The big news in blogging today is not the FEC, but a concerted effort by media companies to kill it by co-opting it. (The illustration is from an Investigator.Biz feature on the slave trade.)

Companies large and small are hiring bloggers, full or part time, are launching their own staff-written blogs, or are seeking to have bloggers publish on company-owned sites.

The weapons they wield are money (I'm up for that), the machinery of publicity, and credibility.

Much of that credibility, however, is being defined by search engines, especially Google, which refuses to spider blog entries on equal terms with media-fed blogs.

If you want to find this entry, for instance, you must look in the main search engine. Specialized blog search engines get a fraction of a regular search engine's traffic, and are based on RSS, meaning they're self-organized rather than spidered.

The result is that the independent blogger today has the same problems finding an audience as an independent Web site would have had in, say, 1998.

How do people find blogs today? Through keywords, at Bloglines. By traffic, at Blogstreet.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to break into blogging, and find an audience of any size. Media companies claim they have one, ready made. The identities of the Top 100 blog sites have stabilized, despite the best efforts of second-tier blogs and, sometimes, the disinterest of the blogs' authors.

Media companies claim they can cut through this. Here's a typical offer.

It will cost you nothing. Just your soul.

When blogging is organized, bloggers are divided among beats. Turf battles can erupt. Favorites are chosen, and those not favored wither or see their traffic die.

Decisions now made by the market, in other words, are going to be made by news bureaucrats, then enforced by institutional heft.

The way is wide-open for a site that will really find the best new blogs, segmented by type, and offer hefty traffic as part of its service. We need good online publications about blogs, with editors who can point out the best of the new.

Barring that, the media conglomerates will win and the independents will move on.