I've been a daily (at worst) reader of Techdirt for the last year, drawn by front man Mike Masnick's insightful commentary (delivered with a consistent level of snarkiness that I can only envy).

I knew Techdirt was selling some sort of research/analysis service, but certainly not at the level (as this Wall Street Journal article points out) of having Volkswagen as a customer. (Nice!)

But, to the point... as Susan Mernit noted the other day, a variety of smart folks are talking openly about the on-going topic of interest to many of us: how to make money in the blogosphere.

While I can't add directly to the conversation until my current consulting relationship ends or changes in nature, I will say this... Techdirt, knowingly or unknowingly (I'll go with the former), is leveraging multiple points of the 'blog content lifecycle', which is interesting both conceptually and in practice, as witnessed by a) the rather large audience that Techdirt has accumulated, and b) the substantial monthly fee they are successfully charging their clients.

The talking heads would be well advised to, as they say, 'factor this in'.

Note: If you don't have a conceptual reference or framework for the weblog content lifecycle, I hereby unabashedly point you to some thinking that my good friend Deeje Cooley recently posted (and floated in early form as far back as Feb 2003). I have a different image in my mind, which I'll try to commit to graphics at a future date... but it'll largely draw on Deeje's work.