Boston-based Gather.com, set to receive $6 million funding this week, intends to become an eBay of sorts for bloggers, other writers and their readers - with a business model that recruits writers by offering them a share of online advertising revenue, writes the Boston Globe. The most popular writers would eventually earn hefty paychecks, according to Gather founder Tom Gerace. The site will officially launch in February or March but already has hundreds of writers and about 8,500 readers.

This week's funding infusion is coming from former Lotus CEO Jim Manzi, and New York investment bank Allen & Co., jointly run by former US senator Bill Bradley; both Manzi and Bradley will join the Gather board.

In a recent posting on the site, Manzi extols Gather's model: ''No longer must I accept much of my content from what I have called the Literary Industrial Complex, that group of concentrated media organizations with their small elites and self-reinforcing arbiters delivering my news and information 'top-down.'"