Blogs are the new black. Whether you are a Fortune 500 CEO, an ambitious engineer working the late shift or a promiscuous Singaporean teen – you’ve got to have one. For the uninitiated, the prospect of adding yet more words to the ocean of information on the web may seem futile. But fame and power await those who manage to break out of the mass of hyperlinked opinion.
No wonder that media companies are also starting to get religion. Readers secretly want to be moguls too.

As they say – no new tunes in the key of C. But in an age of Tarantino,hip hop sampling and Google API mashups – the remix is generally better than the real thing. What should be a headache for intellectual property lawyers, is becoming fertile ground for legal innovation with
the rise of the creative commons licensing regime. But does copyright altruism really add up to new economy affluence?

You can bet that if people are reading it, companies will find a way to advertise on it. So no surprises, that weblogs have become the latest weapon in the war for consumer attention.

The Oracle of Omaha had little good news for the newspaper industry following Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting. In comments made in the Washington Post, Warren Buffett noted that it was once an excellent investment buying newspapers because a dominant paper in a city could count on steady advertising revenue, and could raise ad rates annually. Not so anymore.

With declining circulation due to alternative new sources such as the Internet and television, ad rates are no longer so elastic. That assertion is backed up by the Wall Street Journal which reports on figures released today by the Audit Bureau which show industry wide declines of between 1-3%.

So, where to from here? Buffet's last comment is a telling one. He argued that owning the dominant news website in a region was not enough to guarantee sustained profitability for newspaper firms.

There is no doubt that newspapers need to secure a strong foothold in the emerging channels which are gradually cannibalising their revenues, but even if they do so – these sites are unlikely to offer the smooth ride and high barriers to entry which they have enjoyed during the last fifty years of publishing.

Ironically, one glimmer of hope is the infinite number of weblogs which are being created every day, and which are endlessly discussing, commentating and driving link traffic back to newspaper websites.

Oh, that is, if the geniuses in newspaper web publishing departments realised that non-expiring links and open access to content was a good idea.

The New York Times takes an interesting look at how newspapers like The Houston Chronicle and Yellow Pages publishers like Bellsouth and SBC Communications have recently become Google and Yahoo adword resellers, leveraging their existing sales relationships with small & medium business owners.

You can see why the search engines would be happy with such a partnership given how expensive and time consuming account managing millions of low value business advertisers would be. But from the newspaper perspective, you have to wonder whether they will learn the game fast enough before their portal partners begin stealing the food from their plates.