With the number of blogs continuing to climb (Technorati currently reports 21.1 million blogs), more and more bloggers are wondering if there isn’t some way to make all that hard work pay. Once again, Darren Rouse of ProBlogger comes through, this time from his deathbed. In an post titled How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs, he details several varieties of advertising, sponsorship, affiliate programs, digital assets, blog network gigs, non-blog writing, donations, selling your blog, merchandising, and consulting. If the topic is of any interest, this is the best round-up I’ve seen. Even with a high fever, Mr. Rouse knows whereof he speaks, having reported a six figure income from blogging last year. Not all of us can aspire to the same rich trove, but it helps if you at least know where the potential lies.

Not long ago, corporate wisdom had it that content and customers were best kept behind tall garden walls, but the recent announcement that Microsoft and Yahoo will open up their networks and allow their respective instant messaging users to talk with one another is yet more proof that those walls are tumbling down. While altruism may have played some part in the deal, it is likely that the two partnered in hopes of overtaking AOL with its 56% of the current market share. They’ll have a rough row to hoe. AOL’s software is ubiquitous and friendlier than either Yahoo or MSN.

Plus, could the hand-shake be too little too late? Upstarts like Cerulean Studios’ Trillian and Defaultware’s Proteus X for the Mac have been providing free software allowing individuals to chat across all three systems for a while now and they come with a friendly array of customizable features, among them video and SMS support for forwarding messages to your phone.

This is all well and good for the user who just wants to chat with their friends and colleagues across systems, but the real competitive edge may well turn out to be voice over IP (VoIP). The recent $2.6 billion purchase of VoIP company Skype (whose tagline reads “the whole world can talk for free”) by eBay was considered by many to be chancy, but signs are good that individuals will choose the much cheaper (free!) VoIP services over more traditional telephone providers whenever it’s possible and easy. The Microsoft/Yahoo partnership will make it very easy for users of those two systems.

The real story may lie in rumors of talks between Microsoft and AOL’s owner Time Warner to discuss more interoperability between those two chat and voice systems. There’s been little love lost between the two in the past but market pragmatics could force them to at least kiss for the cameras. Meanwhile, newcomer to the messenger game, Google, is also said to be in talks with AOL. It will be worth watching how this all plays out.

We hear the phrase “citizen journalist” bandied about quite a bit these days, but it is much easier to hypothesize about the future of this movement than to get a clear picture of what exactly is happening today.

The USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review’s Tom Grubisich provides an overview of ten community news sites titled Grassroots Journalism: Actual Content vs. Shining Ideal. He begins by pointing out that while Americans log onto the web by the millions, the relationships that grow up among individuals are largely based on shared interests rather than geography. With the emergence of local news sites, whether independent or associated with print or broadcast organizations, there is opportunity for true grassroots reporting and community dialogue. However, after analyzing the ten sites, Grubisich comes to the conclusion that, “…what you see when you take a closer look, apart from a couple of honorable exceptions, is the Internet equivalent of Potemkin villiages - an elaborate facade with little substance behind it.”

In response, Bayosphere’s Ryan Sholin asks “What are your “shining ideals when it comes to citizen journalism?” Sholin suggests that local newspapers have the readership, advertisers and audience already in place and so are the most likely candidates for true citizen journalist forums, but then he opens up the discussion to his own readers. The comments on both the Bayosphere site and Grubisich’s story help to round out the discussion. Perhaps you’d like to add your own comments there or here.

Yesterday, PaidContent.org broke the story that the somewhat moribund AOL had purchased Jason Calacanis’ Weblogs, Inc. Network (WIN) for $25m (or more, reports vary). With annual revenues at more than a million dollars, WIN is home to Engadget, Autoblog, Italian charms and more than 80 other lifestyle and consumer sites. The purchase is the largest blog content buy so far. (Some would argue that this distinction belongs to the New York Times and its purchase of About.com with its blog-like components for $410m by earlier this year.) The purchase of blog pioneer Dave Winer’s similarly named weblogs.com on the same day by Verisign for $4.3m further validates blogging as an entrepreneurial enterprise.

Blogs are abuzz with speculation about what AOL (and their own overlords at Time Warner) intend for WIN. Some believe AOL’s assertion that the network will be treated as a “wholly-owned, stand-alone subsidiary” with “full editorial control and independence.” Others point to AOL’s history of cordoning off content.

David Kline, a veteran journalist at BlogRevolt.com provides some real-world context in a post titled Blogging Business Gets Real.

Over on Corante, Dana Blankenhorn points out that “$25 million is less than the cost of a single good magazine title.”

The always astute Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger quotes from email sent from WIN to one of their bloggers saying, among other things, that “AOL are moving to an ad based model which fits with WIN.” That makes sense. Even AOL has come round to understanding that the walled garden is so last century.

Ad Pulp chides the New York Times for the Grey Lady’s poor reporting of the buy, largely the result of misunderstandings about blogs (calling all blogs “online diaries” and stating that WIN publishes “1000 blogs a week,” rather than 1000 posts, for instance.) Oops!

Meanwhile, rumors ran amuck that Nick Denton’s own Gawker network was to be sold to NewsCorp. Denton is quoted in the Washington Post as writing, “The whole point about blogs is that they’re not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It’s way too early. Like a decade too early.”

Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. n. Web development technique that combines HTML, CSS, XML, and JavaScript to generate dynamic interactive web-based applications that update page elements incrementally without having to reload the entire page. Examples: Gmail, Google Maps, and Flickr. [Coined in 2005 by Jesse James Garrett.]

With the second annual Web 2.0 Conference convening in San Francisco on Wednesday, it’s little wonder that the blog world is full of discussion on the topic. Still, it’s a bit of a challenge to get a handle on just what is at the heart of the movement. Among those who lay claim to the Web 2.0 mantle, there are as many definitions as there are definers, but that’s in the spirit of the “radical decentralization” and “architecture of participation” that distinguish the movement.

Advocates are generally in agreement when pointing to examples of Web 2.0 success stories: the active community that’s grown up around photo-upload site Flickr; the ingenious and addictive bookmarking database at del.icio.us; the real-time delivery of video and other large files across BitTorrent’s decentralized network in which every client is a server; the breadth and utility of the user-written Wikipedia project; and, of course, the phenomenal growth of blogs and syndicated feeds.

What distinguishes all these efforts is the fact that they have adopted the web as a platform, delivering services across networks and devices rather than distributing software artifacts. They are all free and, as such, can afford to be in perpetual beta release. Users happily provide testing, feedback, and suggestions. Some even take advantage of the open source code beneath the surface, contributing valuable variations and enhancements.

By design and default, individual users evangelize and populate the databases. The more people use Web 2.0 services, the more robust and useful they become, and all at very little additional cost. Because much of the contributed content is niche, users are rewarded with an unprecedented array of choices.

Indeed, a whole new argot is growing up around the movement. Folksonomy, a portmanteau for folks and taxonomy, describes the popular use of tagging or freely chosen keywords to categorize content from the bottom-up rather than the top-down hierarchies employed by traditional systems. The Long Tail, with its L-shaped distribution curve, illustrates the cost-effective access to niche content allowed by Web 2.0 mechanisms. Remixing is stolen from the pop culture world and is used to describe hybrids like the many homegrown Google Map applications.

Whether these grand experiments in “radical trust” and the “wisdom of crowds” survive and evolve viable business plans is yet to be seen, but the next few days should provide us with some intriguing prognostications from those on the frontlines.