Actually I am sceptical to the idea of making money from blogging. In a previous post on the Blogburst I reported about the downsides of commercial feeds (they eat your broadband, usually you dont get more readers, and payment is virtually nil). Obviously there are the exceptions to the rule. In the same way as Madonna makes money from selling records is an exception from the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) who never will.
Dont get me wrong – I am not against money per se. I just dont believe that I will make money directly from my blog. Despite this, I found this news interesting.
Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There’s so much great blog content being created every day — it’ll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created.
(via Creative Commons)
The attempts to create commercial forms of citizen journalism are fascinating to watch. Again we see the new social uses of media threatening the established business models. Blogs will not kill print media but they will force print media news to adapt to a new reality. As usual in situations such as these there will be commercial winners and losers.