Happy birthday Google... and remote computing
Google turns five today, or at least that's what I think their birthday-caked logo suggests.

For those who ever had any doubts, Google.com proves the vast vitality and potent potential of web computing. Why use some silly Encyclopedia-on-a-CD when you can tap into the Google resources: 3.1 billion online documents sorted by 10,000 servers and 200 million linking minds?

Five years ago, Sun and Microsoft spent a lot of time debating the primacy of the network versus the PC. Quietly, without anyone making a big deal of it, it has become clear that the network is winning.

Yep, I'm one of those folks who believe that soon ALL interesting computing will be done by "the Internet" and not by local computers. I live this belief. My "to do" list sits on a server in Budapest. Junk e-mail aimed at my head is deflected by the spam filters at Messagefire's server. My company sits on servers in Austin and caters to clients sitting in Mantes, Manhattan, Paris, Haddington, Vienna, Eu, Oban, Cleveland, Geneva, London, LA, Lisbon... and, if need be, the moon. My phone calls are answered by a computer in ... I don't even know where.

The Internet gives businesses incredible economies of scale AND unprecedented opportunities to create new connections among ideas, people, goods and services. The best is yet to come... and come and come.

Gelernter likes blogs, but doesn't know it
Yale comsci prof David Gelernter gives a nice philosophical overview of print and online newspapers. Along the way, he offers a brilliant brief for blogging, although he appears not to know the word. On print papers:

A newsprint paper is a slab of space (even a closed tabloid is larger than most computer screens) that is browsable and transparent. Browsability is what a newspaper is for: to offer readers a smorgasbord of stories, pictures, ads and let them choose what looks good. "Transparent" means you can always tell from a distance what you're getting into (Are there lots of pages here or not many? Important news today or nothing much?)--and you always know (as you read) where you are, how far you've come, and how much is left. The newsprint paper is an easy, comfortable, unfussy object. You can turn to the editorials, flip to the back page, or pull out the sports section without thinking. It's light and simple and cheap: Spread it on the breakfast table and spill coffee on it, read it standing in a subway or flat on your back on sofa or lawn, on the beach or in bed. You can write on it, cut it up, pull it apart, fold it open to an interesting story, and stick it (folded) in your pocket to show to someone later. These small details add up to brilliant design.

On "online newspapers:"

The web-papers of tomorrow should be "objects in time," and here is the picture. Imagine a parade of jumbo index cards standing like set-up dominoes. On your computer display, the parade of index cards stretches into the simulated depths of your screen, from the middle-bottom (where the front-most card stands, looking big) to the farthest-away card in the upper left corner (looking small). Now, something happens: Tony Blair makes a speech. A new card materializes in front (a report on the speech) and everyone else takes a step back--and the farthest-away card falls off the screen and (temporarily) disappears. So the parade is in constant motion. New stories keep popping up in front, and the parade streams backwards to the rear. Each card is a "news item"--text or photo, or (sometimes) audio or video. "Text" could mean an entire conventional news story or speech or interview. But the pressure in this medium is away from the long set-piece story, towards the continuing series of lapidary paragraphs. There's room on a "news card" for a headline, a paragraph and a small photo. (If the news item is a long story or transcript, only the opening fits on the card--but you can read the whole thing if you want to, by clicking the proper mouse-buttons.) So: a moving parade (or flowing stream) of news items--new ones constantly arriving in front, older ones moving back.

In a footnote, Gelernter admits that the online newspaper (blog) sounds a lot like his company's attempt to revamp the basic OS, Scopeware.

Blog election ballistics
Washington Post's media pundit writes: "It seems this morning that bloggers have taken over the world. Or at least the 2004 presidential campaign. Or at least the not-so-invisible primary leading up to the campaign. The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging. Who needs television? Let's just eliminate the middleman." (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

War traffic jam VII
Josh Marshall wracked up 1.4 million page views in March. Indricotheriums beware, the grass is being eating from beneath your toes. (Via Mr. Jolliffe.)

War traffic jam VI
Andrew Sullivan writes: "March was another record traffic month: 1.88 million visits to the site from almost half a million separate people. 2.5 million page views. But my favorite piece of data is from Alexa.com. They rank websites, and like most such rankings, they're fallible, so don't put too much weight on this little piece of information. But according to Alexa, this site is now neck and neck, in traffic terms, with the Nation. In fact, the very latest data show this site just ahead of the Nation: we were ranked 6,116 Monday; they were ranked 8,728. No, I'm not putting out a full-fledged magazine, but the more you think about that simple statistic, the more remarkable it is. This site didn't exist three years ago; the Nation has been around for a century. This site, thanks to you, is comfortably in the black with no debt. The Nation has bled money for decades, as most such magazines do. Moreover, compare the stats for last month with the same month a year ago: we had 805,000 visits in March 2002 and 1,880,000 in March 2003."

