BusinessWeek has a good overview on John Battelle’s Federated Media: a company that is forging a new model for publishing.
“The Sausalito (Calif.) startup is signing up hundreds of the best [blogs] and selling their ad space to brand-name advertisers such as IBM (IBM ), Absolut, and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ). Federated Media doesn’t own the blogs, as do other blogging networks such as Gawker.com, but it keeps 40% of the ad revenue and gives the rest to the site’s owner. “It’s kind of like a music label, except we don’t control their intellectual property and tell them what to sing,” says Battelle.”