The great American road trip has been around since Lewis and Clark, but it seems to me this is a special time of personal entrepreneurship. Near instantaneous video-blogging tools make the returns to sponsors all the more deliverable. With a few hours of work setting up a free publishing tool, your personal bid for celebrity becomes accessible to a global audience.

Is online video encouraging a generation of moochers, who expect sponsors will readily pony up for them to tape themselves doing whatever it is they find interesting? Continue reading my essay on this topic at GigaOM.