So many blog networks launching. So many bloggers recruited. So many column pixels devoted to reporting on them. So much hype. So much expectation of income (from the bloggers) and big pay-days (from the network owners).

What’s it all about, Alphonso? The answer is blowing in the cloud.

It’s all about virtual real estate. Big wodges of content that advertising agencies ~ and that now includes Microsoft, Yahoo and supremo, Google ~ can hang their messages around while raking in billions in micro and macro-payments.

A CASE IN POINT : You’re a blogger (content provider in the jargon) who has a bit of technical experience with Wordpress or some such platform. You’ve never made any real money online, although the lure of bucks from doing what you like doing is a real one, especially since it could mean giving up the day job you hate. What do you do in the new climate?

You can join a blog network and earn up to $500 a month, in some cases $2000 a month. This sounds great for many who have long since given up the idea of rewards for online writing. It’s easy to add it onto present income and be tempted.

After the first flush has faded though, and the time for real work begins, the rewards / effort ratio will begin to look thin. A piece of written work, well researched, that can fetch $1000+ in old media, will deliver $5 or less online. As a professional writer myself, I have to say, this is for amateurs and enthusiasts only. Unemployed men and desperate housewives (reverse these adjectives for political correctness) may at least derive a feeling of being wanted.

The upside of this is that working as a content provider can give you valuable experience of the business. Even the Chairman of a major corporation has to go through the two-people-in-a-garage phase.

So where does the real gold lie? Virtual real estate.

The difference between renting a house and buying one is fairly obvious in these times of rapidly rising property prices. If you own the place, the price rise is all yours, so long as you can pay the interest on the loan. Hence the current rush to launch blog networks.

As content builds and search traffic increases, so Page Rank goes up and Bingo, you have a valuable piece of virtual real estate which, if you know what you’re doing, can earn you sizeable returns in the short-to-medium term. Darren Rowse’s now legendary $15,000 AdSense payout for May zinged round the Web like a clarion call.

But the biggest incitement of all comes later. The moment when you’re approached by a big media outfit with millions on the table. Darren’s income stream was topped by Jason Calacanis’s sale of WeblogsInc to AOL for a reported $25m. And the canny soul even stayed on as a salaried executive doing the job he loves, nurturing his Internet child. Maybe there are stock options too, and with Microsoft and Google / Comcast sniffing around AOL … well, it can’t be all nettles and sour fruit can it?

So, do you throw your content into someone else’s goody bag, building up their virtual real estate? Or do you create your own green, pixelated acres across the infinite field of gold that is the 21st-century Web?

Everyone will have their own answer. In case you’re wondering, I do both. I blog for another network and I have my own, Syntagma Media, a blog network now with its own print publishing arm. Which will be the most profitable?

If you need an answer to that, you’ve missed the point of this article.