John Battelle announced he is testing ads for his new Federated Media publishing network on SearchBlog. John already has a number of heavy hitting influencers joining his network, including Om Malik, MetaFilter, & Boing Boing.

What makes Federated Media different than most blog networks is that John believes the ads and content should be kept separate. I am not trying to say that others are doing a bunch of advertorials, but John wants to gather a group of the best technology bloggers to sell influencer ad space. Unlike other blogging networks I believe he is partnering with the bloggers to sell their ads, instead of trying to own the blogging websites and hire the writers.

You can run into scalability problems during economic downturns if you hire hundreds of writers and create the associated corporate infrastructure.

John was a co-founder of WIRED & founded The Industry Standard. He was recently profiled in ClickZ & IWantMedia. No too long ago my friend Philipp interviewed him as well. If you can’t get enough John Battelle in your diet you may also want to see the guest lecture he recently gave at Berkeley 🙂