Steven Johnson, author of Swarm, has created a punchy campaign ad for Clark that would look great as a blogad. Good size, good emphasis on witty use of words and images. Which campaign will be the first to recognize the explosive and cost-effective potential of advertising on blogs?

Joe Queenan:“…it is true that residents of the New York area wake up every morning and turn on their radios to find out if the bridges to Manhattan are still standing. This is certainly no treat. But at least they do so knowing that if the bridges are still standing they can go across them and look at the Vermeers. Or the van Goghs. Or the Yankees. In Raleigh, if the bridges are still standing, the only thing you can do is go across them to Durham.” The creativity formula he’s poking fun at is here.

Josh Marshall publishes an unbroken string of 100+ questions & answers from a White House Press conference this morning. This is the kind of “I publish, you decide” journalism that can only appear on a blog. In juxtaposition to the sound bites published by traditional media, this is a factual banquet. Finally, the message is the message.

Our Y-guides campout was derailed, so we drove over the Wrightsville beach Saturday. Inland, rain was pouring down from huge black cloud banks, but the beach was sundrenched. We found a dead Jelly bomb jelly fish and enjoyed bouncing in the surf near Johnnie Mercer’s Pier. My son improvised a javelin-style throw and enjoyed tossing the baseball 20 yards. Madamoiselle enjoyed bucking deeper waves. We slept at the Sleep Inn and ate at Elizabeth’s Pizza — one of those family-run strip-mall restaurants plastered with exhuberant framed paintings/photos of Italian tourist attractions, plastic covered menus, everyone having fun, huge fish tanks separating the tables and the ceiling strewn with christmas tree lights.

When I lived in London in 1984 — a strange year of drinking ale with Cockney bond traders and sniffing port and the country air with my posh boss and his wife — I also developped a strong affection for the music of Robert Palmer, particularly his album Double Fun. I put on that CD a couple of weeks back and was sucked out into the sea of memory.

So when I saw today that Robert Palmer had died of a heart attack, I didn’t at first connect. Damn, gone at 54. I’m gonna get out that album, or maybe Riptide, right now.

Writes the New York Press: blogs “will disappear when some of the more high-profile bloggers’those who came up from nothing with a will to write, not those high-vis journos who slummed in the freeform’find jobs in the mainstream press, where they clearly thirst to be. Their sites will atrophy, and the left-behinders will become bitter, scream ‘sellout’ and lose interest. The blog is a dead form within two years.”

I wonder how writers like Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, Ed Cone, Amy Langfield, Virginia Postrel, Megan McArdle, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Welch and Liz Spiers — “made” print journalists who also love to blog and have bigger audiences than many print magazine publishers — fit into the NYPress’s projection of “atrophying” blogs?

These bloggers don’t seem to be fading, but rather finding new joy (and scoops) in blogging. Speaking as someone who spent seven years in the trenches of journalism, I’d bet there are more journalists yearning for freedom beyond print than bloggers yearning for the corporate harness.

David Rushkoff: “Content only matters in an interactive space or even the real world, I’d argue, because it gives us an excuse to interact with one another.” (Via Scott Knowles.)

I’m proud to know these guys. Listen.

(By sheer coincidence, Blogads’ main server is named magpie, a species in the corvid family.)

A little greed is a good thing, but this is ridiculous.

Jason Calacanis has announced Weblogsinc, “a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.” The resulting network, Calacanis says, will make easier for business readers to find information. That might happen. Might.

But who is going to write these blogs? “Our goal is to partner with individual webloggers, letting them do what they do best (writing, creating community, researching) while supporting them with what we do best (upgrading the software that drives their Web site, generating revenue, running the business). We split the profits 50/50 with each of our bloggers taking out only hard costs (i.e., sales commissions, credit card fees).”

That’s 50% of the profits after hardware costs and sales commissons are paid. So, assuming sales commissions are 30%… for every $10,000 in advertising revenue, a blogger will get let’s say… hmm… $2000?

Sounds like Calacanis has basically replicated the cost structure of traditional media, minus the printing presses.

There’s no room for blog owners/managers, unless the owner and operator are one and the same. As Calacanis himself has already moralized about the defection from Gawker of blogger Liz Spiers, bloggers who are employed by blogs are easily tempted by other offers.

Why join Calacanis’ keritsu when a whole portfolio of best-of-breed services is already alive and constantly evolving. Relying on the blogosphere for network traffic, Movable Type and pMachine for blogging technology and Blogads for ad sales, the same blogger could keep $8000, less some Paypal fees.

This is THIN media; lightweight tools, extreme specialization, rampant collaboration, swarming individuals, ad hoc decision-making… lots of small pieces loosely joined, as Dave Weinberger put it so nicely. (Via Buzzmachine.) Update: some good context from Wired.

World War I cost France 1,357,800 dead, 4,266,000 wounded (of whom 1.5 million were permanently maimed) and 537,000 made prisoner or missing — exactly 73% of the 8,410,000 men mobilized, according to William Shirer in The Collapse of the Third Republic. Some context: France had 40 million citizens at the start of the war; six in ten men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were permanently maimed.