and was always sincere in his openness to others. As Om put it: “The world just got a lot less nicer because of this one subtraction. Give heaven a taste of your heaven, Allen — you will be missed by me and thousands of others whose lives you touched.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Chris Tingom

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So when he announced earlier this week that he was launching a new company called Small Picture and had a new product called Little Outliner, I was interested, even though I didn’t really understand what it was. So I called Winer up and asked him to describe what Little Outliner is and what it is designed to do — and there is a clear thread that connects this new service to the other things he has championed: namely, the idea of having control over one’s content, and of being fully open.

A browser-based notepad, but also much more

In a nutshell, Little Outliner is a kind of notepad, and it runs in a browser window so no software has to be installed, and it allows a user to keep notes or text content of any kind — but also allows them to structure that content in a number of ways, so that it becomes a kind of brainstorming tool. Says Winer:

“It’s basically a note-taking tool that becomes a writing tool. So if you’re a reporter, as you’re putting together a story, you might talk to a few people and take notes while you’re doing that, and maybe you do a little research and gather some quotes and put that in your outline — but the structure is malleable, it’s fluid, things just flow into it and you don’t have to worry about where you put them because where they are is easily changed.”

This kind of thing comes naturally to Winer, because he said he has been using some form of outliner ever since he first became a programmer. “People think, ‘Oh he’s the guy who started RSS, podcasting or blogging,’ but that’s not really what I do,” Winer said. “What I really do is outlining. It was my entry into the tech industry — I wasn’t even a programmer until I realized computers could be used for these things, and it’s still what I do to this day.”

In addition to being used as an organizational tool while programming (which Winer says he does with his new partner, Small Picture co-founder Kyle Shank), one potential use for Little Outliner is as a blogging tool, the former Weblogs.com founder says. The product as it currently exists is just an entry-level thing, Winer said — with more features to be added later, as users discover new uses for it. And one of those features will likely be integration with blogging platforms like WordPress (please see the disclosure statement below).

“I have a really incredible blogging system, far in advance of what anybody else uses, I’m pretty sure of that, and this gives me a way to deliver that to people on the terms that they want it. They want it in the browser, so now it’s in the browser — and now it’s about hooking it up in very simple ways to things that can take advantage of it, like WordPress. I want to integrate — that’s my religion: interoperability.”

Open standards and interoperability

While Little Outliner may seem competitive with other tools such as Evernote or Google’s new Keep service, Winer said it differs from these in two specific ways — the first being that it incorporates structure into the notes or content being saved. The second is that Winer is dedicated to keeping it as open as possible, in part so that users don’t suffer the same fate they did when Google shut down Google Reader. That’s why the content is stored locally on a user’s computer (although web sharing is coming) and it is based on OPML, an open standard.

“For some people, Keep will probably be a wonderful tool to use. If it were my type of tool, the questions I would ask would be the obvious ones in light of the Google Reader thing — what does the future look like, how open is it — if things were open, if you could replace them and their data was accessible to other pieces of software, then it wouldn’t matter if they withdrew. But if you have to worry about them dropping the product and they don’t make the data accessible to other pieces of software, you really don’t have any upside.”

Whether Little Outliner becomes a must-use product for millions or not, Winer’s dedication to open standards — which has included promoting the idea of a distributed version of Twitter, rather than relying on a proprietary platform owned by a single company — means that those who prefer open and interoperable web tools will always have an alternative.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Joi Ito

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“All the stuff that’s done really well on mobile has been incredibly short form and easily scannable,” Mullenweg told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. “I think there’s a space … to sit down and read something longer than a couple of seconds. Rather than the coffee line experience, what’s the sitting-down-in-the-back experience? We’re going to keep experimenting.”

Mullenweg said that the average post on WordPress is 280 words long, and that’s remained “relatively constant” over the past few years. “Certain ideas need to be expressed and they just need more than 140 characters,” he said.

WordPress is taking steps to surface more of its users’ content. “We’ve been working a lot on wordpress.com to create an interesting reading experience,” he said. The site’s “Freshly Pressed” feed surfaces content from across users’ blogs. “You’ll see a lot more longform content and a lot more galleries [on the feed],” Mullenweg said, and traffic to that feed has grown by double digits in the past couple of months.

When Swisher noted that WordPress doesn’t link its users’ blogs together — suggesting what else to read if you liked a certain post, say — Mullenweg answered that “we’re really excited about starting to do that.”

