Dominique Busso of tech site VNUnet was about to tell the conference that blogs were the future, but yesterday's announcement that AOL had bought Weblogs Inc took the wind out of his sails.

It has been said that the dot com boom ended when AOL bought Time Warner, he said. So will the blogging boom end now that AOL has spent $30m on Weblogging? That's Jason Calcanis' not insignificant blog empire - and Mr Busso quoted Jeff Jarvis: "So is the best way for a media company to get into blogs to buy them? I don't think so."

The integration of blogging culture into mainstream publishing is inevitable, he said.

"Readers now have access to PR, readers have access to newswires and readers have access to the blog publishing format. Anyone can access a very elaborate publishing tool today with no technical background at all."

This shift towards a more active audience presents a number of challenges for publishers.

Joining them, not beating them

Will mainstream media have to compete with niche nanopublishers? With citizen journalism? Should the major media still create original content? How can publishers co-operate and integrate with the blogosphere? And will it be left to the mainstream media to provide ways of organising or filtering content?

VNUnet has begun to tackle some of these issues - with the advantage of an enthusiastic and very tech savvy readership.

The network offers a VNU-branded RSS news aggregator in partnership with Newsgator, last month launched a free branded blog platform for users on VNUnet UK, and this week announced a deal with US blog giants Gizmodo.

The collaboration with Gawker Media means that it can publish content from the US blogs on European VNU sites under the Gizmodo brand. All of these help bond users to the site as part of a community.

The range of blogs on VNUnet generate about 10 to 15 per cent of the overall traffic, but the new Gizmodo projects are expected to increase this share by a further 10 per cent.

The commitment of that blogging community is what allows the site to self moderate its content, said Mr Busso.

"There are hundreds of bloggers posting all the time and we couldn't do pre-moderation unless we had a huge team," he said. VNUnet asks users to sign up to conditions of use.

"But we trust our posters, and the community will usually put people in the right direction.

"If there's crap content on a blog someone will email us and ask us to remove it. It wouldn't stay up for more than a couple of days."

• Tonight's AOP awards dinner is the biggest yet - 650 people from across the industry. And booze. Will report back on the standard of dancing if it takes off before I get the train back to Brighton...

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).