Blogcritics cited by Tennessee AG

Updating a post about an antitrust action against price-fixing record companies, Glenn Reynolds notes that "The Tennessee Attorney General's office emails me to note that actually the feds were on the case first -- and, get this, refers me to this post on Blogcritics for more information on the subject. Is that cool, or what?"

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Success tailor-made from the web

At Lands' End, 40 percent of all chino and jeans sales on the company's Web site are now custom orders. Original projection: 10%. Once a customer finds the right fit, "they'll typically buy every color in those jeans or chinos or whatever," a Lands' End exec tells the NYTimes.

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Fleishman: blogging boosts credibility

Wi-Fi maven Glenn Fleishman writes: "My blog has given me the credibility that's extended me back into a variety of print publications, including InfoWorld (see this coming Monday's edition), Macworld (Bluetooth knowledge), and The New York Times (although I was writing occasionally for them, the Wi-Fi blog has resulted in stories they've asked me to write or that I've pitched). For freelancers, a blog like mine, on a focused topic, can truly change your career."

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Swing low, sweet pricing point

Seeking to cash in on (and exacerbate) the confluence of Moore's law and Baby-bust deflation, Olivier Travers launches The Happy Deflationist. As Olivier describes it: "Fresh deals and bargains found for you on eBay, Amazon.com, and elsewhere on the web. Tech products, computer hardware, books, DVDs and CDs. Stuff that you actually want to buy, and can afford as well." It's the poor man's Gizmodo.

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'Recursive publishing tool'

Writing about RSS/RDF wrestling, Anil Dash comments: "Blogger wasn't named RPT: Recursive Publishing Tool. That's part of why it caught on with normal people."

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Googlesphere

Moxie and Doc went to lunch and thought they coined the Googlesphere. Google said otherwise. Perhaps they can get credit for popularizing it?

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Daypop up

Daypop is back, just in time to record News.Google's linkage by 178 blogs. Bots chasing people chasing bots chasing people.

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Featurewell

Wordsmith and newly syndicated author Ken Layne describes the article syndication Internet service run by Featurewell. "There are some 800 writers - Jimmy Breslin, Eric Alterman, Catherine Dunn, Christopher Hitchens and Andrei Codrescu, to name a few - who use Featurewell to sell their work again and again to the 900 editors signed up with the service. Wallis has a reputation as a fierce defender of free-lancers' rights, and this combined with his record of actually getting the money from publishers to journalists makes Featurewell a friendly place for an impressive roster of writers." Correspondent.com, one of Pressflex's publishing clients, offers a parallel service focused on Europe. And I know Red Dot provides an Internet-managed photo syndication service from Budapest.

[5] comments (3708 views)  |  link

It's Google, stupid.

If you are in the news business, forget how you manage and serve information. Don't bother going to fancy content management summits. Instead, spend some time thinking about how readers acquire information.

Eager to test-drive the next content management system? Open a web-browser. Type www.google.com. Voila.

Serving over 5 billion searches a month, Google is by far the world's biggest single information server, the global content management system. For premium, information-hungry readers, Google is, defacto, both the homepage and prefered acquisition tool for most important information.

What does this mean for news publishers? Consider New York, where Google thrashes the city's paper of record on its own front stoop.

The New York Times portrays itself as The City's Leading Information Source. And as one discovers by crunching the NYTimes.com's own audience figures, the paper gets an average of 1.2 million visitors a day or roughly 11 million total users in a month.

These numbers pale when we consider that Google serves 12,195,400 searches a month for the words "New York." And 68,400 for "World Trade Center." And 91,200 for "Bloomberg." And 144,400 for "NYSE." And 630,700 for "Broadway." And 752,300 for "Manhattan." And 22,800 for "Pataki." And 60,800 for "Empire State Building."

You get the idea. Here's the scary thing; the number of Google searches for "New York" has grown 62% since March. When was the last time the New York Times grew its web audience by more than 20% a year? (All Google figures gleaned from its old Adwords program.)

