Have you got the Blews? Or how about the Nogs?

You know what news is, right? We all kind of know what blogs are, right, though they are harder to define, with 15, 20 million out there that cover everything from in-the-Baghdad-street coverage to Aunt Lilly’s kimono collection. .

Now the differences are getting murkier.

Some news companies are looking at how to incorporate local blogs into their sites, while others are trying to figure out how to bring news and blogs together contextually. Still other aggregators are scanning the blog world, and picking out the jewels in the rock piles, as they decide how to market the gems.

Consider the Washington Post’s use of Technorati, which has been the foremost aggregator of blogs. The Post has partnered with Technorati to provide blogs that are contextual to its news and political coverage, well demarcated and placed in a box next to the news. Check out the “Who’s Blogging” boxes on the columns to the right of news stories.

Down in Austin, the American Statesman is partnering with Austin-based Pluck, which got its start providing RSS readers. Now Pluck’s blog community software is used link to invite local users to participate in news- and local-oriented discussions. It’s just been launched, so a check of the conversations show them to be sparse in areas. Still it harkens back to the Koz software community publishing attempts of the late ‘90s in trying to bring the community into the newspaper, a fond memory for some of us who have seen current newspaper sites become largely replicas of their print products. It's a model others may well imitate, through Pluck or other means.

Back in April, High Beam Research started its “Blog This” link, which goes the other way – letting bloggers pick story headlines and first paragraphs from its service, add its own notes and display it on their blogs. Then the story précis provides an entry point back to High Beam’s free trial of its paid sub service.

Then there’s Topix, which is now indexing 15,000 blogs, along with many news sites and feeds. Topix link picked that first collection with an eye toward high-value, news-oriented blogs, which could live well next to its news presentations – and the feeds it sells to websites. Mike Markson, vp/business development of Topix, suggested to me that, “We look at them carefully, going beyond the first-person.” The feeds are also filtered for any obscenity or “heated speech,” to make them more acceptable to traditional audiences.

Newstex, an early 2005 start-up, headed by former Comtex execs, is also getting into the blog business. It has started by selecting a few hundred feeds to feature along with its news wires. Significantly, Newstex is not just indexing selected blogs, as Topix is doing – it is obtaining licenses from the bloggers. The plan: redistribute the blogs, at this point only in the traditional b-to-b markets.

So where does this leave us?

So soon after their introduction and mainstreaming, blogs now are morphing into news content. At least, the cream of the crop is doing that. It is news content, just not written for and owned by Big Media. So Big Media can best do the next best thing: colonize it.

Which may end up working out well for both high-quality bloggers and the bigger media dearly needing fresh voices. What may let the new blog models work is the same phenomenon that has enlivened all Web businesses this year: contextual advertising.

Such advertising provides a new model for bloggers and those hosting them – whether created by a blues enthusiast in Austin or a Bush deconstructionist in Washington.

Whether it is the Blews or the Nogs, expect to see it approach pandemic by the advent of spring.