blogads for the opinion makers

The new ad for Camille Paglia’s book about poetry is one of the best blogads yet.

Great image. Fun text. Best of all, links into the blogosphere… real people who give a darn about the book and its author. Blogad author: Farah Miller at Pantheon. Here’s the image, but don’t miss the text, which is where the real fun is.

There’s some post-modern intertextual polymorphic joy (not forgetting that Paglia hates post-modernism) in the fact that Paglia’s publisher bought an ad on Anne Althouse’s blog quoting an Althouse post that quoted Paglia saying: “Once you’re ’swept up in the blogosphere,’ you become self-referential.”

Hey, you can have fun with advertising! Let’s get out of the stiff and starched print-it-once-a-month-and-pray-that-someone-reads-it mentality. This Paglia ad is a wonderful respite from book blogads with blurry images sporting mumbling unreadable text, the bain of my existence.

After driving past a church sign proclaiming “If evolution is true, Jesus is a liar,” we found nearly 100 fossil shark teeth Saturday in Aurora. We found one like this Great White that was probably 4 centimeters tall… not one of the 20 centimeter giants, but our best find yet.

Then to Topsail beach, where we built sand castles, tossed wet tennis balls, flash-light stalked sprinting crabs, found 100s of tiny pink, purple and yellow clams (?).

Heading to the beach for the long weekend. With luck, we’ll stop here tomorrow to claw out a few shark’s teeth.

Nice coverage of blogad mininetworks by Juan Cole in CNET. (One correction to note: the liberal network is doing a million impressions a day.) Will advertising ruin blogs?

But because with blogging the price of entry is so low, you can never have ownership consolidation. It will always be a distributed medium and therefore very difficult to control. If professional bloggers emerged who came to be unduly beholden to their advertisers and started not covering certain stories or spinning them for the sake of their sponsors, other nonprofessional bloggers would just step into the breach. If corporate media bought up a few big bloggers, they would still have to compete against literally millions of independents. And if any of the independents were providing what the audience wanted better, the traffic would shift to them. In the world of blogging, any form of censorship actually creates opportunities for those immune to it.

Technical limitations and expense make it almost impossible for anyone now to start up a new 24-hour-a-day news channel. But anyone can start a blog. I expect journalist cooperatives (both professional and amateur) to emerge over time and do podcasting, and eventually Webcasting with video, finally breaking the current semimonopoly of broadcast news.

Eric Kuhn writes with news that Blogads was on the cover of Le Monde, France’s leading daily, yesterday in an article titled “La blogosphère contre les médias.”

Blogads est devenu “la” référence, en proposant aux internautes américains d’abriter leur blog. En contrepartie, Blogads leur reverse une part des recettes qu’il reçoit des annonceurs monnayant leur présence sur ces blogs.

Blogads ne cache pas ses intentions. Auprès de ses clients (Paramount Pictures, The Wall Street Journal, Oxford University Press), il insiste sur le fait que l’univers des blogs est le plus sûr moyen de “courtiser les activistes et les leaders d’opinion que les médias traditionnels ne touchent pas.”

Funnily enough, Blogads was born in Paris, where I was living and trying to talk French and English newspapers into publishing online. Blogads went public three years ago on Saturday.

Don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying Heather Green and Stephen Baker’s blogging at Business Week. Heather did something too few bloggers yet have the courage to do, calling up Jeff Jarvis and asking him about his leap into the moonlight. Well-timed soundings along the fault-line of change are fun. Let’s all do it more! (In a month it will be interesting to see how well Heather and Steve’s blogging maps to (or disrupts) their normal editorial schedule… maybe I’ll do that interview.)

Meanwhile, some miles back from the battle front (or ahead of it?) NYT just announced “targeted staff reductions” of 190 staff. Roughly 20 of those jobs will be in the newsroom. In editor Bill Keller’s odd phrasing, “In each of these cases, the position would disappear with the person.” Suggests a chilling trajectory for the whole industry?

A fitful but amusing night of sleep. I awoke with a whole bunch of lingering procedural challenges solved, whamo, and a distinct memory of laughing hysterically throughout my last dream. Let’s have more nights like that, please!

The walk to school was wreathed by the smell of honeysuckle.