Here are some other Google search tallies for publishers to chew on. Google gets 11,260,800 searches a month for "London." "Atlanta" gets 2,302,300 a month. "Los Angeles" gets 3,442,100 a month.

Now, Google goes for the news jugular. Google has been running an alpha version of its news scraper for months, putting relevant headlines atop search results. This week, its "news.google" page began serving up whole pages of relevant news scraped from 4,000 sources.

Noting that the NYTimes URLs in News.Google include the word "partner," Dave Winer suggests some special benefit will accrue to the paper. I don't know what he's thinking. Will Google skew its news judgement to send some extra visitors to the Times? My bet is that the partnership simply (and only) jumps visitors past the Times' registration module.

In fact, News.Google shames the NYTimes.com. On the ten articles highlighted on the current news aggregation for "New York," only two are from the New York Times. Only one of ten for the "New York City" search is from the Times.

Assuming Google's content relevance and peer weighting algorithms continue to run the show, News.Google will boost well-networked bloggers as Google's source of highly referenced sites expands. The key thing to watch -- when and how will Google expand the list of 4,000 news providers.

Kuro5hin and Slashdot are already included. (But no Metafilter?) Will Blogcritics or Instapundit or Scripting News be next? Will Drudge, the human headline squeegee, ever make the list?

The bottom of Google's new news aggregator says: "This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."

No humans harmed... but more than a few corporations will drown as the river of news floods and erases its old banks.

Want the latest news and views about News.Google? Where better to check than the source itself.

(9/26/02 Nick Denton, former CEO of headline aggregating Moreover.com, examines a Google fumble in presenting news. And Leslie Walker writes: "the former editor in me feels humbled at how a computer is able to assemble on the fly an adequate version of what it takes a dozen or two humans to do at most major Web news sites.")

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Chasing ads, dailies think 'adult'

On a day when Glenn gives a bodaciously illustrated link to topless UK hunting enthusiasts, I'm inspired to dredge up this article from a couple months back.

E&P: "It's a newspaper advertising category that for decades has been owned lock, stock, and fur-lined handcuffs by alternative papers. But now increasing numbers of daily newspapers are coyly succumbing to the many seductions of sex ads."

"'I worry about the slippery slope of pursuing these ads,' Hartford (Conn.) Advocate Advertising Manager Greg Shimer said. 'I want our people to go after auto, hospitals, fashion -- the ads alternatives don't traditionally get.'" Nevertheless, in July "the Advocate began a two-month experiment of slightly relaxed standards -- including bigger ad sizes and photographs (although only head shots are allowed) -- to attract more business to its small adult-advertising section."

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Ego disintermediation

In today's NYTimes, Mickey Kaus worries that blogging journalists will save their best stuff for their blogs and bypass editors. Good point. Most writers are in it as much for mojo than money. Ego disintermediation is a big driver for blogging journalists. The article is written by journalist David Gallagher, who says (on his own blog) that he blogs "because self-publishing is the best thing about the Web." (Via Hylton Jolliffe.)

Reading the same article, Amy Langfield asks: "should journalists blog?" And she answers, "As a former copy editor and desk editor, I want to say Good God, NO! There are some reporters who are really bad. They are lazy, sloppy and sometimes deceptive. There is a reason newspapers and magazines employ copy editors and desk editors..."

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IMterviews

Tony Pierce has mastered IM fiction chatting with people like Lenny Kravitz and Anna Kournikova.

Now, Dawn Olsen perfects the straight IMterview with writer Neal Pollack. He likens bloggers to "a prison full of lunatics shouting to see the warden." He notes later that "you probably have as many loyal readers as the average midlist fiction writer."

E-mail interviews often secrete preachy, overboiled prose; good IMterviews spurt globules of memorable text and, for those who care, record context and spelling.

I'd love to read articles woven from IMterviews. The writer would build her case, but the source documents would be linked for anyone's perusal.

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Blog CV: my life as a blog

Jason Kottke writes: "Anyone who meets me online -- including possible friends, fellow Web design enthusiaists, or potential employers -- has access to 4+ years of my thoughts before they even have to strike up a conversation. That's damn powerful stuff." Yep, so much so that I currently feel it would be tough to hire someone who is not a blogger. It would feel like they were hiding something.

