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.