Though I enjoyed Sith, I also loved Anthony Lane’s review, best summed up in his Yoddaesque burl: “Break me a fucking give.”

Other choice slams: “The general opinion of ‘Revenge of the Sith’ seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, ‘The Phantom Menace’ and ‘Attack of the Clones.’ True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.” Or “What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth?”

Scott Sala gives Mayor Bloomberg a friendly poke in the ribs for ignoring, to date, blog advertising.

Jeff Jarvis, my go to man for news from the front line in the war between blogging and conventional publishing, quits his job today as online chief at traditional publisher Advance. He’s going to continue walking the line, working with the NYT and a start-up conceived by Upendra Shardanand, a very early buyer of blogads.

Speaking of the bloggers versus journalists, I had an interesting conversation with a traditional publisher earlier this afternoon. He’d just spent a few days around a bunch of bloggers. He told me he was fascinated by the fact that bloggers are obsessed with their traffic/readers/feedback, while most traditional journalists are obstinately oblivious to their readers.

Seems pretty obvious the folks focused on their customers would outpace those who aren’t, right?

New York was exhausting. I had breakfast at the soon-to-be-shuttered HoJo on 44th street, where Gene Hackman once worked as maitre’d and Lili Tomlin waitressed. When I asked about the closing next month, Hackman’s successor at the cash register said the owners were making a mistake giving up on the restaurant. “If someone can’t make the business here, they can’t make it anywhere in the world.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly the problem:

The restaurant and the land it sits on, a prime site on the northwest corner of 46th Street and Broadway, was recently sold for “more than $100 million” by longtime owner Kenneth Rubinstein to Jeff Sutton’s Wharton Acquisitions. Sutton plans to flatten the four-story edifice and replace it with a gleaming new retail outlet.

The Howard Johnson’s was built in 1955 and is the oldest, continually operated business facing directly on Times Square. Its squat dimensions once fit in nicely with the low-scale, slightly down-at-heel architecture that for a long time characterized the area. But the real estate revival of the late 1990s saw it dwarfed by glass towers and glossy stores like Toys ‘R’ Us and the Virgin Megastore. Increasingly, the venerable old institution looked like an anachronism.

My favorite line from the two conferences I attended came from Doc Searles. “The demand side supplies itself.” Which is to say that, increasingly, people solve their own problems and build their technology without recourse to the mass-market corporate Rube Goldberg machine. This can be t-shirt peddlers, musicians, authors, software entrepreneurs…

I got a real charge out of Thom Pain (based on nothing), directed by my Beatles-bootleg buddy Hal Brooks. Someone else in the front row, who had been fidgetting briefly with business cards, got the “I hate the way you breath” speech. Full in the face, I got:

What if you only had one day to live? What would you do? That’s easy. You’d be brave and true and reckless. You would love life and people with wild and new abandon’What if you only had forty years? What would you do? If you’ re like me, and, no offense, but you probably are, you wouldn’t do anything. It’s sad isn’t it?

Good questions, which I hope I’m answering well.

After a year and a half hiatus, John Hiler, one of the geniuses behind Xanga, is back blogging about what he calls microcontent.

Hmm, looks like the stakes in web publishing is rising. In France, a blogger gets sued by the mayor for “les critiques incivique.”

And in NY, my old hack-mate Nick gets cream pied. Here’s another view:

And Virginia Postrel in todays NYT looks at bias in the news business as “a feature not a bug:”

But one person’s contradiction is another’s market niche. Those differences help answer an economic puzzle: if bias is a product flaw, why does it not behave like auto repair rates, declining under competitive pressure?

In a recent paper, “The Market for News,” two Harvard economists look at that question. “There’s plenty of competition” among news sources, Sendhil Mullainathan, one of the authors, said in an interview. But “the more competition there has been in the last 20 years, the more discussion there has been of bias.”

The reason, he and his colleague, Andrei Shleifer, argue, is that consumers care about more than accuracy. “We assume that readers prefer to hear or read news that are more consistent with their beliefs,” they write. Bias is not a bug but a feature.

In a competitive news market, they argue, producers can use bias to differentiate their products and stave off price competition. Bias increases consumer loyalty.

Via Glenn Reyonlds.

