Collective Intellect has a goal: Make bloggers work for The Man.

But who is being paid? As Google has shown, there is much value in aggregation and sorting, less value in some forms of content production:

“(Collective Intellect) has created a service that combs through thousands of blogs, news sites, chat rooms and other Web sites every day and then surfaces rumors and news reports that might be of interest to traders or corporate public-relations executives….Collective Intellect can charge several thousand dollars, Springer said, because it filters out the critical information for its subscribers“

Content is king? Some content is king. Audience is the real king. If you’ve got that, chances are you are making the real money.

“Google Blog Search and Technorati look only at blogs. There really is no good search engine that I know of for bulletin boards,� Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research“

Perhaps there’s an opportunity there for AI/Search gurus.

On a similar theme, Donna Bogatin wonders: “How has Google managed to get away with selling billions of dollars of ads against content that it has not paid for?�

Googles answer is usually: “if you don’t want to appear in Google, opt out�. Whilst webmasters receive more value in being indexed, then they’re not going to look the Google traffic gift horse in the mouth.