Gather.com gets $6 million in VC funding

I'm not sure why the mainstream financial media thinks this is a big deal, or maybe it's just a slow news day with the federal holiday, but MarketWatch (now part of Dow Jones) reports that Gather.com, "a blogging Web site founded by a dot-com exec from the 1990s" has gotten $6 million in VC funding.

See: Gather.com gets $6 million in funding - Allen & Co., ex-Lotus exec line up behind blogging site.

It's not clear to me how Gather is that different than any other blogging network.

Maybe it's simply that they are raising it to a whole new level of hype. For example, check out this posting on their site: The End of the Literary Industrial Complex. Yeah, that's cute and clever, but... show me the money. I mean, just like in the traditional literary world, a relatively small number of superstars make the big bucks, and a vast secondary tier of wannabes get a pittance that hardly pays them minimum wage for their writing efforts. So, if you really have some blockbuster content and blogging ideas that have the potential to rake in big bucks, why not just start your own blog and promote your work yourself? Is Gather really going to do that much more for you?

-- Jack Krupansky