And don’t forget blogebrity, a brilliant idea.

Friday night we wandered around Carrboro, ducking into galleries. Played Ms. Pacman at Italy 3 Saturday night. 41,700 versus 17,900. We sang the chorus from “day by day” in church yesterday, something I haven’t sung in 25 years. I looked in the hymnal for my favorite song (beside Amazing Grace), but couldn’t find it.

Watch this space.

I’m excited to be in New York next week, participating Monday in the Personal Democracy conference and Tuesday in the Syndicate conference.

Monday, I’m hoping to have a drink or two with some of the New York blogad federates.

Tuesday night, I’m seeing Thom Pain based on nothing with three of the smartest advertisers using Blogads.

Yoouweeh! Audi3’s Speedracer-meets-Maxxim ad campaign continues with a combination of a daringly obscure image and links to bloggers who’ve joined the conversation about the narrative itself. Click to see the next act.

Frank Barnako at MarketWatch covers the launch of what headline-meister Jeff Jarvis dubs the “tofu” network.

I prefer “zeitgeist factory” myself.

For those of you keeping track, watch for three more mininetworks to launch next week. And maybe the conservatives too. (Wondering what headline Jeff will concoct for that.)

Having breakfast last week, I looked up and saw a middle aged guy wearing a Gogol Bordello t-shirt. Now, I only know of the Gogol Bordello band from reading blogs by New Yorkers like Rick Bruner.

I thought, “wow, a hipster in our biscuit joint.”

I said, “great t-shirt — are you a fan?”

“No, man, I got this in a dumpster over in Raleigh.”

Jim Treacher came up with the word “we-dia” a few weeks to describe the weird p2p communications that are swamping corporate media.

Well here’s a prime example of wedia: the liberal blog advertising network, 44 of America’s biggest liberal blogs, all ads buyable on one web page. One million impressions a day. How many political page impressions does the Washington Post do each day? (Will some intrepid reporter dare to call Post.com publisher Cliff Sloan and ask?)

Introducing The liberal blogs advertising network.

As the liberal network’s description puts it: advertisers now get a unique opportunity to “reach the people who manufacture the liberal and progressive zeitgeist.”

Information that used to take a day or three to ascend one side of a corporate ladder (from source to journalist to editor) and then down the other (from layout to production to printing press to teamsters to newstand to coffee table) now passes directly from person to person in real time. Zappo. And networks like this let advertisers tap directly into that p2p mosh-pit… mainlining right into the beating heart of the zeitgeist.

To tally up: there’s NYC, Philly, TV, North Carolina, Economists, LA, food bloggers, New England arts, Evangalicals, baseball, gay and sports networks. (Yes, there’s a conservative network percolating.)

Nashville was a blast. Along with many old faces, I enjoyed meeting La Shawn Barber , Les Jones , Staci Kramer , Robin Burk, Jeffrey Henning, Donald Sensing, BL Ochman, Tom and Red, Dana Blankenhorn and Bill Hobbs Bill Hobbs.

There were many memorable moments, including Dave Winer’s, to me, off-key suggestion that the event kick off by singing Dixie. Instead we settled on America the beautiful. The “disagreement” session was the ultimate in synecdoche, summed up here and with an overview here. This could be a best-seller — where are the podcasts?

The highpoint for me was meeting aspiring blogger John Jay Hooker, a 75-year-old lawyer who showed up at the conference and, as the session “disagreement” reached one boiling point, said things like as “sometimes you can’t call a son of a bitch a son of a bitch without calling him a son of a bitch” and “you have to learn to disagree without being disagreeable.”

Later, a bunch of bloggers spent a couple of hours imbibing with Mr. Hooker. He told us about a) founding HCA, the company that has put Bill Frist on track for the White House b) making STP a profitable company and c) his friends Jimmy the Greek, Warren Beaty, Bobby Kennedy and Mohammed Ali. Fantasist or voluble multi-millionaire? Here’s his bio:

In 1961, he was appointed Special Assistant to Robert F. Kennedy which led to his involvement in the Baker v. Carr case. In 1962, Hooker became general counsel for the Nashville Tennessean. Also in that year, he was endorsed by Senator Kefauver and the Nashville Tennessean to run for Governor against Frank Clement for the Democratic nomination. Hooker chose not to run in that election, but did run and lose in 1966 against Buford Ellington for the Democratic nomination.