A couple weeks ago, Krzysztof Kowalczyk argued that the best resume is a blog. "My opinion is that it's impossible to tell anything from a typical resume. So a guy says he knows PHP. Does it mean that he's a PHP guru who has written 100k lines of PHP code or that he's just finished 'Learn PHP in 15 minutes'? No way to tell. My idea: blog your resume. In addition to a standard resume keep a log of all the stuff you're learning and doing. E.g. if today you wrote a 5k lines perl script that spiders the web and extracts interesting info, you would to your log a dated entry: Finished 5k line Perl script to spider the web. Used LWP::Simple module... "

Curriculum Vitae means "a summary of one's education, professional history, and job qualifications, as for a prospective employer." CVs inevitably distort and elide. History is written by the victors; likewise CVs are overwritten by our winning ideas. Our missteps, mistakes and stupidities get forgotten.

A blog captures our professional and personal accretions in real-time, records the quality of our interactions and snap-shoots our judgements. Other important factors get recorded: do we play well with the other children in our class? do we share credit? do we collaborate? listen? articulate? admit mistakes? grow?

This transparency may be a crucial selling point for Weblogs4hire. Don't hire a blogger to blog for you. Hire her because you understand her skills and personality. Because you trust her. Because she'll fit better with your team, last longer, and (not least) communicate better.

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Tribune classifieds boom online, slump offline

Tribune Company, owner of the LATimes and the Chicago Tribune, says that online revenues in August grew 29% to $6.4 million, up from $4.9 million in August 2001. The growth is attributed to the company's CareerBuilder web site, says this article.

Meanwhile print classified sales declined 1%, with the biggest decline coming in the "help wanted" category, which was down 17 percent.

Cannibalization? Nawww.

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Eggers self-publishes second novel

Dave Eggers, author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," will issue his second novel himself and "sell it only through the McSweeney's Web site and 100 or so independent bookstores. Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other giant retailers are to be cut out of the action." The WSJournal adds:

"Mr. Eggers seems to have taken as his playbook Jason Epstein's 'Book Business.' Published last year, it ought to be required reading for serious writers everywhere. Mr. Epstein, a former editor at Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, argues that the trend toward centralization in book publishing and retailing is coming to an end. In an environment where competition for bestsellers and name-brand authors has sent advances and marketing budgets soaring, profit margins among the mainstream houses are wafer thin. Chain bookstores, saddled with pricey real estate and high labor costs, must themselves bank on an ever-increasing supply of bestsellers; this reliance on quick turnover marginalizes serious, slower-selling books. But the chains are finding it ever more difficult to compete with the ruthless price slashing of Amazon, which will, at no extra cost, deliver to your doorstep. The whole middle-man apparatus of corporate publishing, argues Mr. Epstein, will totter toward obsolescence as e-book and print-on-demand technologies gain traction, reducing the need for costly warehousing and shipping. Someday, he maintains, writers will contract directly with independent editors and publicists, and the trade will revert to its roots as a cottage industry of like-minded souls banding together in fluid groupings around projects of mutual interest."

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Go buy Blogads from Ken!

Ken Layne writes: "I can't stress enough just how simple it was to set up my adstrip for Weird Files. I've sold two ads this week and am running another two free ads -- for my hosting service and the crazy Fortean Times magazine." Next up, Blogads on KENLAYNE.com and LAEXAMINER.

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Weblog seeding

Internet marketeer Tim Ireland offers a number of services, including "Weblog Seeding." Here's the description: "No doubt you've watched a movie or two where some mad scientist, intent on wiping out every human being on the planet with a killer virus, does so by releasing it in multiple strategic locations. The same approach needs to be taken with online viral agents. Web users are creatures of habit, and rarely venture out of a set group of communities and websites. For this reason, a multiple seeding approach is required to give your virus the best chance of wide exposure and exponential growth. Weblog seeding is by far the most effective technique of getting your viral agent in front of as many eyeballs as possible."

