TYPING your name into Google is hardly an exercise for the modest. Until recently, journalists who yielded to the temptation would have found copies of and links to their articles. But the rise of blogging has changed the relationship — a recent search on Google found that somebody had written that one of my articles about podcasting was “quite possibly the most boring one that I have read”.

Criticism that was once simply spoken, or on a bad day expressed by scrunching up the newspaper, is now being published for the world to see — or to put it another way, the power relationship between print and online is tilting towards the internet.

In the US this phenomenon is more pronounced. CBS anchorman Dan Rather was humbled by bloggers who exposed flaws in a report about President Bush’s National Guard record, while Eason Jordan, CNN’s news chief executive, resigned last month after a blog revealed he had made unsupported claims that US troops were targeting journalists in Iraq.

Blogging has not developed in the same way in the UK — internet commentators have yet to claim any scalps. But there are plenty of British sites on gossip, comment and news — such as Popbitch, NTK and The Register — that have survived the dot-com era and are beginning to do well.

The Register, a technology news site, has been running for seven years, and nearly went under during the dot-com bust. But since then it has been growing healthily. Advertising in the first quarter of this year is up by about 25 per cent, its readership is up by 50 per cent year on year and the business is profitable.

Back across the pond, media websites are changing hands for big money again — and at valuations that stretch the imagination.

Last month, The New York Times Company acquired About.com, a network of advice websites, for $410 million (£213 million). The website doubled revenues last year but the Grey Lady is still paying a multiple of ten times sales and 30 times underlying earnings. In the real world, anything north of about nine is pricey, unless you are desperate or think that the business is growing fast.

This was not supposed to happen. After the the dot-com boom, some began to doubt whether internet media could be profitable at all. The web went off the radar between 2001 and last year, during which time online efforts were scaled back, However, the internet’s prospects have been transformed by two factors: increasing consumer engagement and rapid advertising growth.

The growth in engagement has fuelled continuing growth in traffic. People have gradually become so used to using the internet for information and shopping that it has become ingrained into daily life.

Changes in technology have also boosted engagement with the internet. Broadband has made surfing from home a pleasure. Also, simple-to-use news filters, such as the Bloglines service, have made it easier to monitor and search for news and comment, putting personal blogs and small websites on a par with the BBC and The New York Times as information sources.

Economic changes have also been fundamental to internet growth. Although most first-wave internet business models were hopelessly optimistic, the bust three years ago forced those that survived to pare costs to the bone. As a result, web entrepreneurs report that small increases to advertising spending have made a big difference to profitability. In the past two years, spending on internet advertising has more than trebled to £550 million.

The interesting question is what impact the return of the dot-com market will have on traditional media, apart from the appearance of Nathan Barley on our television screens. Most of the money will remain in mass media. TV advertising this year will be about £4 billlion and demand is strong — ITV this week reported a 12 per cent improvement in the first quarter.

But the mix and the mood is changing. That could be threatening for newspapers and in particular local press, which depends on revenue from classified advertising. EBay, the world’s biggest online auction house, has just launched Kijiji.com, a classified service for goods in seven countries.

The UK is yet to join but the power of the eBay brand could be bad news for local and regional newspapers, which have until now delivered readers for advertisers through editorial.

The resurgence of the internet heralds a world in which editorial has to work harder to be relevant both commercially and to audiences, who are now more able to be heard.

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