Moving away from politics, Hooker started Minnie Pearl’s Chicken in 1967. This venture proved to be disastrous. Promoters had used the country singer’s name to sell area franchise agreements, then reported millions in uncollected fees as revenue to drive up their stock price. The business failed amid several lawsuits.

In 1968, Hooker founded the Hospital Corporation of American along with four other individuals. Continuing with his political career, Hooker secured the Democratic nomination for Governor in the 1970 race, but lost to Republican Winfield Dunn. Moving on with his business pursuits, he became chairman of the board of STP Corporation in 1973. He remained in the position until 1976, when he left to run for the U.S. Senate. Hooker lost to James Sasser in the Democratic primary.

In 1979, Hooker organized the sale of the Nashville Tennessean to Gannet Corporation. In this deal he put together a syndicate that bought a part interest in the Newspaper Printing Corporation which owned the Tennessean and the Banner. He also became the publisher of the Banner. In 1982, Hooker sold his interest in the Banner and became chairman of the United Press International. Two years later, Hooker again made a foray into fast food and opened Hooker Hamburgers. In 1986, just two years later, he sold this business.

Some Hooker yarns: “My father liked to entertain and he liked to drink whisky. If you’d have come over to call on him, he’d put a quart of Jack Daniels in front of you and a quart in front of himself. That was OK, because he was a 1/3 shareholder in the company, so he was keeping it in the family. Now my father’s doctor was Dr. Frist, Bill Frist’s father. Dr. Frist told my father, ‘you have two choices, you can either stop drinking or you can die.’ My father told him, “Doctor, I have a third choice: I can get a new doctor.’”

Hooker said running a profitable venture was a lot like fishing, “first, you need to find the right fishing hole. Then you need the right fishing partners. Then you need the right bait.”

He went on a stem winder about the glories of blogging and its future immense impact on the business of marketing. “A lot of money will be made from this, I tell you.” (Several people were filming him — I hope the video will surface. Here are a couple of photos of him at the bottom of this post: http://www.webraw.com/quixtar/archives/2005/05/blognashville_saturday_pictures.php )

So: is blogging the next HCA or another Minnie Pearl’s Chicken? Given the number of calls Blogads fields these days from avaricious VCs and investment bankers, I fear the latter.

Here are some photos by Donald Sensing.

Glenn Reynolds, self-professed dilettante and rabid early adopter of new media tools and techniques, shot video throughout, then edited and posted within hours after the event closed. Here are some links to various feeds.

Asked by videographer Reynolds whether there’s a business model for blogging, Dan Gillmore offered this poignant response: “There better be a business model, or it will be community theatre for the whole world.”

Is there anything more exciting than watching 8-year-olds play baseball?

Bzzagent, a company that pays folks to talk up clients’ products and services, offered pro bono to help the CreativeCommons get people excited and evangelize its cause.

The move backfired when bloggers and commenters flamed the move. Bzzagent’s boss called one of the angry blogger’s work a “vicious cycle of lies.” The CreativeCommons rescinded its decision to collaborate with Bzzagent. And the whole thing unwound online, in full public view.

The bitter Bzzagent honcho commented: “Let’s get this straight: Over 80% of word of mouth occurs OFFLINE. Blogs are a tool for word-of-mouth interaction, but just because there’s plenty of them out there, it doesn’t mean it’s the best place for distributing an honest opinion.” While that perspective is open to debate, there’s no mistaking the fact that in this case, 100% of the word-of-mouth that drove this undeal was online.

(Via Brain Clark.)

Republican women and
liberal blogs.

Lauren Youngs at Bella Bead Design writes: “Blog Ads have made a world of difference for my Business. I tried Google Ad-sense for 4 months up to $3.50 a click and got nowhere. I got three sales the first day with blog ads and business just gets better all the time with lots of repeat business. Thank You blog ads-!!”

Stephen Baker, one of the authors of last week’s bullish Business Week cover story on blogging, does the cluetrain thing and writes on BW’s blog, “It hurts to admit it, but Henry Copeland mounts an uncomfortably convincing case that a BW cover story can be a curse.”