Drudge dredges dollars
Business 2.0 figures out that proto-blogger Matt Drudge is getting rich. Drudge has the highest ROI in online media, strike that, any media, strike that, any business other that's legal. (Via Hylton Jolliffe and Nick Denton.)

The genius of Drudge's model is very, very, old news, but Business 2.0's math is good.

Unfortunately, big media won't be able to copy Drudge's model. The DNA just isn't right. As I wrote previously, "as commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit the new environment."

“We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices,” Drudge said in his 1998 speech to an assembly of sneering National Press Club members. As usual, Drudge was first with the story.

War traffic jam IV
Matt Welch, who coined the term warblog in 2001, has seen Google referals for the term jump from 27 in February to 942 in March.

Mondo Gizmodo
Testing Nick Denton's new Vonage line, I called his number and got a crisp connection.

I asked Nick how the tech blog he publishes, Gizmodo, is doing. He said traffic is growing 50% a month and is currently at 6,000 page impressions a day... with no marketing expenditure.

"We've sold a ton of Samsung phones" recently through Amazon affiliate links, he said. There are good days but also "long dry spells," he said. When page views get to 15,000 a day, the site will add banners, Nick said.

Nick thinks Gizmodo could do 100,000 page impressions a day in 12-18 months. At that point, relative to its cost "in the very low thousands per month," Gizmodo will be a "remarkably profitable little media." Nick figures that a blog publisher can buy 200 posts for $1000, whereas a print publisher might pay the same money for just three freelance articles.

Based on what he's learned from Gizmodo, Nick is planning a blog focused on New York high society. Real estate ads will be a prime revenue source. "The advertisers target old money in the New York Observer. We'll serve the advertisers targetting the young money," he said.

"We're getting the formula refined for thin media." If he could identify the right niches and locales, Nick said, "I'd love to launch one of these a month."

Blogless Lileks: wired but clueless
Newspaper columnist James Lileks describes how he felt when the paper's Internet connection broke and he was unable to read blogs:
"I felt cut off from the world. It was as if my window had been bricked up. I needed to know what was going on out there. Keep in mind that I had this feeling in a newspaper, where I had access to every wire service on the planet." Yep, reading the news without blog context is like listening to an old Sony portable radio versus sitting in the midst of an orchestra. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Shirky: ads will migrate to the Web
Clay Shirky writes: "Weblogs aren't a form of micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary. One obvious response is to restore print economics by creating artificial scarcity: readers can't read if they don't pay. However, the history of generating user fees through artificial scarcity is grim. Without barriers to entry, you will almost certainly have high-quality competition that costs nothing. This leaves only indirect methods for revenue. Advertising and sponsorships are still around, of course. There is a glut of supply, but this suggests that over time advertising dollars will migrate to the Web as a low-cost alternative to traditional media."

If you write something long enough, people will draw diametrically opposed lessons. Jeff Jarvis reads the same post as "very depressing to the community of bloggers."

My view: the pie for professional writers is going to get lots bigger.

Noogle gives bloggers a new opportunity?
Doc Searles writes: "I already have a dependency on Google News, without which I wouldn't have found the last three links in the item above."

Me too. Noogle makes writing about the news a completely different and more interesting game.

In months of scouting, I've never found a Drudge with a business focus. Now this page serves me.

You can do the same yourself with agriculture, sex, the NFL. But why not get more specific? There's the Cleveland Browns, mutiple sclerosis, NRA or even the Google itself.

Of course, Google can probably never (in the next five years?) filter out the crud and provide the necessary context. Which leaves a huge amount of room for bloggers to add value.

Noogle may create a wonderful opportunity for bloggers to refine and interpret the spew of news. Energy that went into crawling the web can now be devoted entirely to thinking and writing about the product of that crawling.

Riordan's real shot at glory
Millionaire and aspiring LA publishing mogul Dick Riordan is a "rebel without a blog," quips this article.

Hell, why doesn't Riordan stop putzing around and just pay the LAEXAMINER team $300,000 a year to cover five journo salaries? Three scribes would report, with the other two copyediting and blogging.

