A few days ago I noted that Law.com was creating a Blog Network, re-publishing selected law-related blogger’s posts. Along similar lines, Steve Rubel’s excellent Micro Persuasion blog is now going to be re-published within WebProNews, and Steve has posted an insightful article about the pros and cons of this arrangement:

…WebProNews immediately augments their high-value, professionally written articles with more folksy contributors who live on the edge of the content tail – all at no cost. In return, I benefit from more visibility, in-bound links and traffic. This is a harbinger of the partnerships we’ll see many big media construct in the near future.

Prediction: You’ll see a lot of this blog network/re-publishing/aggregation from big media in the next few months, then this will snowball as bloggers figure out how to do this all by themselves… RSS and the MovableType/MetaWeblog APIs make it easier to than ever to aggregate content, and bloggers will figure out very quickly how to self-assemble their own blog networks. And once they do, you thought cross-linking and blogrolling was an effective way to increase page rank? Watch how fast bloggers game the system again with reposting networks…