And while Mullenweg criticized many forms of digital advertising — “print ads are still infinitely better” — he suggested that WordPress might look at offering more native advertising options. WordPress would consider a partnership with a company offering native ad units, he said, if it’s “something really compelling that doesn’t make readers block it…Native advertising is the most interesting thing I’ve seen. At the point where advertising becomes as good as the content that surrounds it, I will applaud it.”

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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One of the reasons why this incident has drawn so much attention is that Popova seems like a great example of the kind of self-sustaining media entity many bloggers — and even traditional journalists — aspire to become. While she may not be in the same league as Sullivan, who employs a team to run his Daily Dish blog (and who will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17), the idea that someone can make a living by simply curating excellent content in return for donations is inspiring.

Are affiliate links a sneaky form of advertising?

The Popova case has also become a flashpoint because as traditional advertising becomes less lucrative, publishers are turning to alternative forms of advertising such as “native” or sponsored content — something that caused a similar firestorm of criticism for The Atlantic recently — as well as affiliate-related content. Gawker is hiring writers to create what it calls “commerce journalism” that is designed to drive revenue from affiliate links. But standards on disclosure and other elements of these new forms of advertising are all over the map.

In a number of profiles, including a glowing one in the Sunday New York Times, Popova comes across as a highly intelligent and motivated individual — a former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria who started Brainpickings as a way of collecting interesting links to books and other content. The reputation of the blog seems to have spread fairly quickly, to the point where luminaries like former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter said they support her through donations in the same way they support National Public Radio. And Popova has said repeatedly that she is proud to be advertising free:

“It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first – it turns them into a sellable eyeball, and sells that to advertisers. As soon as you begin to treat your stakeholder as a bargaining chip, you’re not interested in broadening their intellectual horizons or bettering their life. I don’t believe in this model of making people into currency. You become accountable to advertisers, rather than your reader.”

That rosy picture got a little blurrier over the past couple of days, however, after an anonymous blogger (later revealed to be Tom Bleymaier, founder of a startup in Palo Alto, Calif.) posted on Tumblr about Popova’s liberal use of affiliate links — that is, links to books and other products on e-commerce sites (primarily Amazon) that provide her with a payment if one of her readers clicks through. The anonymous blogger extrapolated from Popova’s traffic numbers and estimated that she could generate between $200,000 and $400,000 a year from those links.

.@underoak @moorhen blogs that bring in money should have on-site disclosures about where it is coming from. cc @brainpicker

—
Staci D Kramer (@sdkstl) February 14, 2013

Disclosure is always better if you want trust

Given that kind of income — from something that is pretty clearly a form of advertising, although perhaps a non-traditional one — the Tumblr critic argued that Popova’s claim to be “advertising free” is clearly inaccurate. He also argued that some of her donors might think twice about giving her money every month if they knew that she was deriving a substantial amount of income from affiliate links, something that Popova didn’t disclose before or after a reader clicked on one of those links (Note: She has since added disclosure to her donations page).

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon followed up with a post about Popova, repeating some of the financial claims made by Bleymaier and adding some of his own. Popova has since responded to both Salmon and Betabeat — which also published a critical post about her practices — saying she doesn’t see affiliate links as advertising, is open about using them, and doesn’t make anything close to what Bleymaier said she does.

“Those numbers are ludicrous! If Amazon gave me even a tenth of that a year after Uncle Sam takes his fair share, I’d be delighted. I’ve been completely honest about the Amazon links with anyone who’s ever asked – and have many, many, many emails I’m happy to forward – and have brought it up myself multiple times in talks and on Twitter.”

Many of Popova’s supporters have said they are happy to have her get revenue from her writing in any way possible, and don’t mind the lack of disclosure about her use of affiliate links. Others, however, have questioned why she wouldn’t attach a simple disclaimer to her site — especially on the donation page — to note that she uses them (and some have even pointed out that this kind of disclaimer is arguably required by law, due to FTC regulations on disclosing marketing-related content).

I think the main point that Salmon makes in his post on the issue is a good one: namely, that if you are relying on donations from your fans for your livelihood — as Sullivan is, and others such as musician Amanda Palmer are — then it behooves you to be as open as possible about your financial arrangements, in the interests of increasing the trust your readers or fans have in you. Sullivan and Palmer have both been extremely forthcoming about their financial situations, an approach Popova might want to imitate.