Riordan could be battering the LAT next week rather than sometime in 2004. He could turn a profit quicker with far lower risk and, more importantly, have a bigger impact on LA life.

(Looking for further thoughts on the idiocy of funding a newpaper rather than a weblog swat team, Riordan should read this post, and this, and... in fact, he should read this whole blog.)

ASAP RIP: Goliath fails to eat David's lunch
Forbes shuts ASAP, its 10-year-old print and web magazine about the digital economy. "There is no market for a dedicated new-economy publication," says a spokeswoman.

I guess that depends on how you define the words "market" and "publication." Yes, it may be uneconomical to cover the digital "As Soon As Possible" economy in a quarterly print publication. And if by "market" you mean $500 million a year, yes, that doesn't exist today.

In fact, "dedicated new economy publications" like 80211b, Tom's Hardware Guide, Slashdot and The Register seem to be doing OK. Perhaps the truth about the nimble digital economy is best reported by nimble digital Davids, not lumbering print Goliaths.

Ironically, ASAP's last issue includes an article by blogger Greg Beato quoting the operator of DavidLynch.com, a site which more than covers its expenses of $30-40,000 a month through membership and sponsorship fees. "Eventually, small guys like us are going to prove that you can make money doing this..."

I hope ASAP's eight laid off staffers can find themselves a home where they belong: on the Internet.

Blogcritics cited by Tennessee AG
Updating a post about an antitrust action against price-fixing record companies, Glenn Reynolds notes that "The Tennessee Attorney General's office emails me to note that actually the feds were on the case first -- and, get this, refers me to this post on Blogcritics for more information on the subject. Is that cool, or what?"

Success tailor-made from the web
At Lands' End, 40 percent of all chino and jeans sales on the company's Web site are now custom orders. Original projection: 10%. Once a customer finds the right fit, "they'll typically buy every color in those jeans or chinos or whatever," a Lands' End exec tells the NYTimes.

Fleishman: blogging boosts credibility
Wi-Fi maven Glenn Fleishman writes: "My blog has given me the credibility that's extended me back into a variety of print publications, including InfoWorld (see this coming Monday's edition), Macworld (Bluetooth knowledge), and The New York Times (although I was writing occasionally for them, the Wi-Fi blog has resulted in stories they've asked me to write or that I've pitched). For freelancers, a blog like mine, on a focused topic, can truly change your career."

Googlesphere
Moxie and Doc went to lunch and thought they coined the Googlesphere. Google said otherwise. Perhaps they can get credit for popularizing it?

Daypop up
Daypop is back, just in time to record News.Google's linkage by 178 blogs. Bots chasing people chasing bots chasing people.

Featurewell
Wordsmith and newly syndicated author Ken Layne describes the article syndication Internet service run by Featurewell. "There are some 800 writers - Jimmy Breslin, Eric Alterman, Catherine Dunn, Christopher Hitchens and Andrei Codrescu, to name a few - who use Featurewell to sell their work again and again to the 900 editors signed up with the service. Wallis has a reputation as a fierce defender of free-lancers' rights, and this combined with his record of actually getting the money from publishers to journalists makes Featurewell a friendly place for an impressive roster of writers." Correspondent.com, one of Pressflex's publishing clients, offers a parallel service focused on Europe. And I know Red Dot provides an Internet-managed photo syndication service from Budapest.

It's Google, stupid.
If you are in the news business, forget how you manage and serve information. Don't bother going to fancy content management summits. Instead, spend some time thinking about how readers acquire information.

Eager to test-drive the next content management system? Open a web-browser. Type www.google.com. Voila.

Serving over 5 billion searches a month, Google is by far the world's biggest single information server, the global content management system. For premium, information-hungry readers, Google is, defacto, both the homepage and prefered acquisition tool for most important information.

What does this mean for news publishers? Consider New York, where Google thrashes the city's paper of record on its own front stoop.

The New York Times portrays itself as The City's Leading Information Source. And as one discovers by crunching the NYTimes.com's own audience figures, the paper gets an average of 1.2 million visitors a day or roughly 11 million total users in a month.

These numbers pale when we consider that Google serves 12,195,400 searches a month for the words "New York." And 68,400 for "World Trade Center." And 91,200 for "Bloomberg." And 144,400 for "NYSE." And 630,700 for "Broadway." And 752,300 for "Manhattan." And 22,800 for "Pataki." And 60,800 for "Empire State Building."

You get the idea. Here's the scary thing; the number of Google searches for "New York" has grown 62% since March. When was the last time the New York Times grew its web audience by more than 20% a year? (All Google figures gleaned from its old Adwords program.)

