Matt Welch pours some salt and vinegar on attempts to take the “French” out of our fries.

You may have noted the rash of stories about a peanut allergy cure. The Google News service shows 76 news items from publications ranging from the New York Times, Business Week to the PakTribune.

Depending on who you read, the big news is that a) a small company called Tanox has developped a cure for the sometimes deadly problem and/or b) that cure is being blocked by legal wrangling with Genentech and Novartis.

The eruption of stories offer an interesting case study in the manufacture of “news.”

In fact, all this information has been floating around since October, but has made headlines now because Tanox held a news conference this week and is publishing the results of the clinical trials completed last fall.

Hell, I covered it on my other blog in November and tried to get a couple of news organizations excited about the story. No luck. I looked for other bloggers who are interested in the subject and also ran dry.

As a former (and reformed) editor, I can testify to the fact that most editorial “news judgement” is not about judging what will important or interesting to the public, but about covering what other outlets are covering or will soon cover.

Had there been enough bloggers interested in peanut allergies (and had they known about each other) the “news” that is making front pages today would have been widely publicized four months ago.

Tony Perkins, former editor of fat and failed Silicon Valley magazine Red Herring, got some nice ink recently for his new online publication, the Always On Network.

Perkins was featured in a Fortune last month as “a bellwether for technology journalism.”

And in an AP story (“one of the most clueless articles in a while,” said Nick Denton) that was picked up by CNN, Perkins was offered up as an avatar of a corporate blogging revolution.

Blogging has proven the vitality of participatory journalism, said Perkins. “Now there are people like me coming along and trying to figure out how to package it,” Perkins said. “It’s time to take it to the next level.”

Funnily enough, Perkins “next level” looks a lot like the “last level”… a curious recursion to the ancien regime.

First, while blogs are wonderfully transparent and easy to parse, the AO Network is damn confusing. The headlines are overblown… in font and pretense. The section categories are overbaked. (And there’s something about dumping all your personal details into Salesforce where advertisers can access it.)

Yes, Perkins has made a valiant stab at “hubness“… he’s tapped all his Silicon Valley connections and tried to pull them into the site. But this thing is organic as vinyl siding.

Today’s Always On top post has this catchy headline in 30 point type: “Sony’s Idei Part Three” and this vacuous subhead “In a rare and incredibly candid interview, Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation, tells AlwaysOn what he really thinks. Here is Part 3 of this three-part series.”

But that’s not the worst: the Interview was conducted in January at Davos, Switzerland. So nothing new has happened since then? This is blogging? No, this is publishing at its worst: big names, expensive places, inflated ideas… old news.

If the copy is old, the business plan is mummified. Sure, Perkins brags that he spent only $150 on a pMachine license, but he spent another $50,000 on development. He’s got 4.5 people on staff.

He’s got FAT advertisers — Accenture, KPMG, technology-oriented law firm Gray Cary, and the Silicon Valley Bank — old economy behemoths aping nu-economy mores. Selling premium sponsorships to those folks takes wining and dining (or old friendships), which is not a scalable business.

Great to see Perkins headed in our direction, but he’s built an (relatively) expensive and rigid infrastructure and business model before he’s built an audience. He’s not in a good position to duck and dive, tweak and twirl. It’s gonna be tough to keep the network “always on.”

Lesson for thin media infopreneurs: the key to a big ROI is keeping the “I” denominator small.

Jeff Jarvis has officially brought blogging to Western Mass. Jeff brings a lot of personality to his own blog and I’m fascinated to see whether institutional blogs like these can sustain an authentic tone.

No progress on the lawsuit that has stalled a peanut allergy cure.

As I noted in November, watching doctors (as in, “first, do no harm”) stall cures with lawsuits is galling.

Warren Buffett: “If you buy a fraction of a plane, I’ll personally see that you get a three-pack of briefs from Fruit of the Loom.” (Link.)

Looking to siphon off YellowPages revenues, local search portal CitySearch will soon add pay-per-click ads to local searches. The ads will be sold by 100 on-the-street sales representatives, a telephone sales force of 30 and a web form.

I’ve never used CitySearch… do they have any credibility? Would seem to me that sites with exciting brands and personal affinity — either national like Google or local like LAexaminer or Gawker — would do much better.

And won’t the local plumber hire a high school kid to spend all night clicking on his rival’s ad?

We went for a walk yesterday in the woods at the notch. Even though the snow is still two feet deep, the sun and temperate breeze convinced us that spring is near. We listened to the creek gurgling beneath the ice. Breezes knocked puffs of snow off pine bows and down our necks.

Last night, we watched Amherst trounce Southern Vermont 84-60, to advance to the NCAA division III round of 16.

The comments section for this Matt Welch post has an interesting round-up of thumb-waving (up or down) on the Iraq war.

I haven’t played poker in 15 years and got to sub in on a local game last night. I’d forgotten how much fun it is. I was down to just a few chips and then won three hands in a row, coming out a chip or two ahead. Flushes are good, right? Several of the guys there also read this blog… guys, say hello to 600 million people!

The terror and beauty of 21st century life.