The dotcom bubble burst in 2000, but the revolution is only just beginning. Witness the impact of Craigslist.com on San Francisco’s rental market. SFGate reports:

Homefinders, a family-owned firm that billed itself as “the East Bay’s oldest and largest service for rentals since 1970,” closed its Shattuck Square office this week and pulled the plug on its Web site, leaving scores of customers in the lurch and a handful of employees without jobs.

“This type of business just isn’t viable anymore,” said Dana Goodell, 42, who bought Homefinders five years ago from the founders, her father and uncle. “In the boom days, there were thousands of people coming here from all over the country. After the dot-com collapse, there was a surplus of apartments.”

Listing services, which typically charge tenants a set fee, also have succumbed to the great equalizer known as Craigslist.com. The familiar online clearinghouse lets visitors advertise apartments, used furniture, concert tickets or themselves for free. Only employers posting jobs pay fees.

A boon to consumers, Craigslist has proven a thorny problem for those who try to make money by publishing ads for workaday necessities.

“You can’t compete with free,” Goodell said. “Our market niche is over.”

Goodell, who said the firm’s payroll swelled to more than 30 around 2000, released the remaining three employees last week and plans to file for bankruptcy.

RentTech, which bought Berkeley’s Rental Solutions about five years ago, closed earlier this fall. Two other rental services — San Jose’s Home Renters Guide and Berkeley Connection — were purchased and folded into San Francisco’s MetroRent in 1999 and 2000.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, is ambivalent about his site’s influence, widely cited for the apartment listing industry’s consolidation. “I’m personally bothered by the loss of jobs,” Newmark said. “But a lot more people benefit” when the Web replaces information middlemen, he said.

I talked with Craig last week in Boston. He’s got 70 servers and does an estimated 1.4 billion page impressions a month. “It is hard to know exactly, because we’re very cache friendly,” he said. Roughly 1/3 of his impressions are in SF. (To put his traffic in perspective, NYTimes.com does roughly 450 million impressions a month.)

The American Marketing Association has now offered a complimentary pass for its upcoming blogs-and-marketing day to TDavid, the blogger who ruthlessly critiqued next week’s event.

But a friend of mine thinks this is overkill. He writes: “Who is [TDavid], anyway? Anyone know him?… Is he really anyone who’s opinion we even need to worry about?”

Here’s my answer.

TDavid is a blogger. He’s an opinionated, obsessive, savvy geek with a megaphone who can, with a few perceptive comments and just one or two readers who also blog, ruin your reputation in 15 minutes.

While TDavid may not know anyone in New York or Chicago marketing circles, he’s woven into the fabric of the locale, Seattle, the AMA is trying to sell to. He’s got local readers and friends. And TDavid goes to blogger Meetups in Seattle. Let’s assume he said something about the AMA event if he chatted with the Seattle Times journalist or any of the 30-40 bloggers who attended last night’s Seattle blog Meetup.

There’s risk but also reward in doing business in a blogged economy. Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post yesterday about how a Microsoft team is using blogger feedback to shape product development: “How did they decide what to fix? They did a scan of all the blog comments and picked the most important things that the bloggers asked for (that could be done quickly).” Product development has never been so easy.

Back to TDavid, who has also reviewed Tablet PCs, AskJeeves, MSNToolbar, Onstar, Saturn Relay in the last week. He’s gone out of his way to provide feedback on the AMA’s offer. Until the AMA is swamped with other feedback on the upcoming event, TDavid is worth his weight in gold.

The future of marketing is engaging rather than ignoring bloggers like TDavid. For the AMA’s Seattle blog-day, TDavid would be a perfect guest star.

For some background, here’s my post yesterday. (I’ve got a personal interest because I’m participating in the Chicago day.) BTW, I’m loving this chance to re-grok Cluetrain.

One of the key books shaping my understanding of how networked blogs (aka the blogosphere) transcend traditional journalism is Steven Berlin Johnson’s Emergence: Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.” Johnson details how scores of unrelated players can collaborate and effect higher order behavior that mystifies observers who understand only top-down organizations.

So I was honored to be interviewed by Johnson for his latest article in Discover magazine. His overview: This is not a dream: You can make a chunk of change by writing a Web log.

