Every day, it seems, I see more and more people trying to use the blogging metaphor to make money. (The image, naturally, comes from business-blog.com.)

The question remains whether blogging will become subsumed into other media (lots of high-tech publishers, like Business 2.0, now have things they call blogs), whether new journalism businesses can be built on blogging, and whether blogging will be an individual or community endeavor.

Following are some Clues to this future:

I am intrigued by Weblogs Inc. On the one hand they have both a business model and a sales staff. They have good ideas on how to build awareness and traffic. They have excellent tools for user feedback. These are things Corante, for instance, doesn't have (yet). But I have some serious problems with their model:

• There's no credit given writers, and thus no style to the writing.
  
• They've got a lot of tech, but is there is a lot more to business media than tech.
  
• While they support user feedback, they don't empower users to control their own content as, say, Slashdot does.
  

Markos Moulitsas (right -- I've previously called him Markos Zuniga, which is my mistake, as he notes here) has an eloquent statement on the idea of empowerment as a business model in his area (politics) here. He notes (correctly) that this isn't about journalism at all, but about empowerment, empowering voters to become political actors or (more generally) empowering readers to become writers. He takes this from former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, whose book he was reviewing while writing this.

Here's what I consider his "nut graph":

The question isn't whether the tools work -- we've seen them work (heck, half the book is dedicated to showing how the Dean campaign was built through the netroots) -- but who will take advantage of them. The open source geeks working on Linux (or Scoop) quickly closing the gap, or exceeding, what the commercial outfits can offer. Google, giving everyone a chance to get in on its IPO -- a perk once reserved for the good-ol'-boy network in the financial services industry. It's bloggers and their readers pioneering participatory democracy and participatory journalism.

I think this is a good summary of what's wrong with Weblogsinc, and Business 2.0, and to an extent what's wrong with nearly everyone trying to make businesses out of blogging.

The blogging business model cuts the distance between writer and reader, between participant and audience. The best blogging business models will shrink this distance to nearly nothing. The only difference between blog creators and their audience should be their level of commitment to the task. And the task for those who would build blogging businesses is to find the money necessary from somewhere to justify that commitment.

But where is the money to come from?

• Advertising is one way to make money, and you need to pay the people who get it as well as the people who commit the content.
  
• Speaking can be another route to success, if the blog manager creates a professional speakers' bureau and, again, hires an agent who will represent his or her "talent."
  
• Creating a marketplace within the blog is another route, but again you need a professional store manager.
  

Blogging, like all forms of Web content, is easier to create than to profit from. We're all still finding our way, looking for Clues, the keys to success. Once someone finds that key there's going to be a boom here, one that will mean jobs for many and fortunes for a few.

Whoever that fortunate fortune-hunter turns out to be, I hope he (or she) hires me.