I’m pleased to announce I’ve received today the invitation to the BlogBurst Network!

BlogBurst is a service that takes topical content from pre-approved blogs and provides it to publishers (online newspapers, etc.) for republication. Blogs that apply and are accepted are categorized. BlogBurst editors choose great content from those blogs for republication. For more information on how BlogBurst works with publishers, see this page. Bloggers must provide a full text RSS feed to participate, with no included ads in the feed.

As recently as a year ago, it was inconceivable that much of Old Media would embrace blogs. It was probably even harder to imagine that most bloggers, known as much for independence as outspokenness, would willingly succumb to a Big Media bear hug. But attitudes around blogging are changing fast. With new blogs appearing daily — there are 34 million now, up from 9 million a year ago — and more people reading blogs, the mainstreaming of the blogosphere is well under way. And newspapers are realizing that to remain relevant, they need to get more bloggy.

It’s a sign of the times, then, that a startup has come up with a way to accelerate the blending process. Pluck Corp., a blog-technology outfit, has launched a service that pulls together the posts of 700 bloggers and makes them available for traditional publications. Already, some big name traditional outlets, such as The Washington Post, Gannett newspapers, and The Austin American-Statesman, have signed up to give the service a whirl.

The service will follow a tried-and-true syndication model, says Pluck CEO Dave Panos. Blogs that have been invited include tech site Micro Persuasion, celebrity-gossip site Jossip, and The Agonist, which focuses on business and political affairs. Pluck chooses the blogs it wants to include with an eye to covering a broad swath of topics, including sports, travel, and cooking. Pluck employees then vet and review the blogs before pulling together a feed of the best posts for publication partners. The newspapers then put the posts they want into different sections of their online sites. The goal is for newspapers to sell ads in these sections. Pluck would then take a cut of those sales and give a portion to the best performing bloggers. Some bloggers see BlogBurst as a prime opportunity for broader exposure. Steve Rubel, author of Micro Persuasion and an Edelman public-relations executive, says he signed up as an experiment, to get first-hand experience with how syndication might work.

“As journalism moves from unidirectional to multidirectional, it will involve co-creation,” Rubel says. Pluck allows newspapers to tap into the blogosphere without expending too many resources, he says. This skill of co-creating and aggregating is one that marketers will also have to learn in the future, Rubel argues.

Technorati Tags: pluck, BlogBurst, Web 2.0, blogging, syndacation