Talking about blogging

Last night at Chicago Bloggers MeetUp we had a great Q & A with Marcus Riley and Zach Christman of NBC5.com. Our discussion covered the layout of their site, how NBC the big corporation has been coming around to accepting some of the realities of net-connected communication such as interactivity, allowing comments and such. As a long-time blogger at currentbuzz.org I was a pleasantly surprised to find news media folks from the world of broadcasting (see pomoblog for critiques of bcasting) that weren't way behind in their ideas about blogging, social networks and such.

We are working on the idea of a blogger summit sometime this summer. All of our blogger group liked this idea and it shows Marcus and Zach's savvy because by hosting something like this, NBC5 can get in touch with bloggers and build various mutually beneficial relationships.

The bloggers for the NBC5 site don't get paid, but they aren't constrained to write only for NBC5 either. Everyone who wants to make a living in the next ten years realizes that economic models are going through major transformations and there is a shakeout in terms of what we get paid for. In a reputation and open source style market (the bazaar-- see Eric Raymond on this subject) it isn't what you get paid up front, but what connections you make and how you distinguish yourself in a world with too much information and too many things to look at and know.