But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn't a copyright issue - the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it's far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it - if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.

But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.

So what really scares me? It's the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It's the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

"Before you could be anonymous, and now you can't," said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.

Ms. Sun's posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from "The Simpsons" — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the "best online diary" award at the South by Southwest media powwow.

But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions - wrong ones - about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.'"

Any blogger can sign up for the company's 'Kindle Publishing for Blogs' beta program and set up an account to participate. Bloggers just have to made their feed available to Amazon’s website and the company will translate it into a Kindle friendly format.

Amazon hasn't made clear how much bloggers can charge for their blogs but it will split revenue from the subscriptions with the individual publishers. Currently most blogs on the Kindle charge $2 for subscription. Amazon has said individual publishers will get 30 percent of the revenue, with 70 percent going to the company.

The little-known blogs were created by Susan Kaplow, whose title is director of syndication and development and who works under vp of editorial operations Rick Levine and editorial director Tom Wallace.

Launched in the fall of 2007, the network's three bare-bones sites are fueled by a tiny staff and network of freelancers. The sites have an independent, informal look and feel; Product Fiend is a skincare site offering news and tips under headings like Lip Schtick and Zit Zapper. Elastic Waist is devoted to weight-related obsessions, and the third, Daily Bedpost, is a sex blog. They were originally billed as being separate from the company's magazines, but all three display prominently links to Conde Nast's Glamour, Allure and Self. A copyright line identifies the blogs as being part of Conde Nast.

"This blog network was a valued experiment," Kaplow wrote in an email supplied by a company spokesperson. "It was growing and doing well at syndication but we can no longer continue to support it in this environment."

Tens of days ago, The New York Times decided to expand its coverage of personal technology. Gadgetwise is one of the first products of that decision. A new personal-tech blog, Gadgetwise is currently organized around four product categories (digital photography, home entertainment, mobile technology and personal computing), each with a dedicated contributor.

Gadgetwise's mission is to help make people smarter about, well, gadgets–both the gadgets they're thinking about buying and the gadgets they already have. Every day, the blog will feature product news, analysis of tech-industry issues that affect consumers, and a growing database of tips, tricks and hacks that help people get the most out of their hardware and software.

We'll be adding more features to Gadgetwise in the coming weeks, but we wanted to get the conversation started sooner rather than later. Poke around, take a read and let us know what you think.

And thanks for coming to check us out.

For the past fifteen months, CBS News and CBSNews.com have been delivering all the campaign and political news, developments, and analysis on our Horserace and From The Road blogs.

The Horserace is over, and the time for governing is about to begin for a new president and a new congress. Today we're launching the Political Hotsheet, a new blog which will combine the best Washington reporting, analysis and observations from the correspondents and producers at CBS News and CBSNews.com, and partners like the Washington Post and Politico. We'll also point you to the must-read stories across the Web. The Hotsheet will bring it all together in one place.

From the transition to the incoming president's first 100 Days in office and beyond, we'll keep you up on the very latest happenings in what’s about to become one of the busiest and most closely-watched towns in the world. Hotsheet will chronicle the news from the White House, Congress and all the institutions in Washington during these historic and uncharted days.

As Offworld lifts off over the coming weeks and months, I'll be bringing to it a focus on the overlooked, the underappreciated, the rise of the independents and, in general, the games that are bringing genuine excitement and innovation (in both gameplay and design) to the industry.

Offworld will also be home to a number of guest appearances by and regular features from people outside the games industry proper and those that have had only marginal influence but deserve more, because it's when those influences come in that the results have been some of the most magical and memorable, from illustrator Rodney Alan Greenblat and Masaya Matsuura's unforgettable Parappa the Rapper (the face that would launch the rhythm gaming genre proving so profitable today), to studio artist Toshio Iwai's musical Electroplankton, to Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy.

That's not to say that Offworld won't also be exploring and featuring gaming's blockbusters, powerhouses and the history of its respected decades-old institutions, but in general we hope to chase away a lot of the industry's cynicism and myopia that's set in and bring the joy of discovery and a fresh breath of playfulness and wonder back, because we're all in this to have fun, aren't we?

AOL celebrates the third anniversary of its acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. this month. In 2005, Weblogs had a large portfolio of niche blogs targeted at business and professional users, in addition to a general readership. Since then, Weblogs has honed its portfolio to 29 blogs focused on major consumer passion points such as technology, autos, finance, video games and travel. Since 2005, Weblogs has seen worldwide unique visitors climb nearly 1,000% (122% annually, on average) and page views rise over 1,500% (154% annually, on average), according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix.

