"Most bloggers toil in total obscurity"

Blogs to Riches - The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom -- New York Magazine

Great article by Clive Thompson in the NewYork Magazine. It explains why it is so hard for some to build any audience for their blogging efforts and why those who were early in establishing traffic and links are increasingly hard to displace.

There are some great quotes in this article such as "a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies". Success of a blog goes beyond having great content that is is updated regularly - you need to build an audience and that can be done in two ways (assuming you are a grassroots blogger) - the first is to get linked-to by an A-list site - the second is to get promoted in a traditional media. Someone with an audience needs to point to you.

If you consider blog reading a less-than mainstream activity (lots of upside), it begs the question of if how traditional media can leverage their audience to either establish their own blog properties or at least leverage their audience? If a newspaper writes a lot of editorials about blogs or referencing 3rd-party blogs are they accelerating their own demise or do the newspaper's editors become the "human filters" that help users find the information they need?