Bit by bit over the past 10 years, the Web has erected a global platform for personal wisdom. Services like AdSense’along with other advertising outfits, including one called Blogads, which focuses exclusively on blogs’are simply the final plank. You can now compose, design, publish, promote, and make money from your writing without ever leaving your desk. Some high-profile bloggers’particularly in the world of political commentary’have attracted hundreds of thousands of people to their personal sites, making enough money from AdSense or Blogads to quit their day jobs. The liberal commentary site Daily Kos has a monthly audience that exceeds that of venerable magazines like The New Republic and The Nation.

I was a little surprised Johnson didn’t get into the blogosphere’s emergent behavior, but perhaps he’s saving that for Emergence II.

The American Marketing Association is doing a series of one day events about blogging. Putting together a blogging event in this fast and fierce environment is tough, and I have great admiration for organizer Toby Bloomberg’s enthusiasm and determination. AMA will be doing events in Seattle, New York and Chicago, and I’m excited to participate in the Chicago event.

In dealing with various ad agencies, I constantly butt heads with the differences between traditional marketing Weltanschauung and blog marketing. (Interesting to note that the advertisers themselves are often less conservative.)

Now there’s a classic “blogs and marketing” case study brewing around next week’s AMA “intro to blogs” event in Seattle.

First, read the event’s agenda. The goal is to answer the question: “are blogs a credible marketing strategy for your brand or company?”

Then read here what a blogger, TDavid, wrote about the event on his blog. In short: “The overview doesn’t seem to know/hold the answer… And who do they have that’s speaking to answer this question?” He offers a speaker by speaker (and blog by blog) deconstruction of the event.

What’s my humble blog marketing advice for AMA blog event? While it is probably too late to do more than change the wording of the Seattle agenda, there’s still time to make substantive changes to the New York and Chicago agendas. Here’s a game plan:

a) Chant some Cluetrain: markets are conversations… and what you hear ain’t always pretty. Better to learn from criticism than ignore it or dismiss it. Greatness isn’t conceived, it’s iterated.

b) TDavid seems to be chiefly concerned by lack of substance. Are there any real-life case studies panelists are bringing along that can be listed? If participants don’t have first-hand experience, then they could make some calls and bring along some second-hand information. A great writing rule applies: “show, don’t tell.”

c) Respond in the comments section of TDavid’s blog. He’s done a very honest critique and is begging: “Please anybody who can counterpoint me on this, use the comments section and do so.” Commit to improving, welcome your further constructive AND concrete suggestions about ways to improve event. Who would HE like to hear speak?

d) Pack more information into the event: many blog events these days have LOTS of people on stage and ruthless moderation. Add more speakers. Get a debate going among panelists.

e) Commit to using the audience as a resource. Dave Winer has done a great job of turning www.BloggerCon.com into a blogospher-like roundtable rather than a one-to-many broadcast.

f) After tweaking upcoming events, respond again to TDavid’s post again in his comments section. Let other bloggers know about his critique and AMA’s responsiveness. My bet is plenty of bloggers would be interested and the press might pick up the event. Picture your desired headline outcome: “AMA takes own blog medicine, thrills participants.”

g) Comp TDavid a ticket to the event — he’s given a lot of great free advice and would make a great participant.

Damn, I just reread the Cluetrain 95 theses. It’s all in there. And still today, only a few advertisers have any sense the world is changing.

Factoid 1 of the day, from Buzzmachine: “Mohammed said the President understood what blogs are and their importance and they found the staff in the White House views reading blogs as part of their jobs now. The brothers said they were in the White House not just as Iraqi citizens but as representatives of the blogosphere.”

Factoid 2: Craig Newmark says Craigslist, with 70 machines, is doing roughly 1.4 billion impressions a month, roughly 1/3 of that in SF. 1.4 billion is rougly twice as many impressions as the NYT.com and WP.com added together.

CBS, the operation that brought you the forged George Bush documents and was brought to justice by bloggers, is busy backtracking — but not apologizing for or formally “correcting” — on a story that slammed a major blogger for ethical lapses. The story has now been revised twice.