Here are some other Google search tallies for publishers to chew on. Google gets 11,260,800 searches a month for "London." "Atlanta" gets 2,302,300 a month. "Los Angeles" gets 3,442,100 a month.

Now, Google goes for the news jugular. Google has been running an alpha version of its news scraper for months, putting relevant headlines atop search results. This week, its "news.google" page began serving up whole pages of relevant news scraped from 4,000 sources.

Noting that the NYTimes URLs in News.Google include the word "partner," Dave Winer suggests some special benefit will accrue to the paper. I don't know what he's thinking. Will Google skew its news judgement to send some extra visitors to the Times? My bet is that the partnership simply (and only) jumps visitors past the Times' registration module.

In fact, News.Google shames the NYTimes.com. On the ten articles highlighted on the current news aggregation for "New York," only two are from the New York Times. Only one of ten for the "New York City" search is from the Times.

Assuming Google's content relevance and peer weighting algorithms continue to run the show, News.Google will boost well-networked bloggers as Google's source of highly referenced sites expands. The key thing to watch -- when and how will Google expand the list of 4,000 news providers.

Kuro5hin and Slashdot are already included. (But no Metafilter?) Will Blogcritics or Instapundit or Scripting News be next? Will Drudge, the human headline squeegee, ever make the list?

The bottom of Google's new news aggregator says: "This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page."

No humans harmed... but more than a few corporations will drown as the river of news floods and erases its old banks.

Want the latest news and views about News.Google? Where better to check than the source itself.

(9/26/02 Nick Denton, former CEO of headline aggregating Moreover.com, examines a Google fumble in presenting news. And Leslie Walker writes: "the former editor in me feels humbled at how a computer is able to assemble on the fly an adequate version of what it takes a dozen or two humans to do at most major Web news sites.")

Ego disintermediation
In today's NYTimes, Mickey Kaus worries that blogging journalists will save their best stuff for their blogs and bypass editors. Good point. Most writers are in it as much for mojo than money. Ego disintermediation is a big driver for blogging journalists. The article is written by journalist David Gallagher, who says (on his own blog) that he blogs "because self-publishing is the best thing about the Web." (Via Hylton Jolliffe.)

Reading the same article, Amy Langfield asks: "should journalists blog?" And she answers, "As a former copy editor and desk editor, I want to say Good God, NO! There are some reporters who are really bad. They are lazy, sloppy and sometimes deceptive. There is a reason newspapers and magazines employ copy editors and desk editors..."

Peak flow: attracting readers by sending them away
Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit did more than 100,000 page views yesterday.

I've spent the last six years selling sites to traditional publishers and have met print publishers with costly sites who (still) don't manage that traffic in a year. Seriously. Bloggers do not realize just how vigorously their part-time efforts thrash the bang-for-buck achieved by most traditional publishers online.

Instapundit illustrates a perverse law of web traffic. We all know about Metcalfe's law, which states that the usefulness of a network equals the square of its user count. Here's the Copeland corollary: site traffic multiplies in proportion to outbound links. (9/14/02 Revised to "site traffic multiplies in proportion to outbound links to other bloggers' posts"... see comments for more ideas.)

Of course quality, focus, information-density and presentation are essential. But all else being equal, a site that links religiously will attract orders-of-magnitude more traffic than a site that ignores the rest of the web.

This law upsets traditional publishers, who are born and bred to grab eyeballs and hold 'em. Glenn made nearly 100 links yesterday -- some narcissistic publishers haven't made that many in five years online.

In pushing readers to visit other sites, Instapundit constructs a new network. Some linked sites link back. Many visitors return to see the freshest postings; some e-mail reax and news. Previously linked bloggers check back to examine their new peers.

Enabling a network, Instapundit's utility far outstrips that of another site that might simply "publish" an unlinked digest of the same information. Instapundit traffic has grown from 500,000 page views in June to 1 million in August. September seems to be on track for 1.2 million plus.

(9/13/02 In a parallel post yesterday, Jeff Jarvis rightly takes issue with Clay Shirky's statement that "most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast". Jarvis says "what has fascinated me about this world of weblogs is that as a group, they are a community. There is, to use the jargon, 'intercast' communications between and among webloggers: I link to and comment on somebody, publicly; they do likewise; others join in; zap: community." 9/16/02 Like Sassafrass in the comments to this post, Doc notes that while he is Instapundit's equal in the myelin ecosystem, he has just 10% of the traffic. All links are not created equal. 9/20/02
Rick Bruner points out that he articulated the linking implications of Metcalfe's law in his 1998 book Net Results. Rick's 1998 formula needs one more variable: links work far better when made to sites/content capable of linking back. That's what turns a jumble of blogs into a network and really makes the traffic dynamo hum.)

