Swimming practice beneath Niagara falls

Ok, beta Blogads are live on two sites: Techblog and Scifan. Many thanks to Ben Sullivan and Olivier Travers for taking the plunge with us. We’ve done beta testing with adstrips offline; these two niche sites are running the first fully public Blogads. In the next few days, once we’ve stomped out whatever glitches arise, we’ll roll out with a second group of betas with sites inside the blogging feedback whirlpool.

As software developers know, no amount of offline testing can compare with the raw fun of live usage. What features will people use, what will they ignore? Will you get one user the first week, or ten, or 100?

The additional challenge for companies aspiring to serve the blogging community en masse is how to launch a service and tweak it out of the limelight. Because the blogs are so interlinked and quick to assimilate new information, there is no Philadelphia audience to fine-tune your show on before opening on Broadway.

As Ben wrote us after posting his adstrip, “In the immortal words of Socrates, ‘I drank what?'” