*Blatantly stealing a meme from Tyler Cowen.
I attended the DC2.0 event, a Web 2.0 miniconference in Reston (oh, the mighty whines of those who couldn’t navigate roads not on a grid was euphonious to me). I’m sure I’ll have more to say, but the one application that blew me away was this:
Say you want to do this whole blogging thing, but either a) you don’t have time, or b) you’re just inherently an untalented cretin, but in your defense, you actually are aware of this. Others, like me, produce sophisticated, valuable banter on a regular basis. Demand–Supply–Market. You can join, invite people to supply you with posts, and search for posts to buy with attribution, without attribution, or with exclusivity. Prices are determined by the seller, and the service charges a commission.
I don’t doubt there’s a market for it, and I applaud the guys for finding it and building a medium-slick app to exploit it. But I have to wonder: is technology really a “pain point” (thanks for the new marketroid buzzword) or an excuse for not blogging? Today’s tools are pretty easy, and I have a choice of any number of WYSIKOWYG clients (What You See Is Kind Of What You Get). I think the pain point is trying to do something you have neither the time nor talent to do. If you don’t have time to hone your writing, do you really have time to cull through the vast amount of stuff out there and find quality blog posts to buy and claim as your own?
And if you do, how does this help you? After a while, I figure out that link blogs should tell me who else is worth reading so I can skip the middleman, unless their culling skills are excellent. Sploid is such for me, but they also add value in their writeups. So without clever commentary on the links you provide and some serious thought into which links go into your blog, you don’t have any more compelling content than you did when you posted once a week with something semi-insightful. (Finger pointing at self, here.)
Anyway, it’s an interesting approach, and not badly done, but I doubt it has much of a future. Then again, I hate InstaPundit for much the same reason, so…
Sandy Smith 
I just want to record my first impression here and save me the pain of actually blogging about it.
The presenter started his presentation with “Let me tell you HOW this works …” and my unfiltered first thought was “I want to know WHY this works…”
Someone in the audience also asked, “So is your target market the absolutely lazy…” (paraphrasing)
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Wait a minute, these guys have created a market for selling individual blog posts?
Has anyone ever expressed a desire to _buy_ individual blog posts?
Besides that, isn’t the idea a little uncomfortably close to those shady businesses that sell old term papers for students to “read for inspiration” (i.e. shamelessly plagiarize)?
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They claim the target market are trade associations and “communications professionals” that want to get into this blogging thing but aren’t very technical and are understaffed.
I think a better model for an individual blogger would be to become known in a given area and quietly offer to write original posts for a trade association’s blog for a fee–or maybe even do it publicly, so your name carries weight for their posts and you’re seen as making a living blogging.
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