By now everyone has probably read Mike Arrington’s piece/rant on blogs raising money, the inevitable rise of blogging networks and the politics associated with such things. I’m not going to say much on it, but I do have a few thoughts as someone who has made the jump from a personal blog to one of the larger blogs. This is of course my own perspective and in no way indicates how others I work with at VentureBeat feel.

I think Arrington makes some great points, namely on the blurring line between blogging and business as well as the politics of linking. That said, I’m not sure the end game here has to be a massive “dream teaming” of blogs into super networks. I completely understand why that makes sense, but I also thinks it runs somewhat against the principals of blogging. That, of course, leads to another debate, which Frederic mentions, as to what is blogging vs. what is more traditional journalism — something which I am getting to know more and more about.

When I was writing the majority of my thoughts here, at ParisLemon, some other writers and myself did have this whole B-list group thing going on as Louis Gray mentions. But it was never anything formal, and there were certainly no rules on linking to one another or anything like that. We all just sort of gravitated around the same stories and it was interesting to see one another’s perspectives on things.

I think that is the innocent side of all of this. Perhaps Arrington is right that if we all were to get larger and more money was involved, it would have gotten political and things may have potentially grown sour between some of us – it’s probably naive to think that wouldn’t have happened in some regards despite the fact that a lot of that stuff is awfully petty and really distracts from interesting conversations. Still, when it is your livelihood, it is your livelihood.

Exactly why we need a Bitchmeme.