Tough times for some in publishing.

BIOS, one of the building blocks of the PC, was hacked together more than 20 years ago as a temporary solution; engineers thought it would only last for the first 250,000 machines before being replaced by something better.

“New research shows that some traumatized people may be better off repressing the experience than illuminating it in therapy. If you’re stuck and scared, perhaps you should not remember but forget.” (Link.)

A bunch of people have written to ask whether we’re worried about Google’s purchase of Pyra/Blogger, noting that Google could start to sell ads on the blogs that Pyra hosts.

Well, just days after Google bought Pyra, Matt Haughey has discovered that Google is already running its textads on Blogspot sites. For example, check out KEH Camera Brokers ad atop this photography-oriented blog and compare it with the ads running in the right column of this Google search for “Leica.” See the redundancy?

These were not ads bought specifically to run on blogs, since no such choice exists in Google’s Adwords forms; the advertiser likely opted to allow the ads to be “syndicated” onto Google’s partner sites. (According to Googles Adwords terms, these partners include America Online, Inc. CompuServe, Netscape, AT&T Worldnet, EarthLink, Inc. and Sympatico Inc.)

Does this threaten our Blogads service? No. (That’s not the same answer I’d give to the question “are you nervous as hell?”)

For the forseeable future, we offer bloggers and advertisers certain unique advantages:

a) Bloggers get the bulk of the proceeds from their Blogads sales.

b) Bloggers get to approve every ad before it appears.

c) Advertisers get more options (images, longer text, comments.)

d) Advertisers can use words like “lowest” which are not allowed in Google Adwords.

e) Google kills ads that don’t get a 1% clickthru, so its ads are only effective for direct marketers rather than brand-builders.

We’ll scramble to keep Blogads differentiated. Google may be a brilliant and wonderfully benign company… but if it does get a monopoly on blog advertising, nobody’s gonna be too happy.

A reader asks: “You have a book in the works on some of this stuff? 🙂 Just the sense I get'”

No book. I’m generally unable to think in patches of more than 1000 words. I wrote a senior essay in college that resurrected Darwin’s Christian credentials by re-uniting his language with its then-current theological context… and the damn thing mutated into an attempt to overturn the reigning theory of intellectual history… and nearly killed me. I was right, but history will never know it. I’m a sprinter and can’t stick to an outline for more than a week. That said, I’m amazed to find that blogging is helping me churn out patches of text that might be woven together into something larger… micro-competitors versus behemoths, the network as the new publisher, disintermediation, intraction… oh no, better stop.

I’ll stick to service-building and blog-storming. The force of competition, investors, colleagues and clients keep me tethered to a trajectory… even if it isn’t yet clear exactly where that is.

Writing in the National Post, Matt Welch makes impassioned arguments for populist print media against the entrenched dailies staffed by acres of complacent professional journalists. He champions the low-overhead free dailies run by Metro that target strap hangers.

Matt doesn’t mention blogs, but the same logic applies… squared. Many blogs — BoingBoing, Gawker, Slashdot and Tom’s Hardware — have the same populist content, lower costs of production and faster-compounding circulations. Look for more local blogs (Localogs?) as 2003 matures.

Remember, when ecosystems undergo radical change, the smallest organisms survive and adapt fastest and grow to dominate expansive new niches.

“Just like everybody should have at least one friend who owns a truck, everybody should know at least one Matt Welch…” Howard Owens writes.

Went to see Amherst play Bowdoin Saturday in the first round of the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Bowdoin started a 6’6” freshman from Iowa City, Iowa who looks like a stretched Rick Bruner. The kid played with a nonchalant excellence that could be easily mistaken for arrogance, blocking shots, tossing headfakes, scrambling by fleeter-looking players. But he missed a bunch of easy shots in the first few minutes that probably cost Bowdoin the game. The game was much closer than the final score, 78-67, looks.

“Two years ago… weather.com, the Web site of cable television’s Weather Channel, ran on 80 Sun servers. Today, the data center for weather.com is filled with 123 Intel-based servers running Linux ‘ and Sun was sent packing. The savings on hardware were $2.3 million, according to Dan Agronow, vice president for technology at weather.com, who added that maintenance costs were lower, too.” Link.

Blogcritics offer their albums of the year.