Note: Since the original version of this post appeared, Popova has added a footnote to her site at the bottom of each page that describes how she uses Amazon affiliate links, which says:

“Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.”

This story was updated to note that Popova has added disclosure of her affiliate links to her donations page, as she noted on Twitter, as well as a note in the footer of her site.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Igor Steganovic and Brainpicker

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Just a few weeks ago, Sullivan announced that he was severing his relationship with The Daily Beast and launching a standalone website, and asked for reader support in the form of a $19.99-per-year subscription. In just a matter of days, Sullivan managed to raise more than $300,000 and said recently that he has a total of almost $500,000 now — and that more than half of those who contributed to his campaign paid more than they had to (one anonymous subscriber contributed $10,000).

Fans don’t want content, they want a relationship

When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was the “pay what you want” music experiments of bands like Radiohead and Girl Talk, both of whom asked their fans to pay for songs that they could have easily downloaded for free, and got millions of dollars in response. Why did fans do this? Because they wanted to support those artists, not because they wanted music for free — just as readers who want to support Sullivan probably don’t care that they can get the content free via an RSS reader (Note: Sullivan will be discussing his new approach at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The Kickstarter campaign that Amanda Palmer ran last year to raise funds for a new album and a national tour falls into the same category (as does comedian Louis CK’s method of going direct to his fans to sell a concert tour): after quitting a deal with a traditional record label, Palmer initially wanted to raise $100,000 to fund her recording. Instead, she collected 10 times that amount, or more than $1 million. And the reason why her fans wanted to donate all of that money has very little to do with their desire to get an album, or even to see her perform.

Part of what Palmer has done — in addition to detailing what she is doing with all of the money raised — is to turn what could have been a regular tour into a series of personal events. Some of those who contributed got invitations to private shows, in which Palmer would not only invite attendees to come on stage and play (something that caused some controversy because she asked for volunteers instead of paying people) and otherwise interact with her.

As she describes in a recent interview with Billboard magazine, the rise of the social web has made it much more feasible for an artist to reach out directly to his or her fans — and many of those fans are going to be willing to contribute something, regardless of whether they get a direct return or not (a theory that former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly has called “1,000 True Fans”). As Palmer puts it:

“I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is — which is that music has value, it’s subjective and we’re moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level. My theory is that things aren’t going to pick up until people … instead of saying people should want to pay for music, I think people should want to help their artists. I really think it’s a different way of thinking.”

Connect with fans and give them a reason to contribute

Getting up-close and personal with an artist like Palmer (who at some shows allows her fans to paint her body with washable paint) may or may not be your thing, but there’s no question that it inspires devotion in a fan base. And while Andrew Sullivan doesn’t go as far as Palmer, he is obsessively interested in what his readers want and how they are reacting to what he writes. As he described in his “declaration of independence” post, one of the reasons he decided to look at reader subscriptions instead of advertising was that he wanted to deepen his relationship with his readers.

“For the first time in human history, a writer – or group of writers and editors – can instantly reach readers – even hundreds of thousands of readers across the planet – with no intermediary at all. And they can reach back. We want to create a place where readers – and readers alone – sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way.”

One of the most common responses to both Palmer and Sullivan is that very few people can get away with making a living from their fans or readers — in other words, that the two are the “one percent” of artists or creators who can do this. But whether it’s one percent or 5 percent or more, the fact remains that the tools that allow Palmer or Sullivan to do this are more readily available than ever, thanks to platforms like Kickstarter and the TinyPass paywall system Sullivan is using — or 29th Street Publishing, which allows writers to create their own mini-magazines.

Will this allow every writer to do what Sullivan is doing, or every artist to do what Palmer is doing? No. But their example (and others such as Jonathan Coulton) show that as Mike Masnick of Techdirt puts it, when an artist connects with their fans and gives them a reason to buy or contribute, they will almost always do so. All that’s required is that you have something valuable to offer — and that you are as fanatical about your devotion to those fans as Palmer and Sullivan and Louis CK are.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Andres Rodriguez

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Content farms appeared on the scene several years ago, as publishers tried to figure out how to drive search traffic to their websites, since Google had become one of the top traffic sources in the industry. As SEO or search-engine optimization became a crucial part of the business, some took this principle to its logical conclusion and started creating content specifically to attract Google and profit from advertising keywords (Note: We’re going to be talking about alternative methods of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in April).