Baker rightly notes that BW wasn’t making a market call in this cover issue. But he stands by his prediction that traditional media can dominate blogging: “what do you do if you’re a big media company that’s getting its lunch handed to it by smart, nimble blogging startups? My guess: You try to buy a passel of them.” Maybe. In fact, I know of cases in which bloggers were in negotiations to be “bought” by traditional media, but traditional media could’t match the latitude and revenues that blogging already provides in this early stage of its development. The publisher’s ability to pay was capped both by traditional journalistic pay scales (don’t want those print boys griping when a blogger works 6 hours a day at home and makes more than they do!) and multi-layered publishing overheads, which left not enough juice for all to stay hydrated.

Again, I’m a happy reader of Business Week. It’s extremely well written, concise and full of quotable factoids. It does a wonderful job of encapsulating yesterday and the current moment. I just don’t trust it’s look into the future. Though now that Stephen and Heather are blogging on their own outside of the editorial info-processor, maybe the foresight will improve.

I’m just off the plane sitting in the Courtyard Marriott enjoying free wifi & on my way to the opening party for blogNashville. It’s a gorgeous evening, 70 degrees and blue-green in the twilight.

I’m excited by the breadth of issues to be covered here, lots of topics — military blogging, faith-based blogging — that hasn’t been covered in bluer Bloggercons. The whole thing is shockingly well organized, with much of the weight carried, as far as I can tell by Robert Cox.

With Glenn Reynolds’ encouragement, I’m catalyzing a session tomorrow on blogonomics. Here’s a refresh of what I’ve written before about this session:

I hope this session works in extreme socratic mode. Everyone in the room will get called on to contribute both questions and answers. The stuff below is just a foundational list.

I’d like to situate the discussion between two poles. On the one side, Business Week says: “Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere.” Are you looking forward to working for MSM?

On the other side, with MSM clearly collapsing — Tribune Circ rev down 9% in a year! — somebody intelligent BETTER step into the vacuum that will occur when the current media ecosystem finally (soon) collapses.

So, some categories of discussion:
– what are bloggers’ “unique selling propositions” in the info-economy? (Remember, MSNBC.com sells ad space for $0.10 CPMs!)
—- * passion
—–* networkness
—–* audience loyalty
—–* influentials audience
– what technologies/services currently enable bloggers to efficiently monatize their audiences?
—–* Blogads, Adsense, Pheedo, Pajamas
– are indie bloggers unsafe for advertisers… or safer?
– what is the current/potential role for publishers (traditional or newmedia) versus indies in the economics of blogging?
—–* NYT, Salon, Slate, BusinessWeek
—–* Gawker, MarketingVox, PaidContent, WeblogsInc, Corante, GrassrootsMedia, HuffingtonPost, Pajamas
– what new technologies/services might help indie-bloggers monatize their audiences?
– how many bloggers will earn a living from blogging in 5 years?
– do bloggers compete with each other for ad$?
– unless anyone vehemently disagrees, I’m going to leave discussion of “getting hired to do blogging as PR for a company” for another session. Many people will make a good living doing this in coming years, but I think that career path is pretty clear, so would like to focus on murkier/bigger stuff.

Over the last year, we’ve had a lot of fun watching the T-shirt vendors use blogads to peddle their wares. Now the WSJ
reports:

It turns out the T-shirt is a perfect fit for online commerce. It captures the Web’s renegade allure and allows surfers to show off their virtual journeys. Easy to make and deliver, T-shirts often cost $15 or less online.

More than 1,500 Web sites now sell T-shirts, says Rodney Blackwell, a Sacramento, Calif., entrepreneur who runs several Web sites. Mr. Blackwell, who began cataloguing the number of sites offering T-shirts in early 2004 for one of his Web properties, tracked just 500 such sites last year before the market exploded.

Here are some examples of their craft. Nothing but tarted up rags? Nope, t-shirts are a symptom of an important trend. After a hundred years of mass market clothing (produced by giant factories, marketed by giant companies via giant media) the web is enabling new levels of personalization, self-expression and niche identity. I think some of these t-shirt companies are going to become major players in clothing, slowly expanding and leveraging their knowledge of this new social and commercial modality. And I think that we’ll see other manufacturers realize that the need to personalize/nichify their products too. Here’s an extension of this argument, a thought experiment about how blogging and niche commerce will cross-pollinate:

Great blogs inspire strong group identities. These groups see the world through a certain set of eyeglasses. They speak in certain codes and fixate on certain issues.

