"A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. "[Tomalak's Realm]

Shirky further argues, "Mass amateurization is the web's normal pattern. Travelocity doesn't make everyone a travel agent. It undermines the value of being travel agent at all, by fixing the inefficiencies travel agents are paid to overcome one booking at a time. Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for.

Traditional publishing creates value in two ways. The first is intrinsic: it takes real work to publish anything in print, and more work to store, ship, and sell it. Because the up-front costs are large, and because each additional copy generates some additional cost, the number of potential publishers is limited to organizations prepared to support these costs. (These are barriers to entry.) And since it's most efficient to distribute those costs over the widest possible audience, big publishers will outperform little ones. (These are economies of scale.) The cost of print insures that there will be a small number of publishers, and of those, the big ones will have a disproportionately large market share.

Weblogs destroy this intrinsic value, because they are a platform for the unlimited reproduction and distribution of the written word, for a low and fixed cost. No barriers to entry, no economies of scale, no limits on supply.

Print publishing also creates extrinsic value, as an indicator of quality. A book's physical presence says "Someone thought this was worth risking money on." Because large-scale print publishing costs so much, anyone who wants to be a published author has to convince a professionally skeptical system to take that risk. You can see how much we rely on this signal of value by reflecting on our attitudes towards vanity press publications.

Weblogs destroy this extrinsic value as well. Print publishing acts as a filter, weblogs do not. Whatever you want to offer the world -- a draft of your novel, your thoughts on the war, your shopping list -- you get to do it, and any filtering happens after the fact, through mechanisms like blogdex and Google. Publishing your writing in a weblog creates none of the imprimatur of having it published in print. "

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So,if there is little likely monetary reward why would one work on creating , however polished, a written summary, a body of ideas, on the web? I believe that there are rewards for doing this and they relate to making a community of understanding with those that do respond to your ideas. As a benefit of community membership one receives relevant suggestion and criticism of her/his ideas. As another benefit, this interest-based community also provides new and related ideas from which one may continue to build her/his knowledge base. There are benefits for all.

In short, be wiser and happier in your knowledge making web community, but don't quit your day job!!