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Double Blogad family

Congratulations to Emmanuelle Richard and Matt Welch, the first double Blogad family. Emmanuelle scores another first: a French blogad. Be sure to click and contribute the cause of blogging a la mode francaise. Finally, I'm excited that Emmanuelle pushes the envelope so nicely with her house ads, especially the one for Dot.con.

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Journalism: craft or commodity?

Ken Layne writes: "The cost-cutting, personality-hating newspaper chains have done everything possible to do away with popular columnists. The most successful tactic has been to let the popular columnists die off and quickly kill all discussion of replacements by issuing the standard 'he/she could never be replaced.'"

To the folks who think great writers won't ever make a living from blogging, I can only say: what are you gonna read if they don't?

Professional journalism is being crushed by lead-coated, 19th-century overheads. Although a few true-believers fight back, each year, another 5% of the newspaper heap gets amalgamated or liquidated. Eighty percent of newspaper revenue funds executive parking garages, ad rep bonuses, printing presses, phone bills, delivery trucks, and 3-martini-lunches.

The fires of competition will boil off these impurities and slag. Wordsmiths and other idea entrepreneurs will thrive; the advertiser will get five times more bang for her buck; readers will get more and better commercial information.

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Slouching towards irrelevance

Reviewing the newest LA Times mediacritique/mediocrity about blogging, Matt Welch and Tony Pierce note that no LA bloggers are quoted, although more than 200 are now listed at LAblogs.

This omission may be because quoting an LA blogger would have meant publicizing the neonetwork of Kaus, Volokh, Johnson, Havrilesky, Roderick, Simberg, Moxie, Pierce, Salisbury, Layne, Welch and the LAEXAMINER -- all of whom comprise a Cabel of LAT Critics.

But I don't think the exclusion of LA Bloggers was (just) cynical self-protection. A more subtle rule also applied. The article only quoted people who write for a newspaper (Safire), teach graduate students (Halavais, Grabowicz, Pryor), publish a book (Weinberger), or attend J-School (Milios).

Here's what the LAT was thinking: "The rest of you aren't worth quoting. You aren't authorities. We can't rely on you because nobody 'official' says you are OK. You haven't been vetted. And if we quoted people who aren't authorities, we'd lose our status as an authority."

Of course, it is self-evident that nobody is better qualified to talk about blogging than members of the LA blogging community. They are authorities by right of their own experience posting millions of words and creating 100s of thousands of links. And they are authorities because they have, by daily inspection and ongoing dialog, vetted each other.

So, by clinging to its outmoded definition of authority, the LATimes abdicates its own claim to authority. The LA Times, like a plastic surgeon with a giant wart on the end of his nose, convinces us, but not in the way intended. The real story: bloggers can create powerful networks of mutually validated authorities, networks that exceed the vision and authority of traditional media.

Blind to its own blindness, the LAT is slouching towards irrelevance. (To paraphrase Tony.)

PS: Don't miss Matt's closing paragraph, which recounts his previous bad experiences as a "subject" of the LAT. And don't miss Tony's point-by-point deconstruction of the article.

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Peak flow: attracting readers by sending them away

Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit did more than 100,000 page views yesterday.

I've spent the last six years selling sites to traditional publishers and have met print publishers with costly sites who (still) don't manage that traffic in a year. Seriously. Bloggers do not realize just how vigorously their part-time efforts thrash the bang-for-buck achieved by most traditional publishers online.

Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe's law, which states that the usefulness of a network equals the square of its user count. Here's the Copeland corollary: site traffic multiplies in proportion to outbound links. (9/14/02 Revised to "site traffic multiplies in proportion to outbound links to other bloggers' posts"... see comments for more ideas.)

Of course quality, focus, information-density and presentation are essential. But all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web.

This law upsets traditional publishers, who are born and bred to grab eyeballs and hold 'em. Glenn made nearly 100 links yesterday -- some narcissistic publishers haven't made that many in five years online.

