OK, this cover story (find it here on BizWeek online), written as if it were a series of blog entries, goes a bit over the top to start:

How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy.

OK, but, it makes some good points germane to FM once we get past the bluster:

Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking. Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating buzz. Advertisers are tracking responses to their campaigns. "I'm amazed people don't get it yet," says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice-president who heads up search. "Never in the history of market research has there been a tool like this."

And this:

One more idea. Think of TiVo, (TIVO ) think of the iPod. When you're using one of them, do you consider the company that provides the programming? CBS, for example? Not much. You're putting together your own package. The pieces come from lots of companies and artists. Often you don't even know where.

Aggregators do the same job for the Net. So, just like the record companies, which have figured out how to market bits and pieces of their albums as standalone songs and ringtones, the rest of the media and entertainment world is going to have to think small. Content, whether it's news or a Hollywood movie, is going to travel in bite-size nuggets. The challenge, for bloggers and giants alike, is to brand those nuggets and devise ways to sell them or wrap them in advertising.

Well, not exactly, but sort of. This model does not work, to my mind, if the advertising is not endemic and respectful of the conversation each site fosters. For more on that, read my Searchblog posting "Toward the Endemic....:

Also, the idea of an aggregator is often misunderstood. While readers are often overwhelmed by too many choices and wish for a service to guide them through it, the interesting aggregation service, to my mind, faces the marketer, not the reader, and is sophisticated and selective rather than overbroad and ravenous for traffic.

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. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it "an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes."

Can't argue too much with that except to say that the implication that "vast stretches" will be comprised of *only* mainstream media is silly. It will be both mainstream and independent sites, sites competing with mainstream because they have the power of Web 2.0 companies aiding them. In the Web 2.0 world, it matter less that you have a major media company behind you, what matters is if your voice and point of view are considered valuable by your audience. The rest - who your publisher is, how you make money, etc. - is a choice, not a presumption.

The authors get this with their grace note:

The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Bingo.