Techdirt.com

Back when I started talking about business applications of (or lessons from) blogging, Mike Masnick sent me an interesting message about Techdirt.com, a multi-author (slashcode) technology/business news blog that’s been running continuously since 1997 (that is, since before the word blog was coined).
One interesting thing is that Mike and his team managed to monetize the project by starting Techdirt Corporate Intelligence. Techdirt CI provides “enterprise blogs to technology companies…. Each gets a customized, private blog that is filled every day with links, summaries, and (most importantly) analysis of all the news that impacts them.”
This is interesting to me, because it’s a passive or “push” blog for the end-users. I suppose this can be thought of as sticking to their core competency and outsourcing the infograzing.
Mike tells me the company is profitable, running off revenue with no outside investment. In a sense I see this as a version of what Megnut’s been talking about (I’d call her Meg but we’ve never met). You can say that Mike (with the help of his cohorts) established himself as a competent blogger (not just poster, but link-sifter, context-provider) and then found a nice independent way to get hired by numerous client to blog for them professionally.
Not as outreach but as intelligence.