I’m proud to know these guys. Listen.

(By sheer coincidence, Blogads’ main server is named magpie, a species in the corvid family.)

A little greed is a good thing, but this is ridiculous.

Jason Calacanis has announced Weblogsinc, “a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.” The resulting network, Calacanis says, will make easier for business readers to find information. That might happen. Might.

But who is going to write these blogs? “Our goal is to partner with individual webloggers, letting them do what they do best (writing, creating community, researching) while supporting them with what we do best (upgrading the software that drives their Web site, generating revenue, running the business). We split the profits 50/50 with each of our bloggers taking out only hard costs (i.e., sales commissions, credit card fees).”

That’s 50% of the profits after hardware costs and sales commissons are paid. So, assuming sales commissions are 30%… for every $10,000 in advertising revenue, a blogger will get let’s say… hmm… $2000?

Sounds like Calacanis has basically replicated the cost structure of traditional media, minus the printing presses.

There’s no room for blog owners/managers, unless the owner and operator are one and the same. As Calacanis himself has already moralized about the defection from Gawker of blogger Liz Spiers, bloggers who are employed by blogs are easily tempted by other offers.

Why join Calacanis’ keritsu when a whole portfolio of best-of-breed services is already alive and constantly evolving. Relying on the blogosphere for network traffic, Movable Type and pMachine for blogging technology and Blogads for ad sales, the same blogger could keep $8000, less some Paypal fees.

This is THIN media; lightweight tools, extreme specialization, rampant collaboration, swarming individuals, ad hoc decision-making… lots of small pieces loosely joined, as Dave Weinberger put it so nicely. (Via Buzzmachine.) Update: some good context from Wired.

World War I cost France 1,357,800 dead, 4,266,000 wounded (of whom 1.5 million were permanently maimed) and 537,000 made prisoner or missing — exactly 73% of the 8,410,000 men mobilized, according to William Shirer in The Collapse of the Third Republic. Some context: France had 40 million citizens at the start of the war; six in ten men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were permanently maimed.

We lost power at around 2PM Thursday. No really spectacular wind or rain. Had a laugh-filled dinner by candlelight. Biggest excitement: son peeing with the aid of a headlamp. Power came back up around 2PM Friday.

Publishers often get pushed by advertisers either to run flattering profiles or to kill unflattering exposes. Often enough, publishers succumb to the temptation. (Some publishers have even institutionalized the practice of drafting editorial staff into writing advertorials.)

Journalism professors worried about a blogger’s ability to handle the same temptations should take comfort from the case of blogger Sgt. Stryker, who yesterday sold an ad to author Harrry Helms for his book Inside the Shadow Government.

Stryker reacted by poking fun at Helms’ ad (or site or book?), calling it “basically poorly written fiction that would be funny if it weren’t so passe.”

Apologetic to his readers for running the ad, he commented “…never let it be said that I let principle get in the way of making a buck (25, in this case).”

Helms, an author with plenty of books for sale at Amazon, asked for his money back and we obliged. I understand that it would be galling to have your socio-political analysis trashed by someone who you’ve just paid $25 for publicity. But from a PR perspective, the ad and Stryker’s reaction were a home run. Plenty of other advertisers would kill for Helms’ 18% clickthru.

Blogs are an unedited space where people curse, brainstorm, rhapsodize and generally shoot off their mouths. With individual personality, ethics and accountability on the line and undiluted by the corporate “we,” bloggers seem more likely to bite the hand that feeds them than lick it.

This isn’t your grandmother’s newspaper. And for the right kind of advertiser, that’s the best news in a long time.

Journalist Jeff Jarvis: “The line between “news” and “non-news” is hardly drawn with a straight-edge anymore, folks; that’s just wishful thinking, it’s old-school thinking. Is the New York Times news when Jayson Blair writes it? Nope (a cheap shot, I admit). Are The Star and The Enquirer news even though they’re tabloids? More and more, yes. Is the Today show news when it’s flacking for Dr. Phil’s new diet fllimflam? God, no! Is FoxNews news? Absolutely. Is a weblog news even though it may not be written by a professional and may include opinion? If it’s reporting something worthwhile, of course. Is a forum post that reports the scores from last night’s Little League game news? To its audience, you bet it is. Is a picture taken at a news event by a witness news? Yup. News — and the definition of news — are no longer owned by the newsmen.”

Lots of other great ideas in Jeff’s rant against traditional publishers who don’t get the electrified media.

To add my own two cents: News is now of/by/for the people. Anyone can push words around the world in 0.2 seconds for free, so distribution of information — the engine of traditional media economics — is no longer rewarded. Profits will flow only to those who create communities/connections that bust through the noise of infinite free news. Hallelujah!

Glenn Reynolds riffs on the implications of home entrepreneurship.

A long time ago, I wrote an article about a bunch of young Americans in Prague. Details magazine, then edited by the fast-rising James Truman, bought the article and gave it the headline Wild, Wild East.

Now, nearly a dozen years later, a New Yorker editor has gathered a bunch of short stories by people like Arthur Phillips, Josip Novakovich John Beckman, and Charlotte Hobson about life in Eastern Europe and titled it… The Wild East. I thought that title cliched even in 1992. But I guess, like amber, some cliches become so ossified they take on a new brilliance and attraction.

Unfortunately, so far at least, none of the fiction I’ve read about the decade after the fall of communism come close to the weirdness and wildness of that time. Fiction just can’t compare.

Footnotes: #1 many of those young Americans are now bloggers: Matt Welch, Amy Langfield, Ken Layne, Doug Arellanes and Ben Sullivan. Other bloggers I met in the Wild East include Rick Bruner, Nick Denton and Emmanuelle Richard. I guess you could call us the “Wild East Blogger Bunch.” Grunt. OK, footnote #2 I’ve met a couple of people in bars through the years who claimed they moved to Prague after reading my brilliant prose. Was that you? Leave a comment.

Pancakes and sausages with friends, then scrimaging soccer three kids vs one father, then to the botanical garden, where we saw a praying mantis, many blue tailed lizards and monarch caterpillars and chrysali. And we played chess on the giant board.

The photographer: “The point is moot, for we already know the identity of the man in the picture. He is you and me.”