Here’s a few interesting articles that I found today:

The Rise of the Professional Blogger (The Atlantic) – Benjamin Carlson says what a lot of us have noticed – the biggest blogs are now group blogs or content websites.  The individual blogger seems to be drowned out by the machines.  What was particularly interesting to me was the link out to The Blogosphere 2.0, where Laura McKenna of 11D, who’s been blogging for over six years, makes nine smart observations about the blogosphere in 2009.  Great conversation in the comments.  Hat tip to Tape Noise Diary for finding this one.

Seth Godin Tries Brandjacking – Lisa Barone writes a harsh critique about Seth’s new project Brands In Public.  In a nutshell, Seth’s got a team building websites (using Squidoo) that capture online conversations about brands (i.e.  KFC, Molson, Trader Joes, etc.).  For $400/month, he’ll give the brand owners the right to control these sites – they can monitor them for free, of course, but they don’t have any control.  Lisa calls this brandjacking, saying that the brands really don’t stand to gain anything positive from this, that they can do better themselves, and that Seth’s new websites are essentially taking control of something that belongs to the brand owner.  The thing is, everything that these websites do is to use existing RSS feeds or links to websites with content related to the brands.  There’s no advertising involved like there is on a standard Squidoo lens.  Now, if this is just a cheap grab for revenue, it seems pretty paltry:  100 sites would gross $500,000 per year (well, $480,000, but it rounds up).  1000 sites would gross $5,000,000 per year.  That’s a lot of money to you and me, but a business, even a small one, can burn through that much cash in a year, no problem.  I’d like to think that what Godin’s really trying to do is to sell the concept of online, public brand monitoring and that he’d really rather that companies were smart (or brave) enough to do this themselves.  However, any brand/company should have a clear, easy way to opt out of having one of these sites – that wasn’t immediately apparent when Godin posted.  A harsh view of this project would compare it to the days when people would register domain names of famous brands and then expect a big profit when they sold these domain names back to the brands.  Claim staking.  Anyway, Lisa seemed to be quite appalled by this project and I’m a bit taken aback myself, although I think this project may just be a case of trying to go out too far to the edges, as Godin might say.

The problem with the economy: you aren’t needed anymore – the glass is simultaneously half-full and half-empty in this Hank Williams post about the impact of technology on the economy.

Ignoring the widsdom (sp) of crowds – an interesting rebuttal to the “wisdom of crowds” concepts.  Jason Cohen looks at some well touted examples of the power of group decision making (e.g.  a crowd’s average guess of the number of jellybeans in a jar being incredibly close to being accurate; the accuracy of the audience polls during an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire) and pokes holes in them.