MSN sees potential of blogs

Mark Glaser at USC’s Online Journalism Review (OJR) reports that even MSN sees the value of user-generated content from blogs. Mark, in his story on the bounce back of online advertising, quotes Scott Moore, the general manager of the MSN network:

If you’re a blogger, MSN might come to you and say, ‘We want to distribute you. We’ll send you traffic and we want you to run these ads on your site, and you’ll get a share of revenues on that,'” Moore said. “That’s probably an offer that many bloggers are going to be interested in because they don’t want to have to invest in creating that kind of infrastructure, and they would value the traffic.

I do not see lawyers as looking to selling advertising on lawyer blogs. However, MSN’s looking at blogs is just one more sign that blogs are going to become part of the fabric of our society just like Web sites have. Even if blogs are foreign to lawyers, they are not going to be foreign to a law firm’s prospective clients.

Among other things, Mark Glaser writes a weekly column for the Online Journalism Review, software features for TechWeb, occasional features for The New York Times’ Circuits section and a bi-weekly e-mail newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. For those who have not seen it before OJR is an excellent Web-based journal produced at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.