In addition to Weblogs' own growth, the acquisition was instrumental to AOL's launch of successful sites such as TMZ, http://tmz.com, and Asylum, http://asylum.com, FanHouse, http://fanhouse.com, BloggingStocks, http://bloggingstocks.com, and Spinner, http://spinner.com. AOL is now the largest global publisher of owned-and-operated blogs.

"The acquisition of Weblogs was game-changing for AOL and the entire blogging community," said Marty Moe, Senior Vice President, AOL Money & Finance, News, Sports, Weblogs and KOL. "Weblogs pioneered the development of professional blogging, and AOL accelerated its growth and leadership in branded content publishing by deeply integrating Weblogs throughout AOL's substantial network of programming channels. In doing so, AOL transformed its publishing model and increased its relevancy and reach for advertisers, while advancing best-of-breed sites in key consumer interest areas."

AOL's owned and operated blog network, including Weblogs, Inc. and AOL's other blog properties, is now the largest in the world in terms of unique visitors, according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix, with a worldwide blog audience of more than 30 million unique visitors and more than 650 million page views monthly. Leading brands in AOL's blog network include TMZ, http://tmz.com, Engadget, http://engadget.com, Asylum, http://asylum.com, FanHouse, http://fanhouse.com, Autoblog, http://autoblog.com, Spinner, http://spinner.com, Joystiq, http://joystiq.com, BloggingStocks, http://bloggingstocks.com, ParentDish, http://parentdish.com, Cinematical, http://cinematical.com, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), http://tuaw.com, DownloadSquad, http://downloadsquad.com, GreenDaily, http://greendaily.com, Luxist, http://luxist.com, and others.

Over the next 12 months, AOL plans to launch of number of new blog brands in important consumer interest areas, as well as aggressively continue the expansion of its blogs internationally.

"CES's choice of Engadget as its Official Blog Partner further cements the publication's place as the leading voice in consumer electronics coverage. Our award-winning site will cover the 2009 CES with the fast-paced, up-to-the-minute reporting that has made Engadget the market leader and final word in the world of technology journalism," said Joshua Topolsky, Editor-in-chief, Engadget. "CEA is one of the global consumer electronics industry's most powerful trade groups, and CES is the industry's most important and anticipated event, hands down."

"The online technology community is of continuing importance to us and this partnership shows the crucial role that blog sites like Engadget play in bringing CES' hot product news to a worldwide audience, before, during and after the show," said Karen Chupka, senior vice president of events and conferences for CEA, the producer of the International CES. "We estimate that some 20,000 new products are launched at CES each year and the Engadget editorial team is able to bring all the hot product news, across dozens of different categories, to life for both consumers and technology professionals."

Engadget will provide live coverage of the 2009 International CES on both its domestic and international sites, and will have extensive presence at the show, including interviews, product news and reviews, updates on CES events and commentary by a team of Engadget editors from across the globe. Engadget's expansion into the international market will provide an opportunity for consumers and advertisers around the world to follow up-to-the minute news from the show.

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists is thinking about adding a blogging category to its annual awards contest.

At its recent meeting, the NSNC board of directors passed a motion to ask the contest chair to present a proposal for such a category.

Current categories cover general-interest, humor, notes/items, and online writing. Award winners are announced during the NSNC's annual June conference.

Obsessable covers the latest in the world of technology, including cell phones, cameras, and HDTVs - obsessively, of course. Obsessable is powered by the rapid content development engine, Crowd Fusion.

Like Weblogs Inc before it, Crowd Fusion is being built on a custom built content management system (at Weblogs Inc it was BlogSmith). The angle is that the new CMS allows the team to do things they think are important in a better way, without relying on an existing platform such as MovableType (which powers Gawker Media sites among others) and WordPress.

Backed with $3 million from investors including Marc Andreessen and Ross Levinsohn, the list of team members reads like a walk down Weblogs Inc memory lane. Along with Alvey, Barb Dybwad was a former producer at Engadget, CTO Craig Wood was formerley a member of the Blogsmith team, COO Judith Meskill was at one time COO of Weblogs Inc, and CMO Steve Friedman was on the Weblogs Inc sales team...and that's just the ones we know about so far.