In pushing readers to visit other sites, Instapundit constructs a new network. Some linked sites link back. Many visitors return to see the freshest postings; some e-mail reax and news. Previously linked bloggers check back to examine their new peers.

Enabling a network, Instapundit's utility far outstrips that of another site that might simply "publish" an unlinked digest of the same information. Instapundit traffic has grown from 500,000 page views in June to 1 million in August. September seems to be on track for 1.2 million plus.

(9/13/02 In a parallel post yesterday, Jeff Jarvis rightly takes issue with Clay Shirky's statement that "most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast". Jarvis says "what has fascinated me about this world of weblogs is that as a group, they are a community. There is, to use the jargon, 'intercast' communications between and among webloggers: I link to and comment on somebody, publicly; they do likewise; others join in; zap: community." 9/16/02 Like Sassafrass in the comments to this post, Doc notes that while he is Instapundit's equal in the myelin ecosystem, he has just 10% of the traffic. All links are not created equal. 9/20/02
Rick Bruner points out that he articulated the linking implications of Metcalfe's law in his 1998 book Net Results. Rick's 1998 formula needs one more variable: links work far better when made to sites/content capable of linking back. That's what turns a jumble of blogs into a network and really makes the traffic dynamo hum.)

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Covers on paid blogging...

Greg Beato writes: "Tools like Bloggingnetwork.com, which makes it easier to support independent content, and blogads.com, which actually gives you something in return for supporting independent content, are a valuable addition to the blogosphere. Will they survive? Who knows? But I think it's great that they're here, and hope to see an increasing number of similar efforts." And Neil Dodds writes: Blogads "represent a form of micro-targeting similar to classified ads in a local newspaper or fan ads in a zine. In many cases, but by no means all, audiences will be smaller than those of big media, but this is offset by the ads' reach and low costs."

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Digging it

I'm fascinated by "thin media" -- news sites staffed by 0.25 to 1.5 writers.

Matt Drudge was the first thin media mogul. He eschewed reporting and sought to distill, popularize, accelerate and aggregate other sites' stories.

Drudge was expected to ride Clinton's coattails into obscurity. Instead, he's stronger than ever and has spawned 100s of other thin media link-peddlers, each finding a progressively tighter niche to itch.

Cougars in South Wales, animal sacrifice rituals, an orange orb, Berkeley weirdos... Weird Files is a fascinating front for Ken Layne's print syndication business. Gizmodo's doing its thing with million-color printers, combadges, camera phones, portable hard drives for photogs and 1cm thick mini-disk players. Romenesko's MediaNews links a FOIA about FOIAs, Bradlee on Neuharth, and Trudeau on Doonesbury. Rough & Tumble links Orange County crime, Davis signs law against burglary tool, and Santa Cruz officials fume over medical pot club bust. And ScienceBlog touts Dust-sized chips, electronic cars, and synthetic diamond film.

Although all are blogs, each eschews personal anecdote, agenda or banter and sticks to the new.

Style books differ. Rough & Tumble knocks out one to four straight sentences. Gizmodo holds the line at two sentences, with an occasional Economistic twist. ScienceBlog and WeirdFiles introduce adjectives and storytelling. MediaNews adds quotations and reax. Meanwhile, Drudge cooks on with his griddle of hot headlines.

Other great examples: Obscure Store, LAExaminer,Arts & Letters Daily...

My favorite style would mix them all depending on post and then occasionally add some well-flagged editorializing. I can't think of anyone publishing in just that style, actually.

Editorializing: Why is it worth writing about thin media at 5.50 AM EST? Because there will be 100s of thousands more of these things in just a couple years. The sooner the model is perfected, the sooner it can MIRV. And (cue commercial) Blogads classifieds will power their cash registers.

(In theory, other layers of thin media should materialize as traditional publishing constructs dematerialize, right? BlogCMS is already well-populated. Sekimori is carving out a design reputation. Nothing Special and Hostmatters have nice hosting practices. Sitemeter and Extreme Tracking keep score. Will ambitious bloggers ever hire elite editors to probe for excellence? Itinerant blog copy editors? What else are we missing?)

