Blogs - open for business?

Reading the article Blogs will change your business, one passage caught my attention:

"A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like -- you guessed it -- blogs."

I have read much over the last few weeks for this course about how blogs are challenging the establishment, challenging the corporate influence in the MSM with their citizen journalism, challenging the power bases within the Liberal and Republican establishments to take back the parties for the real supporters.

I remember hearing much the same thing in the mid 1990s, when I first began working in the new technology revolution. People pronounced that the 'old fashioned' business models of profit and loss were over - the new economy was where it was at and any one who didn't believe it would be left behind.

Well, anyone who has seen the value of my investments recently will know that didn't quite work out. 5 years later, they have yet to return to their pre dot.com crash levels. Meanwhile, apart from a few exceptions like Google, the majority of companies who have survived did so focusing on traditional models of making a good product and providing good sales and service to their customers. Very few made a profit selling advertising space on their web sites.

So I am wondering if the same future awaits blogs in the next few years. One or two notable ones will survive, though probably not the ones we would expect to now. But in the main, most will remain very amateur web diaries, or instead, will become branches of the MSM, their radical aims swallowed up by the offers of money and fame that only the MSM and corporate advertising can make.

Many, including myself, bemoan the commercialisation of the music industry. I wonder if the same fate will befall blogging?