Now I can keep an eye on Biz and buddies.

Richard Luckett, who handles marketing for leftish vendor Agitproperties, has been one of our most creative advertisers, running a series of humorous ads on Atrios and now DailyKos. Richard called me up last night to rave about how well things are going. This morning he reprised his comments by e-mail:

Businesses and ad agencies that dismiss blogs and blog ads are nuts! Blogads are absolutely phenomenal. Compared with print ads we’ve run in the Village Voice, blogads target our exact demographic and give four times the ‘bang-for-buck.’ You are keeping our fulfillment guy extremely busy. Bloggers put us on the map and blogads are definitely keeping us there.

Advertisers should study Agitproperties’ strategy. Update your ad text and image often. Be cheeky. Be exhuberant. Use some html tags. Know your audience. Keep some pitches inside. And put your fulfillment guy on overtime.

Here are the components of the ad Richard is running today:

Ho Ho Faux!

What better way to enjoy a cup of holiday cheer than in our 12 oz. FAUX NEWS coffee mug in “Hannity’s Heart” black?

See it, along with our infamous FOX-baiting O’REILLY YOUTH tee, our world-famous FAUX NEWS tee, our timely Got Allies? tee, way-cool TED RALL stuff and more at agitproperties.com – for the unrepentant Leftists on your gift list.

“Dear Mom, today I had a problem in school….” Unbelievable. Makes me want to vomit. (Via Volokh.)

Jeff Jarvis, vigorous blogger and president of Advance.net, writes “I’ll bet you’ll be seeing weblogs from The Times sooner than you think…. ”

Jeff is the smartest and best-wired publisher I know. But what the heck, I’ll take your bet Jeff, if you’ll accept some tweaking.

There are tremendous barriers, both psychic and fiscal, to NYT truly blogging.

NYT may allow journalists to publish some reverse-chronological, lite-edited, almost-real-time, time-stamped online news. But this is not really blogging and it won’t achieve the desired impact: more wattage and page impressions.

I’ll bet $20 that if or when NYT “blogs,” each new “blog” will omit at least five out of the following eight blog characteristics:

* strong opinions
* a sprinkle of personal details from the blogger’s life
* a blogroll
* an independent traffic counter
* a unique domain name
* the blogger’s photo
* some snark
* lots of links to other blogs and news sources

These are the ingredients that give blogs ten times more readers per keystroke than conventional journalism. Without the individualistic impulse that makes blogging great, NYT’s blogs will be Frankensteins… all the meat but none of the spirit.

OK, so those are the psychic barriers. Now the financial.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says he’s “startled” to learn the NYT has more readers daily online than in print. He thinks this trend will impel NYT to start blogging.

Well, if Professor Rosen had been reading this very blog rather than the Times, he’d have learned about the traffic milestone in October of 2002. But, although other media repeated the news, the NYTimes still hasn’t written online or in print about the startling milestone or highlighted it to investors.

Like Professor Rosen, NYT shareholders will be startled too, I think. And concerned. Concerned that NYTimes.com reaches more people than the print journal, but, because of a vastly more competitive environment, achieves less than 3% of print’s revenues.

Which brings up the show-stopping question NYT shareholders will ask if management ever admits that 1/5 of a NYT journalist’s paid hours are devoted to blogging. “Why the h*ck are we dumping resources into such a low-margin business? How are we going to compete with passionate zero-overhead bloggers empowered by the blogosphere, the biggest traffic spinner since the cloverleaf?”

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see the NYTimes trying to sell blog impressions to advertisers. It will further legitimate blogs and reinforce the startling fact that blog advertising, unencumbered by publishing’s traditional cost structure, is 95% cheaper. I just don’t think NYT shareholders can stomach watching their company wade into a link-quagmire to battle 10,000 infopreneurs.

Steve Lohr’s recent NYT overview of “markets as conversations” failed to mention Cluetrain, but did mention an interesting document that I pursued further this morning.

MIT professor Eric von Hippel researches the ways that technology users may form de facto peer networks to innovate new functionalities and invent new dimensions of commerce and design. Von Hippel surveys fields ranging from pipe-hanging to windsurfing to open-source-software to mountain-biking and examines the conditions under which users rather than traditional manufacturers can lead the way via horizontal collaboration.

User innovation networks can function entirely independently of manufacturers when (1) at least some users have sufficient incentive to innovate, (2) at least some users have an incentive to voluntarily reveal their innovations, and (3) diffusion of innovations by users is low cost and can compete with commercial production and distribution. When only the first two conditions hold, a pattern of user innovation and trial and improvement will occur within user networks, followed by commercial manufacture and distribution of innovations that prove to be of general interest.

…

These user innovation networks have a great advantage over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years: they enable each using entity, whether an individual or a corporation, to develop exactly what it wants rather than being restricted to available marketplace choices or relying on a specific manufacturer to act as its (often very imperfect) agent. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed by others and freely shared within and beyond the user network.

Cool stuff.

He’ll need to add blogging to his list of subjects to study. This whole view of horizontal user innovation networks becomes particularly interesting (and recursive) when you start to think about users innovating in the creation of technology that drives the networking/innovation process itself. Think about it this way:

Anonymous blogger Atrios is now selling clever t-shirts saying “I am Atrios.”

Rick Bruner explains what the holidays look like for someone unburdened by child or dog. Scroll down to the November 24 entry on this page.

Pleased with the results from the first go-round, John Kerry’s campaign has re-ordered ads on Talkingpointsmemo, Atrios, PoliticalWire and Agonist. New ads ordered on Oliver Willis, Talkleft, Pandagon and NathanNewman.

Having gone nine months without a cold, I spent the night with that grating feeling in my nose and throat. Ugg. I guess I’ll drive over to Raleigh Thursday to see Virginia Postrel speak. 12:00-2:00 pm, Speech, Brownstone Hotel 1707 Hillsborough Ave.