The future of mass communication?

Ken Yarmosh has an interesting comment on the future of blogging and the Internet on the TCS Daily this morning, and he gives a plug to the BusinessWeek blog written by Steve Baker and Heater Green.

Yarmoush writes, “More and more traditional print publications are getting their writers to blog. Essentially, these writer/bloggers act as filters, directing readers to interesting links or sharing quick opinions on current news items. BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting, written by Stephen Baker and Heather Green, is a good example of real-time news analysis by a business magazine.

“On the other side of the coin, there are sites like TailRank. Its focus is to use proprietary real-time ranking algorithms to discover the most linked to mainstream and blogosphere news items. After its analysis, TailRank subsequently lists and clusters related sources in order of popularity on its homepage. A site called memeorandum does something similar for politics and technology (with sister sites tracking gossip and baseball).

“While BusinessWeek and TailRank represent the traditional man versus machine approach, other relative newcomers have decided to meld the two ideas. Digg.com, for example, is a community driven site that allows users to ‘digg’ stories. Those stories that get dug the most eventually propagate through the system to the Digg homepage.”

Read more here. Quite provocative.