So ads ideally show the advertiser (and the product buyer) to be one of “us” rather than one of “them.” Show some friendliness towards a blog’s sensibilies and two good things can happen. Readers click AND clickers have positive disposition as they engage your offer.

Here’s a thought experiment that pushes this strategy to its logical (and profitable?) extreme.

Every marketer dreams of having a product that appeals to everyone; but most of us would be very happy to sell to 20% of a given marketplace. Consider, for example, Volvo, which sells roughly 100,000 cars a year in the US. What if, rather than simply observing that Volvo drivers tend to be Democrats (65/35), Volvo sought to align itself as THE itself Democratic light vehicle of choice by running ads exclusively in Democratic venues and discounting Volvos to key Democrats?

If a Volvo became an identity badge for Democrats, Volvo might lose 35,000 yearly sales to Republicans, but how many sales, out of the total US sales of 17 million a year, might be gained?

Of course, this is untenable for two reasons. Volvo is owned by Ford and Ford seeks to appeal to Republicans too. And Ford Inc has Republican shareholders.

But what an established, publicly traded company like Ford can’t do, a privately owned upstart with a clean-slate brand CAN.

Consider the success of Ben & Jerry’s. Heck, if frozen milk can tap into a political sensibility to grow a brand, anything can. Ben and Jerry were happy to forgo ambitions for a certain large market segment, the apolitical ice-cream consumers they could never realistically win anyway, to absolutely own another segment that was reachable.

Some folks have asked why bloggers would put in the effort to create and manage the nano-networks (links: 1, 2, 3, 4) you’ve seen sprouting this spring. You know… the NYC, Philly, TV, North Carolina, Economists, LA, food bloggers, New England arts, Evangalicals, baseball, gay, and sports networks. (Still waiting for someone to step up to the plate for conservatives and liberals.)

Of course these networks provide the organizers the chance to help other bloggers; there’s some gratification in helping create and grow something; there’s the challenge of sorting through just who is who in the blogosphere; there’s the satisfaction of being the hub for a great bunch of writers.

In the future, there will be money too, though most of the public-spirited folks so far helping create these networks did not know this when they pitched in. How much and exactly what for? If you are a casual reader of this blog, hang in there while we beta test and work out details. If you are blogads geek, give me a shout and you can help advance the idea.

There’s obviously work beyond wires and programming involved in building a network, whether Blogads.com itself or the nano-networks we support. We’ve wanted to judge how much work and what kind. How to help bloggers organize themselves, how to sort out the great from the good from the bad, and how to encourage good citizens versus free riders. These are questions we chewed on while specing version 0.1 of Blogads three years ago. (Here’s the first evidence of Blogads.com I can find, from the Wayback machine from November 2002.) Now, after what feels like decades of working on the network and talking constantly with bloggers and advertisers, we have a better sense of what is at stake.

I’m not going to lay out all the details here yet. But you should note that, as a first step, we are closing the current, annoyingly inefficient application process for bloggers who want to sell blogads. There are simply too many bloggers queuing up to join the network. In theory, we could take everyone on board, but some bloggers might turn out to be nuts (bloggers are not exempt from the general population’s distribution of dementia), others require dozens of hours of support for $5 a month in revenues to us. We would be diverted from focusing on smart bloggers and their advertisers.

So we’ve relied on a rough and ready applications process. Though ugly, it worked for a while. Here’s what we learned: some bloggers have a snowball’s chance in the Sahara of interesting advertisers. Some didn’t manage to answer the five simple questions we posed. Some did, but fudged their traffic estimate by a factor of 100. Some were alone in niches that we know we won’t be able to serve well for months or years. And some, understandably, got angry when we didn’t respond to their entitled insistence that Blogads.com serve them. Worst of all, some great bloggers got lost in the cracks.

