There has been some considerable keystrokes spent on bloggers and making money off blogs in the recent days…Infact, today’s WSJ has a good face-off between Alan of Jupitermedia and Jason of Weblogs. Interesting to see their contrasting viewpoints. While Alan feels blog networks are the only way of making *any* significant amounts of monies, Jason begs to differ. And with good reason. With an analyst from Jupiter coming up with an estimate that says the online advertising market is set to expand close to $19billion by 2010, even a small portion of that would seem a sizeable amount for the active bloggers to sit up and take notice. Ofcourse, it all depends on what you define as a blogger and an active blogger. Sites like technorati/sphere/intelliseek and others might want you to believe they track millions of ‘em. Fair estimates do not put active bloggers even in the double digit percentages of that….So, there might be some money at the end of it all. And ofcourse, success of Adsense sure has spawned many other similar networks (chitika et al)…And your friendly neighbourhood get-rich-quick schemes just got a shot in the arm ;)

Now combine these findings with another report in Guardian, again based on research by Jupiter, that bloggers are increasingly exerting a “disproportionately large influence” on today’s society. While, that may seem preposterous at face value, there might be some truth to it somewhere down the line. While it currently may not be a given that organizations *need* blogs or need to heed blogs, the days are definitely not far off when they are going to adapt to the same. :)

On a related note, check this good link-out post at scobleizer on blogging and careers. Yes, blogging can get you a new job. We are almost there, not yet ;)