There is a tyranny to having a narrow beat. (The image, by the way, is from the Oak Ridge National Lab.)

Yes, you can develop sources. Yes, you can develop expertise. But with a narrow beat you're limiting yourself, and you're becoming increasingly dependent on your employer, since beat knowledge is often non-transferrable. You're also more likely to "go native" with a beat, internalizing sources' views as your own without analyzing them.

Blogging and RSS are, at their heart, designed to let us do away with this Tyranny of the Beat. Your subject can be read based on its subject matter, or you can develop your own personal fan club.

I have always resisted having a narrow beat in my work. You'll see stories here ranging from Internet Commerce to Always On to law, science, even politics, along with what Hylton thought was my beat when he took me on -- semiconductors.

I think this keeps me fresh. It keeps me interested. That keeps the quality high.

But that's not the way publishers look at things, even blogging publishers. There are now several companies that run a stable of blogs, besides Corante, and each one places writers in narrowly-defined beats. Weblogsinc may be the most aggressive in de-personalizing their blogs. They now have 75. Most can change out the staff in a nano-second and keep going. Good for them, bad for writers.

And weren't blogs created so we'd have something that was good for writers?

A look at the Technorati Top 100 offers a good illustration on the rise of these corporate blogs.

Nick Denton's Gizmodo, Gawker, and Wonkette all have separate entries. Weblogsinc's lead dog, Engadget, is listed at number 10.

Most top-ranked blogs, in fact, are now actually communities (like Flickr, Slashdot, and DailyKos), group efforts (like BoingBoing), corporate efforts like those already mentioned, or political rants that get by because everyone with their point of view points to them. Even personal blogging is becoming corporatized. One other big category is older blogs, blogs that were here practically from the beginning and continue on from that momentum.

I'm proud to note that our home page at Corante.Com is now number 26 on the list. The page has featurettes on some of our latest work, and getting on there is a very competitive business, so check there regularly for the latest.

Another good thing about Corante is we tie blogs to people, although we're always trying to fill new beats as well. And when Hylton trusts you, you're going to get a lot more editorial freedom than anywhere else.

But the trend toward corporatization and treating bloggers like news chattel is going to continue. It's already nearly impossible to create a reasonable RSS feed for yourself based on a subject heading, unless it's very, very narrow, so increasingly people using RSS subscribe to specific blogs, or to specific publishers. That's the trend.

Fight it.