Regardless, the issue has sparked a very interesting discussion around the blogosphere. Duncan Riley took the first major step of actually putting out a call to action on the concept of an advertisement federation.

Steve Hodson complained that he was concerned about the users who read a blog for the blog and might not like editorial restraint that might come from a new “conglomerate”. He did a whole podcast around this. Thanks Steve!

From my perspective, there’s two parts to this equation. There’s a play for advertising dollars where a combined alliance of 5-8 blogs each doing 150k pageviews a month can command a far more significant direct sale interest than any one of those blogs alone.

The second part of that equation is in content, and more importantly, diversity of content. Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins seems to think there is no problem with bunches of bloggers talking about the same things all the time. I disagree, as I think most. But putting that aside, there will always be the echo chamber, regardless of alliances. It’s just that an alliance can present a distributed voice on a wide variety of topics making it more desirable for the combined audience of all member blogs put together as well as the advertisers.

End of the day, this concept still has miles to go before anything actually happens. But I’m happy with the direction of the conversation.

Here’s the second video.