Latest iteration:

The affiliations and identities of bloggers are not always apparent. Take writer Duncan Black, who blogged under the name Atrios. His was a popular liberal blog. During part of the period he was blogging, Black was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. Critics in the blogosphere said this fact wasn’t fairly disclosed.

‘People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,’ Jamieson said. ‘The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.’

That is not a legal problem, however, but one of ethics. Black eventually claimed credit for his blog and his affiliation with Media Matters. Fellow bloggers heavily publicized his political connections. And Black continued blogging.

Defenders of Black point out that unlike the South Dakota blogs, he was not working on behalf of a campaign. And clearly, absent blog ethical guidelines, what Black did was not that different than many others.

The middle iteration:

This is what happened in the case of Duncan Black. The author of the popular liberal blog Atrios, Black wrote under a pseudonym. During part of this period, Black was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America.

‘People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,’ Jamieson said. ‘The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.’

That is not a legal problem, however, but one of ethics. Black eventually claimed credit for his blog. Fellow bloggers heavily publicized his political connections. And Black continued blogging.

Defenders of Black point out that unlike the South Dakota blogs, he was not working on behalf of a campaign. And clearly, absent blog ethical guidelines, what Black did was not that different than many others.

The original iteration:

In the case of Duncan Black, this is what happened. The author of the popular liberal blog Atrios, Black wrote under a pseudonym. All the while, he was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America.

‘People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,’ Jamieson said. ‘The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.’

That is not a legal problem, however, but an ethical one. Black eventually claimed credit for his blog and fellow bloggers heavily publicized his political connections. But he is still blogging.

And here are the facts:

First, the title of this blog is “Eschaton” and not “Atrios.” This is apparent from the big black letters at the top of the page.

Second, you state that I had been working with Media Matters for America “all along” while I was doing this weblog. I began writing this weblog in April, 2002. MMFA only came into existence in May, 2004. I began working with them in June, 2004.

Third, you suggest I had an “ethical” problem. Could you be more specific about what that was? Having one’s character impugned by a major media outlet is a serious matter.

Finally, a quote is positioned in your article such that it suggests my assocation with Media Matters for America makes me somehow “partisan” and that beforehand I therefore was perceived as non-partisan. I have never worked for a candidate or campaign, though I have never made my political views secret, any more than has the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. This blog is produced entirely using my own time and resources, and Media Matters for America is a non-partisan “501(c)(3) not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”

Aren’t there standards at CBS? Have they yet interviewed Atrios in making these revisions? Is the policy still, as with Dan Rather’s emotional commitment to the Bush forgeries, to make a mistake and then try to glide away without confessing the error?

Damn, doesn’t this observation in the CBS article seem ironic: “But where journalists’ careers may be broken on ethics violations, bloggers are writing in the Wild West of cyberspace. There remains no code of ethics, or even an employer, to enforce any standard.”

Unfortunately, the worst part of the article is right up front in the lede: “Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks. With the same First Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are increasingly gaining influence.” Wait, don’t people have First Amendment protections? Then there’s this, which I’ll quote at length before it gets wiped:

Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks. With the same First Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are increasingly gaining influence.

While many are must-reads for political junkies, are some Internet blogs also being used as proxies for campaigns? In the nation’s hottest Senate race, this past year, the answer was yes.

Little over a month ago, the first Senate party leader in 52 years was ousted when South Dakota Republican John Thune defeated top Senate Democrat Tom Daschle. While more than $40 million was spent in the race, saturating the airwaves with advertising, a potentially more intriguing front was also opened.

The two leading South Dakota blogs ‘ websites full of informal analysis, opinions and links ‘ were authored by paid advisers to Thune’s campaign.

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader and the National Journal first cited Federal Election Commission documents showing that Jon Lauck, of Daschle v Thune, and Jason Van Beek, of South Dakota Politics, were advisers to the Thune campaign.

The documents, also obtained by CBS News, show that in June and October the Thune campaign paid Lauck $27,000 and Van Beek $8,000. Lauck had also worked on Thune’s 2002 congressional race.

Both blogs favored Thune, but neither gave any disclaimer during the election that the authors were on the payroll of the Republican candidate.

