Unique intellectual properties

One year ago today I began this weblog. I stumbled on someone else's blog, became intrigued by the concept of "Blogger" (which I had never heard of until that moment) and as an experiment set up this site and began writing. On the Today Programme this morning it was reported that the average life of a website is 40 days.

At first I was concerned to be as anonymous as possible. Only one other person knows I am the author of this site (and I have regretted making even that disclosure). Occasionally readers e-mail me with warnings about what might happen if my identity as author were to be revealed (I have a strategy prepared for that scenario, which I still think is fairly remote).

At the moment I am reading The Gossip Wars by Milt Machlin. It is an American book, published in 1981, which I bought for £1 in a sort of second-hand shop in Staines High Street. Interestingly there isn't any imprint of the publisher, so possibly it was a vanity publication. The book consists of 330 yellowing pages crammed with text, occasionally (very occasionally) relieved by a poorly reproduced black and white photographs. Despite the poor condition of the book and substandard presentation of the text, the actual writing is very good, and the subject matter extremely interesting.

Milt Machlin writes a history of the "gossip" column in New York in the first half of the twentieth century (Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Dorothy Kilgallen etc). The writers who invented the gossip column found themselves in possession of unique intellectual properties that generated huge followings and that they could move from newspaper to newspaper depending on which publication paid them the most. Although the columnists began by reporting the exploits of "society" (the celebrity culture of its day) they became so influential that they ended up shaping it, and expressions / behaviour / attitudes etc mentioned in their columns spread throughout Manhattan to become the normal standard of everyday life.

It occurred to me that the modern weblog / blog phenomenon is mirroring the emergence of New York columnists such as Walter Winchell. A blog seems to be basically a newspaper column floating in the ether (representing the deregulation of the publishing industry). Will these "columns" coalesce into new forms of publication or will they be co-opted into existing traditional publications?

And what should I do with this column?