3. It was about 5 or 6 years ago that blogging began to really reshape mainstream news media with the launch of some of the major blog brands today (like Gawker’s blogs, Huffington Post, the former Weblogs Inc, Mashable, etc.). What has changed over the past 5 years that has allowed the blog model to be so successful?

Nothing any more complex than money and time. A long time ago before anyone really cared, advertising rep agencies like Federated Media (along with a few others) injected cash into many of the biggest blogs in the world, which gave these blogs the ability to hire more staff to generate huge volumes of high quality content. Eventually these blogs were about to court their own advertisers and cut their own deals which allowed them to hire more staff to generate high quality content and spin out the cottage industry of conferences, events, spin-off sites and co-sponsored products that stabilized their revenue streams.

All the while, time was working in their favor. As they kept making more content they kept appearing in Google and kept getting linked to by bigger and better sites which lead to more traffic, more relevance, more links and most importantly more money. As people who work on the Interweb know, eventually you hit the tipping point where traffic, cash and relevancy make you skyrocket above the competition which is where many of the big blogs find themselves today.