No laws have apparently been broken. Case precedent on political speech as it pertains to blogs does not exist. But where journalists’ careers may be broken on ethics violations, bloggers are writing in the Wild West of cyberspace. There remains no code of ethics, or even an employer, to enforce any standard.

At minimum, the role of blogs in the Daschle-Thune race is a telling harbinger for 2006 and 2008. Some blogs could become new vehicles for the old political dirty tricks.

Like all media, blogs hold the potential for abuse. Experts point out that blogs’ unregulated status makes them particularly attractive outlets for political attack.

‘The question is: What are the appropriate regulations on the Internet?” asked Kathleen Jamieson, an expert on political communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communications. ‘It’s evolved into an area that we need to do more thinking about it.

‘If you put out flyers, you have to disclaim it, you have to represent who you are,’ Jamieson said. ‘If you put out an ad you have to put a disclaimer on it. But we don’t have those sorts of regulations for political content, that is campaign-financed on the Internet.’

First Amendment attorney Kevin Goldberg called blogs ‘definitely new territory.’

‘[The question is] whether blogs are analogous to a sole person campaigning or whether they are very much a media publication, which is essentially akin to an online newspaper,’ said Goldberg, who is the legal counsel to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

‘Ultimately, I think, the decision will have to come down to whether the public will be allowed to decide whether bloggers are credible or whether some regulation needs to occur.’

Generally, the Supreme Court has ruled that restrictions on political advocacy by corporations and unions does not apply to media or individuals. The reasoning has been that media competition insures legitimacy. This has historically been the argument against monopolies in media ownership.

Hypothetically, if The Washington Post discovered that The New York Times had a reporter being paid by the Bush campaign it would report it. If proven, the suspect reporter would be fired and likely never work in mainstream journalism again. Hence, the courts have been satisfied with the industry’s ability to regulate itself.

The affiliations and identities of bloggers are not always apparent. Take writer Duncan Black, who blogged under the name Atrios. His was a popular liberal blog. During part of the period he was blogging, Black was a senior fellow at a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America. Critics in the blogosphere said this fact wasn’t fairly disclosed.

‘People are pretty smart in assuming that if a blog is making a case on one side that it’s partisan,’ Jamieson said. ‘The problem is when a blog pretends to hold neutrality but is actually partisan.’

That is not a legal problem, however, but one of ethics. Black eventually claimed credit for his blog and his affiliation with Media Matters. Fellow bloggers heavily publicized his political connections. And Black continued blogging.

Defenders of Black point out that unlike the South Dakota blogs, he was not working on behalf of a campaign. And clearly, absent blog ethical guidelines, what Black did was not that different than many others.

‘He is perfectly free to write the blog. You can criticize him for it but he had a perfect Constitutional right to do what he did,’ said Eugene Volokh, who teaches free speech law at UCLA Law School and authors his own blog, the Volokh Conspiracy.

‘People are free to say whatever they want to say and not reveal any financial inducements and not reveal in whose pay they are,’ Volokh added. ‘Now there is an exception for speech that urges the election or defeat of a particular candidate.’ But where this exception relates to Internet blogs is unclear.

Beginning next year, the F.E.C. will institute new rules on the restricted uses of the Internet as it relates to political speech.

‘I think those questions are going to have to be asked and answered,’ said Lillian BeVier, a First Amendment expert at the University of Virginia. ‘It’s going to be an issue and it should be an issue.’

A month or so ago I predicted we’d start to see some backlash from resentful journalists annoyed by upstart bloggers.

It was OK to topple Trent Lott (aiding and abetting an aged racist) and Howell Raines (an autocratic, egocentric editor) but becoming a media bigshot yourself and going after CBS News’s anchor Dan Rather… well, that’s not done.

So today, we’ve got one of Rather’s colleagues, the “chief political writer” for CBSNews.com, cobbling together a story that, within the narrative of criticizing blogger bias, misportrays key facts about blogger Duncan Black and impugns him for unethical behavior… without ever having checked the facts with Black, or for that matter, the other bloggers mentioned in the story.

Plenty of other people get quoted, but not the people impugned. Hmm, can you smell a grudge? Sloppy, stupid and probably actionable. See Black’s response.