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Time lever

Doc Searles writes: "Blogging for me is a way to leverage time in the extreme. For worthwhile-ness per unit of effort (say, per keystroke), blogging kicks ass more than anything else I've ever done." I agree. Blogging is somehow the virtuous twin of spam -- cheap, text, mass communication that is (nonetheless) non-obtrusive, personalized, contextualized and pursuasive.

[7] comments (3383 views)  |  link

Two's company, 250 is a...

Ray Ozzie looks at the way his Groove groupware is being used. "Approximately 35% of shared spaces are between a single pair of individuals, 60% of shared spaces are between 3 and 25 individuals, and 5% of shared spaces have more than 25 individuals. Amazingly to me - given the design center of the UI - I found that within this 5% there are actually hundreds of spaces with 100-250 members each; I'd surely never have expected this. One other incredibly fascinating tidbit: 25% apparently use shared spaces with only themselves as a member, using Groove as a 'briefcase' to transparently and securely synchronize files across multiple computers that they own - e.g. Office documents being synchronized between home and office PCs." (Fun stuff, but shouldn't these percentages = 100?)

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The blog as a social tool

A BT-funded study of mobile telephone use says that "gossip" accounts for 2/3 of human conversation, and then looks at the mobile phone as a gossip tool. Plenty of observations can be ported to blogs. I'll quote just a couple here:

Texting [SMS] is particularly important in maintaining contact with a wide social network - allows us to maintain social bonds even when we do not have the time, energy, inclination or budget for calls or visits. Texting re-creates the brief, frequent, spontaneous 'connections' with members of our social network that characterised the small communities of pre-industrial times.
...

In the fast-paced and fragmented modern world, social bonding through gossip becomes even more important - but also more difficult. We no longer live in the kind of small, close-knit tribes or communities for which we are 'designed' by our evolutionary heritage, where we would naturally be in daily contact with the members of our social network. Our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer brains, hard-wired for constant grooming-talk with a tightly integrated kinship and friendship network, are struggling to cope with the social isolation of modern urban life. Most of us no longer enjoy the cosiness of a gossip over the garden fence. We may not even know our neighbours' names, and communication is often limited to a brief, slightly embarrassed nod, if that.

Telephones have helped to alleviate some of the stresses caused by fragmented modern lifestyles, but before the advent of mobiles most of us were severely restricted in both the quantity and quality of communication with our social network.

Just as a cellular phone is portable in space, a blog is portable in time -- it waits patiently for new users to come along and then imparts our message. (Found in the October issue of The Atlantic.)

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Blogs selling: vinyl, columns and guaranteed classifieds

Jay Niemann writes: "This Weblog is an experiment in grassroots entrepreneurship. Specifically, it concerns the sale of unusual vinyl records."

Meanwhile, Ken Layne launches a blog called Weird Files to promote print syndication of his columns about weirdness, specifically UFOs, crop circles and Black Helicopters.

And Ben Sullivan is promoting his Blogads by advising buyers, "If you're selling something, I'll keep your ad up until it gets sold, or you tire of all the responses you receive. Something I called Guaranteed Classifieds."

[8] comments (4354 views)  |  link

Blogads: advertising hand-delivered at light-speed

Congratulations to Bill Quick for selling the first Blogad for $32.

Some folk object to advertising in blogs for ideological reasons, arguing that blogs are meant for a higher, purer calling. Others say bloggers don't have the requisite audience or commercial acumen.

Phooey.

First, society needs professional blogs. Journalism as we love it is being crushed by the vice grip of price/earnings. Journalism survives under a few old-school publishers, but everywhere else swarms of mediocre local monopolists, bleed-to-lead TV stations and Murdoch duopolies are killing the honorable fourth estate. Autonomous, dedicated, low-overhead bloggers can save
journalism.

Second, logic demands professional blogs. Many print publications -- with smaller and less influential readerships than a good blog's -- sell enough advertising to pay 20-person staffs. And every surface from newspapers to matchbooks to taxi doors to movie screens to telephone books to cellphone screens to stadiums has eventually found advertising underwriters. Why not blogs too?