Digging it
I'm fascinated by "thin media" -- news sites staffed by 0.25 to 1.5 writers.

Matt Drudge was the first thin media mogul. He eschewed reporting and sought to distill, popularize, accelerate and aggregate other sites' stories.

Drudge was expected to ride Clinton's coattails into obscurity. Instead, he's stronger than ever and has spawned 100s of other thin media link-peddlers, each finding a progressively tighter niche to itch.

Cougars in South Wales, animal sacrifice rituals, an orange orb, Berkeley weirdos... Weird Files is a fascinating front for Ken Layne's print syndication business. Gizmodo's doing its thing with million-color printers, combadges, camera phones, portable hard drives for photogs and 1cm thick mini-disk players. Romenesko's MediaNews links a FOIA about FOIAs, Bradlee on Neuharth, and Trudeau on Doonesbury. Rough & Tumble links Orange County crime, Davis signs law against burglary tool, and Santa Cruz officials fume over medical pot club bust. And ScienceBlog touts Dust-sized chips, electronic cars, and synthetic diamond film.

Although all are blogs, each eschews personal anecdote, agenda or banter and sticks to the new.

Style books differ. Rough & Tumble knocks out one to four straight sentences. Gizmodo holds the line at two sentences, with an occasional Economistic twist. ScienceBlog and WeirdFiles introduce adjectives and storytelling. MediaNews adds quotations and reax. Meanwhile, Drudge cooks on with his griddle of hot headlines.

Other great examples: Obscure Store, LAExaminer,Arts & Letters Daily...

My favorite style would mix them all depending on post and then occasionally add some well-flagged editorializing. I can't think of anyone publishing in just that style, actually.

Editorializing: Why is it worth writing about thin media at 5.50 AM EST? Because there will be 100s of thousands more of these things in just a couple years. The sooner the model is perfected, the sooner it can MIRV. And (cue commercial) Blogads classifieds will power their cash registers.

(In theory, other layers of thin media should materialize as traditional publishing constructs dematerialize, right? BlogCMS is already well-populated. Sekimori is carving out a design reputation. Nothing Special and Hostmatters have nice hosting practices. Sitemeter and Extreme Tracking keep score. Will ambitious bloggers ever hire elite editors to probe for excellence? Itinerant blog copy editors? What else are we missing?)

Time lever
Doc Searles writes: "Blogging for me is a way to leverage time in the extreme. For worthwhile-ness per unit of effort (say, per keystroke), blogging kicks ass more than anything else I've ever done." I agree. Blogging is somehow the virtuous twin of spam -- cheap, text, mass communication that is (nonetheless) non-obtrusive, personalized, contextualized and pursuasive.

Two's company, 250 is a...
Ray Ozzie looks at the way his Groove groupware is being used. "Approximately 35% of shared spaces are between a single pair of individuals, 60% of shared spaces are between 3 and 25 individuals, and 5% of shared spaces have more than 25 individuals. Amazingly to me - given the design center of the UI - I found that within this 5% there are actually hundreds of spaces with 100-250 members each; I'd surely never have expected this. One other incredibly fascinating tidbit: 25% apparently use shared spaces with only themselves as a member, using Groove as a 'briefcase' to transparently and securely synchronize files across multiple computers that they own - e.g. Office documents being synchronized between home and office PCs." (Fun stuff, but shouldn't these percentages = 100?)

The blog as a social tool
A BT-funded study of mobile telephone use says that "gossip" accounts for 2/3 of human conversation, and then looks at the mobile phone as a gossip tool. Plenty of observations can be ported to blogs. I'll quote just a couple here:

Texting [SMS] is particularly important in maintaining contact with a wide social network - allows us to maintain social bonds even when we do not have the time, energy, inclination or budget for calls or visits. Texting re-creates the brief, frequent, spontaneous 'connections' with members of our social network that characterised the small communities of pre-industrial times.
...

In the fast-paced and fragmented modern world, social bonding through gossip becomes even more important - but also more difficult. We no longer live in the kind of small, close-knit tribes or communities for which we are 'designed' by our evolutionary heritage, where we would naturally be in daily contact with the members of our social network. Our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer brains, hard-wired for constant grooming-talk with a tightly integrated kinship and friendship network, are struggling to cope with the social isolation of modern urban life. Most of us no longer enjoy the cosiness of a gossip over the garden fence. We may not even know our neighbours' names, and communication is often limited to a brief, slightly embarrassed nod, if that.

