The Browser hosted an excellent first birthday party last night in London.

The Browser is a good-looking attempt to set up a smart person’s online content aggregator organised in helpful but manageable categories – somewhere between the eclectic and leisurely Arts & Letters and the Economist. It is getting a solid and growing readerhsip, so far by word of mouth.

Virtue needs to be rewarded. So add it to your Favourites and swing by regularly.

The question on the lips of many people at the party including senior newspaper folk and indeed the Browsers themselves was, how to make money from content?

Advertising is down anyway and drifting fast away from traditional media formats, such as newspapers. And why pay for newspapers when there is more than enough to read out there for free?

What, after all, are most newspaper stories these days other than rehashed material from the wires or pieces cobbled together by someone sitting in an office scouring the Web – in other words, bloggers? Investigative journalism is expensive and does not necessarily generate much material.

Take the Daily Mail’s noisy recent ‘special investigation’ on Climategate – how much of it had not already appeared on blogs and other websites?

Or the Guardian’s searching investigation into Tony Blair’s financial arrangements – outsourced to its readers!

All in all, we seem to be heading back to something like the hurly-burly world of C18 coffee-shops and myriad scurrilous pamphleteers, as the legacy media try to work out how to get money from us for their work. But they have a job on their hands.

Which columnists really add unfailing must-read insight and value? Not many, and mainly on the FT. The rest are just paid paid bloggers who happen for now to enjoy access to senior politicians and bureaucrats.

I suspect that technology will solve the problem. Once someone works out how to make a reliable Kindle-type gizmo which makes it easy to read online or download reading material of all shapes and sizes – articles, blogs, websites and the rest – we’ll all be happy to pay for some sort of content subscription.

The smart sellers will sell their material very cheaply, hoping to build up lots of tiny pots of revenue-stream rather than fewer big ones. And (crucially) they’ll have to find ways of selling packages of material with others.

If I want to read only a couple of FT/Times writers plus a specific favourite Guardian and Indy and Daily Mail writer each day (and/or some US and French writers too), why can I not ‘bundle’ their work myself in a customised webpage and pay just for that?

Maybe that device exists and is called an iPhone? It’s just that the sellers are trapped in huge legacy complexity and have not caught up with its possibilities?

But even then the people selling content will have to find a way to compete with those who produce lively, elegant work but do not sell it, using their online material to build revenue in other ways.

Such as me.

Except that revenue-building bit is not working out too well…

On into 2010.