Speaking of grudges, read the CBS article again: are you surprised to hear a lawyer working for the newspaper industry muse: “Ultimately, I think, the decision will have to come down to whether the public will be allowed to decide whether bloggers are credible or whether some regulation needs to occur.’

The argument is then made (or tortured) that because newspapers “compete” they are less biased, and therefore not subject to curtailment of their first amendment rights. Ahh, yes, corporations have first amendment rights, but individual Americans may not. WHAT?

Here’s a dissection of last month’s blogs-are-bad article.

A well done overview by Lauren Gard. Headline: the Business of Blogging, subhead: Explosive growth means Web logs are suddenly in Madison Avenue’s sights.

Just a year ago, blogs were viewed as a collection of off-the-cuff ramblings in cyberspace read mainly by online devotees. Then, as the election season heated up, bloggers gained new prominence, writing up-to-the-minute news and politics nuggets that the mainstream media struggled to match. Suddenly, millions of Americans were turning to political blogs such as instapundit.com and journalist Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. And blogs about everything from art-world gossip to macroeconomics are drawing audiences, too. A new medium, though still a work in progress, is coming into being.

Writing as a frustrated journalist, Mark Glaser outlines “The Media Company I Want to Work For– Not Someday, But Now.”

I don’t get it. Why the urge to “work for” “a media company?”

[I woke up at 3AM thinking about this and other fun stuff, so have updated this with some fresh thoughts.]

Sure, I love newspapers and magazines. I spent a decade working for them and read ’em every night before bed. They are filled with wonderful, brilliant people. They do amazing things.

But corporate publishers are born and bred to do certain things, most of all make money for their shareholders.

Unlike people, who can pursue lots of ends at once entertain conflicting impulses, publicly traded businesses (and those that aspire to be) are simple machines, are wired to one dimension of stimuli — profit and loss. Over the last four-hundred years corporations evolved a range of mechanisms and strategies for doing this. Chains of management, lines of reporting, memos, meetings, conference calls, quarterly reviews: these are the sinew and nerve cells of all corporations.

And the multi-billion dollar pension funds and mutual funds who determine share prices of corporate publishers care about Pulitzer prizes only insofar as a Pulitzer prize or three increases the value of their shares. Afterall, the investor’s first responsibility to their own investors is to make money. A pension fund manager can’t say to 76 year old Uncle, who has entrusted his life savings with the manager, “sorry, you won’t be able to afford to fly to to pay the heating bill this January because we invested in the wrong publisher. But cheer up! The good news is one of the publisher’s newspapers won a Pulitzer prize!”

So it is wrong-headed to ask corporate publishers, as Mark does:

I am tired of waiting for media companies to change and figure out the way that the business is shifting right beneath their short-sighted eyes. When are they going to understand that their readers are more important than their stockholders? When are they going to understand their readers at all? When are they going to “get” the Internet, true interactivity, citizen journalism, blogging and the communities of thought that are rising up?

Corporate publishers can’t think or act outside the box, BECAUSE THEY ARE THE BOX.

But don’t despair. This is a good thing. Who needs overhead and overhang and overlords? Isn’t disaggregation — not just of content but of bodies — the trend?

The many to many blogosphere is far more powerful than any one-to-many top-down distribution mechanisms schemed up by corporate media. Blog swarms are smarter than any editorial board. Blogging tools are cheaper than a six-pack of beer. Bandwidth is sold at pennies per supertanker. And advertisers are waking up to the fact that it’s more fun to pay writers directly rather than shareholders & publishers & flunkies & flunkies of flunkies, aka writers.

Isn’t the playing field leveling now… or even tilting toward the individual?

Ben Hammersley makes an excellent point — thanks to the Internet, the shifting plate tectonics of currencies, normally invisible at ground level, are becoming blatantly evident. He notes that the US version of Typepad’s hosted blogging service “comes in at $4.95 a month. Fair enough: it’s a very nice system. But Typepad.fr .de .es and .nl all cost ‘4.95 a month for the same thing. That’s $6.57 at today’s exchange rate.”

Europe’s prices have always been higher than in the US (20-30% for electronics) and with VAT (25% for most items) the bite has been even worse.

No doubt agile US entrepreneurs will realize that price points in Europe are nearly double for some items and start to focus on electronic exports.