Munching on Cherrios this morning, I expressed my joy that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who I’ve admired ever since reading intrigued by Blogshares.

My wife, always good at bringing me back to earth, asked: “Remind me why blogging is such a big deal?”

I gulped. “Well, for the first time in human history any one of 600 million people has the technical ability to communicate immediately with the other 599,999,999 people. That’s fantastic and amazing. But we need a way to sort out who is who and what is what among all those people and messages. So now different systems are evolving to help us sort. Blogshares sorts by helping people see who other people have ‘invested’ in. Blogrolling lets us see who other people like to read and support. And Blogads sorts by letting audience see who has paid to be heard. None of these systems are perfect, but our speed and quality of filtering and communication are definitely increasing.”

I went back to munching my Cherrios. At night, I’ve been plowing through “Six degrees” another network book. Bottom line, as in the booksLinked and Emergence, weird and powerful things happen when groups of individuals link together and form networks. (I’m still trying to understand what a “percolating hub” is, though. Anyone have any clues?)

BTW, if you have a service or product to advertise, Blogshares ads are a SCREAMINGb bargain right now. Spend $110 and your ad will be seen a couple of million times this month and couple of those views will probably be Pierre Omidyar. Order before the price doubles.

Steve Outing: “Web sites of public newspaper companies averaged $7.93 in annual revenue per unique visitor — compared to more than double that for pure-play online companies that operate competitive services, such as Monster.com, eBay, and AutoTrader.com. Within the newspaper group, per-visitor revenues varied widely — from close to zero all the way up to $44.”

New report says average wage in Massachusetts dropped 5% in the last year.

How well are Google Adwords technology working in the new “contextual” advertising campaign? Badly, Marketing Sherpa says. “Generally newsy, how-to, and highly targeted articles on niche sites tend to get far better ad clicks than newsgroups, bulletin boards, general interest sites, or stagnant info pages. Unfortunately Google didn’t take this factor into consideration when designing the program. They chose the partner sites for contextual ads mainly based on traffic (sites had to have more than 20-million pageviews a month, which very few niche sites do) and “quality” which seems to mean being G-rated.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout me”… more ineluctable proof that Ken Layne is a genius. (Do Ken’s bandwidth a favor and rightclick/save the song, since you are gonna want to listen to it hourly.)