Business Week on blog advertising

A well done overview by Lauren Gard. Headline: the Business of Blogging, subhead: Explosive growth means Web logs are suddenly in Madison Avenue’s sights.

Just a year ago, blogs were viewed as a collection of off-the-cuff ramblings in cyberspace read mainly by online devotees. Then, as the election season heated up, bloggers gained new prominence, writing up-to-the-minute news and politics nuggets that the mainstream media struggled to match. Suddenly, millions of Americans were turning to political blogs such as instapundit.com and journalist Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. And blogs about everything from art-world gossip to macroeconomics are drawing audiences, too. A new medium, though still a work in progress, is coming into being.