Blogs offer advertisers and sponsors intimate contact with influential, passionate audiences. Blogs disintermediate gutless traditional media and offer greater value for money. Blogs articulate new demographics and new market metrics. (For more context, see my early Blogonomics post.)

The old media economics – he who controls distribution wins the most eyeballs and serves advertisers best – will soon be plowed under by a new economics – she who relates best attracts the most valuable audience.

We hope to help make it happen. Blogads brings to advertising the simplicity, low-cost, power and atomic-level automony that tools like Antville, Blogger, Greymatter, MT, pMachine, and Userland deliver to editorial content.

Blogads work seamlessly in all blogforms. Each blogger can sell ads on her own site, setting her own prices, rhetoric and standards, approving or rejecting submissions. Advertisers can upload images, create mini-sites, invite comments and classify their ads. For readers, Blogads classify ads by affinity and commercial category, reducing search costs and boosting serendipitous contacts.

For buyer, seller and reader, Blogads deliver a new commercial kick in a few clicks.

So bloggers will get rich quick, right? No. Not any time soon. Bill's sale notwithstanding, the money won't gush tomorrow or next month or even this year.

It took nearly 200 years to advance from the invention of the movable type printing press to the publication of the first newspaper. Nearly a decade passed after the web was spun before the blogging culture bloomed. And the dream of harnessing advertising to personal publishing has been pursued for many months by people like Matt Haughey, Rusty Foster, Dan Chan, Arnab Nandi, Evan Williams, and Pud.

Technology isn't the challenge. The tools exist. What does not exist yet is the right words and ideas.

We need to invent a new mentality, carve a new space in the crowded minds of advertisers and consumers, articulate new values.

As with previous new medias, Blogads need new metrics, benchmarks, rhetoric and business logic.

Blogads need people experimenting with advertising content and forms, seducing advertisers, thinking in new directions, discovering weird new businesses that will benefit from the Blogad's unique simplicity and audience grip.

Blog readers need to see the blog-advertiser not as another PR-geyser, but as an ally, a comrade, somebody who has invested in a mind-set they care about.

I'm not worried. It will happen. Bloggers are the ultimate intellectual entrepreneurs, history's largest and most powerful class of autonomous scribes. Blog passion, inventiveness and audience-grip guarantee that this medium will detonate a new commercial universe.

Sign on to sell your own Blogads if you have patience. Sign on if you are willing to wait months for paying advertisers and, in the meantime, prime your adstrip with interesting, humorous commerical content -- your friend's gig, your aunt's e-Bay auction, your son's scout troop's spaghetti supper. Put up affiliate links to books you love. Put up free links to charities. Link to great businesses whose ideas you want to boost. Experiment, see what works. Woo advertisers with brilliant tales.

And if you aren't ready to invent Blogads and prefer to watch, please do click a Blogad and remember that the advertiser supports something you value.

(9/04/02 Matt Welch sold a Blogad on his site before his adstrip was even live. The ad promotes an e-book that costs $3.95 -- a great product/price point for Blogads. The advertiser must be a regular reader of Matt's blog, because he punches reader hot buttons like he's Casius Clay. Elsewhere, Heath Row notes that since he's got a fulltime job, his blog will remain a Blogadless labor of love. Still, "Blogads could very well become the tail that wags the blog dog, just like with most media," he writes.) Rick Bruner thinks hard, declares "By jove, I think it just might work!" and buys an ad. (Look left.) Smart, personality-based marketing for the blogosphere. Thank you Rick!)

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Friendly news

The NYTimes profiles Dean Singleton, who runs the "fastest-growing newspaper company of the last two decades," MediaNews Group. To fund growth, Singleton slashes staffs and once "upheld the firing of a reporter who had failed to file a news story consisting of an advertiser's news release verbatim, and instead added accurate details that wound up making the advertiser look bad." Singleton oversees 46 daily newspapers and 81 nondaily newspapers.

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