Two journalists have asked me several questions in common in recent days “aren’t blogs just niche publications that will never get big?” and “what happens to blog advertising after the election is over?”

Since these seem to be in the water, here are my thoughts:

There are 300 million Americans. Consider what Reed’s law means when you apply it to 300 million people. Basically, there are trillions of trillions of combinations of people (aka unserved niches) within that 300 million people.

Those niches are unserved (vis information and intra-niche communications) because traditional media economics — the cost of building a printing press, hiring trucks, chopping down trees, paying for the CEO and her secretary and her nephew in ad sales, paying the shareholders — made it economically impossible.

But now blogging and it’s appendages have lowered the bar radically for creating and serving info markets.

What’s next for blogads? Although some cool advertisers — more than ever in fact — are in the pipeline (like today’s Bill Murray ad!), after the election we’ll undoubtedly see a big drop in political advertising as candidates disappear and political causes catch a breather and regroup. And for a time, other advertisers may focus less on blogs, at least until the next unprecedented event pushes blogs back into the spot-light as THE revolutionary media of the 21st century.

In any case, relative to today’s fortissimo, political ad volume in coming days weeks may seem pianissimo. Don’t freak. Averaging out the daily shouts and whispers, the long-term trend for blog advertising is still in a sharp crescendo.

www.electoral-vote.com reveals himself as Andrew Tanenbaum, an American comp-sci professor in Amsterdam. With some outrageous ideas and programming and blogads on 90 blogs and some college newspapers, his traffic has grown to 700,000 page impressions a day in roughly 2 months. I’ve corresponded with Prof. Tanenbaum, but until today didn’t know who he was. Isn’t the Internet wonderful… one brilliant citizen can build an astonishing service and, by tapping into nature’s second-best network after the brain, reach millions of people in a matter of weeks?

CNET does a wrap of blogs’ political influence. “It is on the quick-shifting pages of the political blogs that the real pulse of the campaign can be felt,” write John Borland. The past year’s growth of political blogs is a template for lots of other niches, folks.

My favorite actor, Bill Murray, is appearing in blogads promoting the new trailer for his Jacques Cousteau movie Team Zissou. I’m there.

Dan Gillmor posts a hack’s e-mail promoting a company’s service to “manage bloggers,” which Dan’ readers vitriolically deconstruct.

Emmanuelle’s new LA wheelz.

Beth Kirsch, who the big blogads order from Audible.com, blogs about what blogs mean for her company. She concludes: “the combination of niche and buzz marketing supported by blog ads is powerful.” Beth pulled together Audible colleagues and developped a truly snarky set of ads. As the husband of a new iPod owner — ask me how to derail your wife’s iPod to Korean! — I’ve just signed up for Audible.com.

Marketing guru BL Ochman, sums up sums up blog advertising at MarketingProfs.com, as “a good (if scary) buy for advertisers.”

We added six new servers last week getting ready for next week’s traffic, which I assume will at least double anything we’ve seen previously. Unfortunately, our mechanism for refreshing ads on these various servers did not scale up. Until we can rejig the ad propagation routine, ad updating may be delayed by minutes or hours. I apologize for the shortfall. Feel free to give advice or complain in comments below, or e-mail info@ with questions.

My buddy Jeff Jarvis highlights an underlying theme between two articles in yesterday’s NYT.

The first examined the rising tide of blogging about your cat on a Friday, practiced by everyone from Instapundit to Atrios. As Jeff puts it, “makes us look like a bunch of frothing nutjobs. It is essentially condescending and insulting.”

Then Jeff digs into a second “news article” that chronicles and bemoans recent blogger vitriole towards journalists.

The article highlights crude insults bloggers and their readers have tossed at journalists. As Jeff puts it, the article “paints us as more of an angry mob than a sensible bunch of people who happen to be citizens and voters and newspaper readers. By making us look so angry, it marginalizes us as cultish.”

Sure there are nutty bloggers and blog readers, and it is worth examining their excesses. But where’s that wonderful journalistic impulse towards balance? What about the good things bloggers do? Nahhh. The essential irony is that an article aimed at proving that bloggers wrongly (and inhumanely) accuse the press as being biased against the left or the right proves itself to be nakedly partisan against bloggers. It repeatedly quotes the worst excesses of the blogosphere, without examining the amazing contributions bloggers are making to the public discourse. Consider the idiocies nailed by the blogosphere in the last two years: Trent Lott (a closet racist), Howell Raines (an arrogant twit), CBS (quick to write, slow to right)… the list grows monthly.