Content farms had an explicitly financial motive

One of the most prominent players was Demand Media, which owned eHow, an early attempt at SEO for content. The model was simple: pay a large stable of freelance writers very small amounts of money (often as little as $2 per article) to create or aggregate “service oriented” content around specific ad-heavy topics. This version of the business was more or less killed by Google via updates to its search algorithm, which pushed low-quality content further down in search results.

Walk argues that Medium and Quora’s new blogging platform (which converted what were message boards into individual blogs) as well as the blog network Svbtle and LinkedIn’s Influencer program share many of the same features as early content farms. Among other things, he says they offer:

• Article-based construction: In other words, a blog-style layout and format with multiple, dated posts written by an individual author
• Cross-promotion: Visitors come to one blog post and are shown others by the same author or different authors to try and entice them to stay
• Easy to use publishing tools: Medium and some other players offer lightweight content-creation features that make it easy to write and publish

For me at least, the main difference between what Medium and Svbtle and Quora seem to be doing and what “content farms” did is the lack of an obvious financial motive. True content farms were designed to maximize the search traffic so that they could generate advertising revenue (at one point, 30 percent of Demand Media’s revenue came from Google ads). But Svbtle and Medium, for example, don’t have advertising of any kind — although of course it’s possible that they could decide to turn on ads at some later date, once their traffic numbers justify it.

The rise of content farms for good?

Even Walk says that he sees these new platforms as “content farms for good,” meaning they are mostly focused on curation of quality content, which is why I think it’s better to think of them as curation engines rather than farms — or perhaps as “artisanal” content producers, to use a popular term. Both Svbtle and Medium are clearly putting a lot of emphasis on selecting quality contributors, since both are invitation-only, and LinkedIn seems to take this approach as well (Quora is much more open, in part because it converted its existing message boards).

LinkedIn clearly has an interest in driving traffic to its site with its Influencer content, in the hope that readers of those articles might decide to stick around or visit more often, and make use of the other things that actually produce revenue for the company. But in that sense, its program is more like what some call “content marketing,” which uses content that isn’t directly monetized as a way of promoting a brand or an advertiser’s main business.

In the end, all these platforms seem to be designed to appeal to writers who may have thoughts to contribute, but don’t necessarily want to maintain their own blog. Making that easy, and curating the results so that they are of high quality, may ultimately be a way around Google’s content-farm algorithms, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if higher-quality content is what gets produced. In that sense at least, Google’s efforts seem to be working.

Images courtesy of Flickr user D. Miller and Shutterstock / Gl0ck

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The reality is that individual brands like Sullivan and Silver now arguably have as much or more power as the traditional brands they used to align themselves with. The big question is how outlets like the Times and others will handle that re-balancing of power, and whether they will ultimately win or lose — and with the ongoing decline of print revenue, the stakes for traditional outlets are higher than they have ever been. (Note: We’re going to be discussing this with Sullivan and several other star bloggers at our paidContent Live media conference on April 17 in New York).

What does the NYT have to offer Nate Silver?

After announcing his split from The Daily Beast on January 2, Sullivan raised more than $300,000 for his new site in a matter of days, and was widely hailed as the harbinger of a new movement towards reader-supported independent writing. The pace of subscriptions has fallen off sharply (not surprisingly), but he is still signing up readers for his $20-per-year plan, with the latest total being $489,000 according to a recent update:

Silver hasn’t said much about his plans for the future since his emergence as a blogging superstar during the recent U.S. federal election, when his statistics-based blog — called Five Thirty Eight, after the number of members in the U.S. electoral college — got so much traffic that at one point it accounted for more than 20 percent of all the visits to the entire New York Times website. But he has hinted that he is considering whether to remain with the NYT or strike out on his own.

And why wouldn’t he consider it? With a book just published to some acclaim, Silver arguably has the kind of personal brand that could be successful as a standalone property like the one Andrew Sullivan is trying to build. And despite the attention the New York Times got from his content during the election, there has been some tension between the newspaper and Silver — including a reprimand from the paper’s public editor over a humorous wager that the blogger wanted to offer to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on the outcome of the election (a bet that the NYT said was unseemly for a journalist).

Silver said this incident wasn’t a big deal, and that he appreciates being part of the New York Times. But how much does he really need the NYT, and how much does the NYT need him and others like him? That’s the question at the core of the Sullivan model: at what point does it become more of a hindrance than a benefit to be associated with a traditional media brand?

If Sullivan can do it, who else might be able to?

