A few months ago, folks worried that Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit blog had peaked. They shrugged off suggestions that the dip in traffic might be due to the holiday funk most sites experience.

Yesterday, Reynolds had , nearly triple what he was averaging in December. He’s on track to [url=http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=s11instapundit&report=33]double December’s visitor count.

The stampede of visitors is obviously fueled by the pending war with Iraq. But will peace (next week or next month we hope) erode Instapundit’s traffic?

My bet is no. Although Instapundit has been covered in dozens of general interest print and online articles, most people outside the blogosphere still haven’t heard of him. (None of my local friends remember hearing about the Knoxville blogging avatar, even though I mention him once a week.)

There’s lots of room to grow, both for Reynolds and other bloggers. I remember talking to some honcho at CNN.com in 1998, who explained that CNN.com traffic always hit new highs during big news events and then held that new level until more news came along to boost the site further. Other successful online publishers report the same ratchet effect.

To see this from another angle, Reynolds’ traffic seemed huge when he did 640,000 page views last June. Now, Instapundit is on track to do that number on a good day sometime this year.

This post from September 2002 offers a theory about some of the unique mechanics, beyond sharp thinking and swift writing, of blog traffic growth.

Living by the “own the niche and link like a banshee” rule, a slew of blogs — ranging from BoingBoing to Obscure Store to ScienceBlog to Gawker to Blogcritics — are riding the same sharp steady growth curve.

And, unlike traditional media like NYtimes.com and CNN.com and ersatz blogs like Always On, they are doing it part-time and/or with almost no overhead.

In reply to my critique of his business plan, former magazine editor and new blog entrepreneur Tony Perkins lashes back: “AO now has over 10,000 registered members, and we have only been up for a little more than a month.”

“You didn’t like my interview with sony’s idei? well, over 40,000 people did, and so did dozens of media outlets and blog sites around the world.”

“you think nick denton’s opinion counts? well, it’s nice that you put your faith in cowards. i used to hang out with that guy when he was a nobody, he then called me ‘unimpressive’ years later on his blog, then refuses to respond to my emails.”

(Yep, I do think Denton’s opinion counts. He’s one of the smartest people I know.)

Perkins continued: “i billed over $65,000 in my first month, against less than half of that much in expenses, so please don’t lose any sleep worrying about my business plan.”

“finally, if you don’t like AO v.5 (there IS a reason we call it that), wait for v.75 to be out soon, and brace yourself for v1.0 due this summer before you get too bitchy.”

Did my critique strike a nerve? Blogging offers a wonderful arena for testing your business idea against 100s or 1000s of other astute (and/or passionate) minds. I get the impression that Tony, apparently better at boasting and bashing than listening and learning, isn’t yet fully acclimated to blogdom’s give and take.

Tony, if you can take a break from interviewing some prospective advertiser, I’ve got one quick question: why wait to v1.0 to revise your allegiance to pompous and vapid headlines and untimely posts? You can disagree with everything else I’ve said, but please don’t tell me you are proud of these things.

Check out this flatulence at the top of today’s page: “Michael Dell’s 21st Century Vision: AlwaysOn’s Tony Perkins asked Michael Dell to tell us about Dell’s past, future, and present, and how he thinks technology will transform the world in the next ten years.” Posted last Wednesday, the article has been read 2507 times.

Gawker has been running photos of a mock Puma shoe ad that is sexually provacative.

Now Puma has sent Gawker a cease and desist letter. Elsewhere, Puma reps are arguing that a blog is “not a media outlet” and so not protected by the First Amendment. (Regardless of whether blogs are media, I’m sad to hear that someone from Puma thinks only the media that has a right to free speach.)

Gawker is sticking to its story.

James Lileks writes, “The newspaper where I work has one copy of every paper it’s published. One copy. It’s on microfilm, and it’s a fragile medium; half of the rolls are badly scratched, and the older ones are brittle. Most people consult them for the stories, but that’s only half the joy. The real news of the day, as it pertains to the lives of the people who bought the papers, were the ads. When I’m looking at the microfilm and I see an ad I like, I hit PRINT. These are some of the old curious ads, rescued from the dark coils.” (Via the inimitable BoingBoing.)

So on his site, Lileks has posted ads for sanitary cigars, wombat coats, the New All-Electric Freshman Equiphase radio, overalls for “short and fat” farmers, fresh cigarettes, the Whoopee Cap, Norge Rollator Refrigeration, Women’s Nonrationed Winter Boots… the list goes on and on and on.

“The real news of the day, as it pertains to the lives of the people who bought the papers, were the ads.” That’s a beautiful and almost-always-overlooked thought. Ads tell a vital story, narrating and nurturing our material life.

These vacuous banners and buttons we spend our todays avoiding don’t tell a story, they don’t engage. And they won’t last.

If you are buying Blogads, please feel free to upload an image, but please don’t forget to use some words too. Tell a story. Have some fun. And we’ll keep your ad for Lileks’ granddaughter to chuckle over.

(Speaking of telling stories with ads, check out the ad on Blogcritics.org for Half Mast, which is teasing readers with successive text snippets from the novel.)

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.)