What is the other side? As Jeff puts it, “Perhaps it’s that big media is messing up and has had no check for too long. Perhaps it’s that once-passive readers now have their own press and have something to say and it’s time for you to listen. Perhaps if you try hard to open your eyes and read your own story again, you might smell a bias here — against the public you supposedly serve.”

Jeff, it is not just that “big media is messing up.” It is that top-down command structures are inherently fragile and weak when compared with networked swarms. Put another way, 100,000 minds networked in real time and positioned across America’s geographic and psychic landscape see and understand lots of things that the ten editors sitting atop rigid periodical news machines in NY and DC do not and can not.

The game has changed. I’ve been a journalist. Some of my best friends are journalists. Some of the smartest, most humane people I know are journalists. But I also know that monopolies corrupt and that enough journalists have been corrupted by complacency to turn into pompous, entitled hacks. If the hacks want war, war it shall be.

The bottom line — if we are moving from the past year’s “Look! Non-journalists with websites! Aren’t they CUTE!” attitude to a new story line of “bloggers call us names and don’t play fair,” the revolution is nearly over. The royalty in the castle’s highest tower can smell the smoke.

My bet is that we’ll see bloggers on the left and right unite around some issue in the next six months, and the unity will be provoked by some attack on a blogger’s rights.

Mary Meeker, the Marie Antoinette of the pre-2001 Ancien Regime, lauds blogs: “if there are hundreds or thousands of thought leaders and motivated, interested parties on the Internet with the ability to publish news or insights into any number of local or global issues, then it is safe to say that these blogs often become both the first source of news, a vital proving ground for authors and a source of potential community for other interested parties. For example, you’re probably going to get far more Boston Red Sox specific-content from a blog about the Red Sox made by a die-hard fan than you will from a random sports page, especially if you’re after opinions and community.”

Blogads aficionados (yes, you Mom) may have noticed this eye-zapping image put out on blogs tonight promoting Eminem’s Mosh.

Here’s Ken Layne’s take.

WPost names “Politics & Elections Readers’ Choice Awards,” 3/4 of whom sell blogads, here. Congratulations to JesusGeneral, Atrios, Instapundit, Talkingpointsmemo, LGF, DailyKos, AndrewSullivan, InDCjournal and Wonkette.

“In terms of formal education, many bloggers surpass journalists.” Look at this page: Markos Moulitsas is a lawyer/activist, Glenn Reynolds is a law professor, Duncan Black is an economics Phd, Josh Marshall has a Phd in American history, Andrew Sullivan has a Phd in political science, the RealClearPolitics guys are former commodity traders, Charles Johnson is an entrepreneur… basically everyone on the list has a field of expertise BEYOND their blogging passion.

Funnily enough, most articles about the blogging revolution fail to mention this fact.

Roundup of blog reviews of .

Excellent blog journalism moves elections in… [url=http://www.pestiside.hu/archives/pestiside_1_soros_0_in_online_electionthrowing_contest000182.php]Budapest.

We went to the state fair yesterday, losing at the ball toss, winning with squirt guns. Lots of pellet shooting at the free stand run by the state wildlife agency. I was surprised to see that Kerry stickers outnumbered Bush stickers 3 to 1.

Ken Layne pulls together lots of ugly peak oil data. Travel like this will one day seem as remote as the days when millions of buffalo roamed the American west.

How can Business Week feature Matt Haughey’s throughout this article but mispell his name?

CBSMarketwatch’s Frank Barnako declares that “almost noone reads” political blogs. Scott Allen points out that Daily Kos, doing nothing but Democratic politics, is within traffic spitting distance of the WashingtonPost, which covers dozens of topics.

Frank, who has an undeclared blog fetish, back-tacks with the thought that the blog audiences must be high quality and ecstatically niche. (Thank you Olivier.) www.jeffjarvis.com notes Barnako misses the “influencers” angle.

Yes to niche and influencers, but if I were an editor looking for the cutting edge (or to revisit a theme declared dead in 2001), I’d sick a reporter on this idea — how can a couple of dozen bloggers reach the same traffic scale, roughly, as the New York Times, which has 1100 editorial employees? What does THAT mean for the future of publishing?