I apologize for the shortfalls in that approach. We didn’t like the application process, most of all, because it forced Blogads to be the gatekeepers in a culture that is all about organic connections. We’ve know all along that Blogads isn’t our network. To work, Blogads has to be a collaboration among bloggers. Smart bloggers have understood this and have had a tremendous positive impact on their own and everyone else’s revenues by pitching into our efforts.

So, going forward, bloggers will join blogads on the invitation of current network members, bloggers who, in essence, have helped beta test the Blogads idea and build the network. These “beta” bloggers will evaluate, invite and guide new blogads sellers. New bloggers (theta?) will pay 30% of ad prices to participate in the network, rather than the 20% fee charged current blogads sellers. A sponsor blogger, only a handful at first, will get 5% of her sponsored bloggers’ revenues while she remains a sponsor. Essentially, sponsor bloggers will be rewarded for doing some of the work traditionally performed in corporate publishing by both an editor and staff in the HR department. (To be clear, this means identifying, recruiting and acculturating stars, not managing!) Sponsors are doing work they are far better qualified to perform than we. (Once acculturated, new bloggers will be able to invite bloggers too.)

In the future, other portions of Blogads’ fee will go to other players who help manage networks or sell blogads. As a corporate entity, Blogads.com will net less in percentage terms when the dust settles. We trust the pie will be bigger.

Let’s call this distributed publishing, a lively human-and-Internet powered swarming response to the fat, mechanistic, rigid, hierarchical infrastructure of traditional publishing. (I’ve always had special glee in participating in a business whose gross profit margin is well below the 30% net profit margin of the traditional publishers it competes against. Lots more on this in my May ‘02 essay on blogonomics.)

This program will be in beta for a while, working with a very small number of beta bloggers, some of whom are current network catalyzers. We’ll be tweaking the formulas, payouts and the processes. Once we’ve got this nailed down, we’ll roll out other interesting mechanisms as we impliment Blogads 3.0 this summer. If you are a journalist, file this all under the topic of “distributed publishing” for future reference.

Vespa scooters, steered by Steve Rubel at Cooper Katz, is getting into the publishing game by hiring four bloggers to drive two blogs.

One blog will celebrate the urban mobile lifestyle. It will include articles, tips, tricks and links on the latest tools that help individuals get around any city more quickly, easily and enjoyably. The blog will feature posts about Vespa scooters, with the aim of appealing to a broader audience - those who crave mobile gadgets. Content might include: how to get real-time traffic alerts on your cell phone; how to learn Spanish while commuting; how to prevent your gadgets from getting wet; Web sites that help you get around by subway more easily; gadgets for staying cool while commuting in the summertime; etc.

The other blog will focus on the journey we call life. It will help readers learn how to get from point A in their lives to point B, both literally and more “existentially.” Content might include: tips, tricks and links on weight loss; saving money; getting errands done faster; how to triumph over stress; or how and where to travel with your pet; etc. Like the other blog, this Vespa blog will also occasionally put the Vespa scooter in the context of larger lifestyle topics.

It’s an audacious move for a PR agency and scooter company. Yet another pirhana chewing on the publishing wildebeast. Not only are traditional publishers up against millions of bloggers and hundreds of entrepreneurs… now scooter makers are doing it too.

The torrent of stories — journalists bemoaning the collapse of their profession and pundits jimmying the cracks in traditional corporate hierarchies and law jobs being outsourced to India for $65 an hour — are more evidence of the coming End of (Industrial) Times.

Major industries have evolved in parallel in the four hundred years since Gutenberg allowed the mass production of words and the Industrial Revolution allowed the mass production of objects. The confluence of publishing and manufacturing created a third industry — advertising. These industries are all, together, part of a giant ecosystem, jammed with interlocking processes, hyper-speciated job descriptions, complex food chains. It’s an organic whole, an industrial and sociological Gaia. I see it every day — braindead ads produced by blind and deaf industrial-age hierarchies serving clueless companies. They muddle along, doing OK by their own metrics, without glimpsing the startling new dimensions and rainbows around them.

The Internet is a comet strike into the lush eco-sphere that grew from the seeds planted by Gutenburg and
Watt and Arkwright. The temperature has dropped. There’s less oxygen. No big food. Can you say mass coextinctions?

(Long live the ants and their humble constructions.)