I'm ashamed to report that I received the most civilized email from Gawker Media kommissar Nick Denton this morning. He responded kindly to yesterday afternoon's post in which I requested a feature in Kinja and accused him of architecting the demise of independent blogging within the space of about three run-on sentences. You're the bigger man, Denton, and I appreciate the email.

That said, I'm going to go ahead with pissing and moaning about Kinja, anyway. I mean you or your Gawker hydra no offense.

Let me begin by paraphrasing what Denton said in the email. He refuted my suggestion about Kinja by saying that aggregators allow readers to quickly and conveniently scan smaller or less frequently updated blogs that they might otherwise abandon completely. He also reminded me that Kinja only provides a preview of each blog's post. Users need to click through to the author's site in order to read the entire thing. Both valid points, and well taken. But my concern is that Kinja is more than an aggregator. It seems to me that Kinja is intended to be a blog portal -- your first and only blog stop.

Take a trip down memory lane with me, won't you? Think back to when Yahoo! was only a search engine and web directory. It was great and everybody used it. So somebody at Yahoo! realized that, since they effectively had control over all the traffic, they should direct it to Yahoo! branded sites or to those sites that paid for it. Even in the heady days when every retard with a website could get a few mil in venture capital, traffic meant everything. It represented potential ad revenue, potential subscription revenue, and potential e-dog food sales. Traffic became currency.

I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that Kinja (or something like it) could take a similar path. Among bloggers, traffic is already currency, and it's a currency largely distributed by the various branches of the Bank of Gawker. Legions of citizen, mouth-breathers, and rugrats are flocking to the internet in search of the much-lauded "blogs," but with so many out there, where is a body to begin? After The Best Week Ever, that is. If Denton's success attracting traffic to his other sites is any indication, many of these folks will find themselves at Kinja. Once there, they'll check out the editors' digests. Soon enough, their own Kinja page will be filled with posts from Gawker, Wonkette, Defamer, Fleshbot, and Gizmodo.

At some point, might not Denton realize that selling ads on each of his individual sites is silly, especially when all their traffic is directed through Kinja, anyway? And why not charge ad supported sites like Gothamist or ego supported sites like this one for inclusion in the Kinja directory? And isn't forcing Kinja users to click through to the author's site kind of silly? Why not require any site listed in Kinja to allow full republishing rights to any listed content? They'll do it because, after all, it's the only way to get read. Pretty soon, you've got an ad supported online magazine in which readers get to choose which unpaid columnists appear on their homepage.

Now, I'm sure this is an overstatement. And I really doubt that Denton's doing anything more than what readers want and the evolution of the medium requires. But it worries me, anyway, even if I'd take it all back in a minute if it meant a full time blogging job for him.

Analogcabin @ 6:59 AM
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