There are a number of other bloggers and columnists who could arguably pull off a standalone, Sullivan-style model: New York Times foreign correspondent Nick Kristof, for example, has a huge following through social media like Twitter and Facebook and is a popular author — although whether he would get access to the people and places he needs to access if he were independent is a question mark. Other columnists at the NYT and similar mainstream outlets like Tom Friedman or Ezra Klein could probably make a go of it, as could some writers such as Felix Salmon at Reuters.

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told a media panel on Friday that the newspaper wants to work closely with high-powered writers like Silver, and in the past has used DealBook blogger Andrew Ross Sorkin as a model for what the paper wants to do by building events and other value-added offerings around individuals with star power. But at some point, writers like Sorkin and others are going to ask whether they wouldn’t be better off running such businesses on their own.

In a sense, this is just the latest evolution of a tension that has existed between traditional media and the web since blogging was invented — writers like our own Om Malik gain a profile in traditional media and then go off to start their own media entities, and some high-profile bloggers like Josh Marshall or Mike Masnick manage to turn their blogs into standalone businesses like Talking Points Memo and Techdirt. It’s a little like the music industry: labels try to nurture star talent, knowing full well that in some cases that talent will leave and go independent.

And as the music industry has discovered, there is even less incentive for talent to stick around now than there ever has been, and the barriers to entry for those who decide to leave are lower. Sullivan may have been the first over the wall in this latest iteration, but he is unlikely to be the last.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Shutterstock / Allies Interactive

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Since the “democratization of content” that was created by both blogs and social media is fairly well established now, both Svbtle and Medium seem to be focused on the process of curation and design rather than simply giving writers a new place to publish their content. How they are going to monetize this new form of curated blogging remains a mystery, however.

Svbtle was born last March, when designer and developer Dustin Curtis decided to create what he thought was a more elegant and simple way of posting content (interestingly enough, this is almost exactly the same motivation that David Karp has said was behind his creation of the Tumblr network in 2007). And while Svbtle seemed at first like a personal project involving Curtis and some of his writer and designer friends, it has grown fairly substantially, with more than 200 bloggers generating what Svbtle says in its blog post are “millions upon millions of pageviews” a month.

Svbtle admits it doesn’t know how it will make money

Curtis told TechCrunch that he raised the unspecified amount of funding from a group that includes SV Angel, the CrunchFund and New York-based incubator Betaworks (the startup also got some earlier funding through the Y Combinator program) because he wanted to hire developers, but also because he needed a “cushion for experimentation.” Among other things, the Svbtle founder admitted he doesn’t really have any idea how the company is going to monetize the content it is curating on the network.

As Curtis put it in the TechCrunch interview: “Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet.” But he provided some clues in a response on Twitter on Tuesday:

You can't make money in publishing by monetizing the content. You have to monetize the delivery system.

—
dustin curtis (@dcurtis) November 21, 2012

Medium is also focusing on curation and design

In many ways, Svbtle seems to be aimed at the same kind of market niche as Medium, the startup that Evan Williams founded last fall after leaving active duty at Twitter — where he was a co-founder and CEO — along with Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, both of whom were co-founders and/or early staffers at Twitter and Blogger. Reinventing blogging seems like a particularly fitting task for Williams, since Blogger (which was acquired by Google in 2003) was one of the early success stories in what was then a brand-new way of publishing and distributing content online.

And like the Svbtle network, Medium seems to be focusing on the curation process as a way of adding value to the blog market: it is invitation-only, although the company has said it plans to open up to more contributors in the future. And Medium recently hired a content editor, former literary agent Kate Lee, whose job appears to be finding new writers and encouraging them to blog on Medium — as well as perhaps finding ways of distributing that content in other forms such as ebooks. But much like Svbtle, the company hasn’t given many hints about how it plans to monetize its network.

Blog networks like Pajamas Media and others were a staple of the early days of blogging too, but most failed to achieve any kind of actual business success — although some managed to earn advertising revenue through ad networks like The Deck and Federated Media, which was an early backer of blogs like TechCrunch and Laughing Squid. The Huffington Post arguably started in the same way, with a core of unpaid bloggers that eventually became a business, and so did Talking Points Memo.

Can Svbtle or Medium find an alternate route to success, possibly by imitating the “artisanal” approach taken by entities like Marco Arment’s The Magazine, which is iOS-only? That remains to be seen. But one thing seems clear: just when you thought blogging was dead, someone comes along to reinvent it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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