Telephones have helped to alleviate some of the stresses caused by fragmented modern lifestyles, but before the advent of mobiles most of us were severely restricted in both the quantity and quality of communication with our social network.

Just as a cellular phone is portable in space, a blog is portable in time -- it waits patiently for new users to come along and then imparts our message. (Found in the October issue of The Atlantic.)

Saudis censor swimming suits online (among other things)
A study of Saudi censorship shows limits on information about women's advances, writes the NYTimes. "The 'Women in American History' section of Encyclopaedia Britannica Online (www.women.eb.com), which summarizes the women's rights movement from 1600 to the present, is blocked. IVillage (ivillage.com), a popular American advice and support site for women, is also blacklisted." Other blacklisted sites: www.rollingstone.com, www.wbr.com, www.seznam.cz, www.theonion.com, and www.ifrance.com See most of the list here. The study notes that "28 pages were blocked from Yahoo's Swimming & Diving category." Interesting that no bloggers made the list.

Blog subscriptions
Newly launched Blog Network charges you $3 a month to access its stable of blogs and publish your own. Bloggers get 50% of the take in proportion to their traffic. It's a creative hybrid of hosting, subscriptions and revenue sharing. The post and comments over at Bill Quick's site summarize the pros and cons.

My take: the blogmachine's atomic-fusion-like power comes from cramming many minds into an open space and letting them interact with fervid recklessness. Barriers or impedances sap this power, so participants will find balancing public versus exclusive content to be a delicate job.

If enough people joined, the math might work. Assuming 1000 bloggers and 9,000 subscribers join, bloggers get to split a pot of $15,000 a month. A power law distribution (the norm for site traffic distribution) would yield roughly these results: 1 blogger gets $4,000 (net $3997), 10 get $400 (net $397), 100 get $40 (net $37), 1000 get $3 (netting 0.) The question for the 999 bloggers who don't get to net $3997 will be, of course, what opportunity for ad revenue or fame has been lost by putting their best content inside the walled garden?

(8/29/02: Over at Bill Quick's blog, the debate about the Blogging Network rages on like some Arizona forest fire. There's also a good debate at Blogroots. I'm excited that Bill is now a Blogad beta user, selling his own ads. On her own blog, Joanne Jacobs tosses lukewarm water on any blogger's chance of making money, then admits that both ideas tempt her. It's early days for blogonomics. 8/30/02: Ken Layne notes, "I've already got a premium/free system. I sell articles and columns to publishers for money, and write for fun on this here site. And there's a nice overlap -- almost everything I've written for publication in the last year is the result of editors reading this site and offering some paying work." And more Bill Quick readers battle each other over the issue here and here. 9/03/02 Bryan Preston compares Blogads to the Blogging Network. And I noticed that the Blogging Network provides a (new?) interesting page full of blogbites about remunerative blogging. I wonder why no mention of Blogonomics? Dave Copeland's pre-launch thoughts about the network. Joanne Jacobs reports $0.30 for her first two days in the network. Not bad, since the membership is still small; but so is the competition. 9/06/02 John Scalzi notes, "A fair chunk of my income comes from people who found out about me through material on this site," so putting information behind a fire-wall wouldn't be worth risk.)

Barking up the wrong tree?
An estimated $236 billion will be spent this year in the US on traditional print, broadcast, radio and online advertising.

Frustrated that their money is being wasted, some advertisers are resorting to hiring models to infiltrate us with their products. Here are some other wacked promotions: "Procter & Gamble sent out a trailer of elegant, air- conditioned Porta Potties, complete with hardwood floors and aromatherapy candles, to state fairs last summer to extol the virtues of Charmin toilet paper. Bottled-water producer Evian paid to repair a run-down public pool in the London neighborhood of Brixton and tile the bottom with its brand name — a message that was hard to miss for passengers flying in and out of nearby Heathrow Airport."

Umm. Why not spend some of the $236 billion on media that people actually shout about?
Hint. Hint. Hint.
Hint. Hint.
Hint.

Street-posters and the community
Cory Doctorow writes: "when I was a kid, I used to go downtown and peel off (expired) street-posters and save them in a scrap-book as a record of all the events and shows happening in my city." A unique chronicle of a community's stream of conscious vanishes with each trash can of ephemera.