There has been a surprising hype in the last months about the paid blogging model. Business 2.0 devotes a long article to Nick Denton's media empire and weblogsinc.

"After only a few months in the lab, the Kinja team scrapped the marketing-tool angle. The project persisted as a kind of Google for blogs, and at launch, to no one's surprise, the New York Times ran a piece about it. But so far, the thing has turned out to be an overhyped bust on par with "push technology." Hourihan quit the day of its launch. Power bloggers eschew it as a weaker version of the programs they already use, the blog-gathering RSS applications, which keep tabs on hundreds of blogs at once. People new to the blogging world, of course, don't look at it at all."

Meanwhile Wired investigates on Nick Denton's past:

"Clearly, this is not Rupert Murdoch's world. In Nick Denton's nanopublishing empire, that last word is usually accompanied by eye rolling and air quotes. The meat of his Gawker Media enterprise, after all, is not newspapers or satellites or movies but weblogs, until recently viewed as non-revenue-generating megaphones for online bloviators. Denton, a part-Hungarian, part-Jewish, matter-of-factly gay and cheerfully iconoclastic 37-year-old British expat, has recruited a squad of talented workaholic misfits who use Movable Type, sexual prurience, and relentless snarkiness to draw enough of a crowd to lure advertisers. While he isn't making a bundle yet - and doesn't claim that he ever will - Denton is making a splash that's seriously rattling the media hierarchy."

Looks like the hype is looking for new targets...