“Secret” advertising on blogs? — Kos comments. Here’s a random $75 response.

Jeff Jarvis is leading a session on “the business of blogging” at the Harvard Bloggercon symposium this year.

My own view is that there’s going to be little “business of blogging” other than the flow of revenues to individuals and small groups of writers selling advertisers access their audiences. And, obviously, I believe the Blogads network — some of America’s smartest writers allied together — is helping make that happen.

I’ve been raving about blog advertising for nearly two years. I’m glad the Harvard poohbahs will finally get to hear about it.

Rick Bruner, who spells as bad as me, is rewarding readers who highlight his mistakes. Yes, yet another slash in the ongoing drawing and quartering of corporate media. “This may seem like a self-effacing bid for greater accountability, but in fact it’s a shameless attempt to build community, get some comments and compel people to actually read my posts closely,” writes Rick. Go pick some of Rick’s nits.

Taegan Goddard, proprieter of PoliticalWire has just launched an aggregator, updating hourly, pulling together headlines from blogs on the left and right.

Sometimes I see a blogad that blows me away. Only on blogs, I think. This is one of them:

“The legendary store Science Fiction, Mysteries, and More in lower Manhattan closed 3 years ago, and after being unable to find a new location, decided to liquidate everything. Over 4000 new paperbacks, available individually or in lots, all must go; this lot ends 4/15!”

The ad is running on the blogs of a pair of science fiction editors, a wife and husband team.

Author Virginia Postrel is selling blogads… go buy from her. Also, an inside tip: the traffic numbers for TAPPed don’t yet register the site’s full traffic, so the one week ads are underpriced. Buy an ad fast if you like good deals.

An overview of political blogads in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. (Userid/pw: blogads.) The lead is a fun one: “Who wouldn’t love this kind of payoff? Invest $2,000 in an obscure concept that has no track record and watch $80,000 pour into your bank account in a mere three weeks. Bonus: The money helps win you a congressional seat.”

“An obscure concept that has no track record”… hmm, I wonder if we should trademark that?

Friday, I spent an amazing day at George Washington University’s internet and politics conference.

The highpoint was the final debate: is the Internet best used as a tool for control and organization or as a tool for individuals to express their automony and/or self-organize? Zack Exley of Moveon.org and Phil Hendon of RightMarch.com spoke pro-control against David Weinberger and Markos Moulitas laid out the case that the web’s anarchic or self-organizing principles are more powerful.

Although Prof. Weinberger pounded the table and shouted at the gathered 300 consultants and poohbahs, “I am not a consumer of your political products, I am a citizen!” the general debate was alarmingly civil; both camps ended up saying “we agree with the other guys, the web is about top-down organization and self-organization.”

To hell with moderation! To round out the dialectical dance, I argued that the either control or self-organization will win; either we’ll have politics a la Microsoft or open source.

Why? The dominant model will achieve network effects and squeeze the second model out. Which is to say: the model that has the most participants and delivers the maximum benefit to those participants will, ta-da!, attract the most participants. And if it will be either/or, the open source model will win.

The session on advertising focused purely on ad units, I guess because this is the currency of exchange that advertisers purchase from publishers. But this agency-and-publisher-centric view misses a key point: an effective message must be composed of an ad unit AND the landing page. Either piece alone fails or underperforms.

One participant asked: what’s the standard unit of political advertising — the banner, the sky-scraper, the popup? Good question. If you measure in terms not of dollars spent but of total number of candidates and causes, the standard unit of political advertising in this election cycle is the blogad: 150X 200 pixels & 300 characters of text. Anyone want to prove me wrong?

Two final points:

Welcome to The American Prospect Magazine, the latest magazine selling blogads. As a fellow journalist used to say as a deadline loomed: three is a trend.

And welcome also to Roadrunner, which, as blogger Bill Hobbs notes, is the first major corporation to advertise on blogs.

Washington Monthly magazine is now selling blogads. Two highly regarded magazines (see post two down) have now signed onto the blogads network, which is nice testimony to the collective power of the blogosphere, not only as a traffic spinner, but as a commercial engine.

I’m in DC for a couple of days meeting people and so mostly offline. If you have something urgent to communicate, be sure to cc info at blogads.com.

I took the train up today and enjoyed napping and re-reading my much annotated copy of The Loyalty Effect. When I’m really into a book, I do a lot of writing in the margins. The first time I read TLE, we were ramping up Pressflex, our webmaster service for European publishers, so it is fun to see our pre-occupations reflected in my old marginal scribblings.

The lessons of the book: a) find and keep smart customers b) hire and retain great staff c) sell shares only to patient and passionate investors, who want you to do (a) and (b) 24/7 through thick and thin.

Bottom line: I’m very glad we never sold shares to VC. Blogads wouldn’t be here today if we had somebody breathing down our neck demanding 35% annualized returns on $5 million. You can do a lot of customers a lot of good without hitting those kind of numbers; in fact, it is far easier to serve people well and grow intelligently if you don’t aspire to those kind of returns.

Speaking of European journalism, I’m very happy Matt introduced me to the FleetStreetBlog.

Want to be an early adopter? Go buy blogads on Roger Simon’s blog and Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog.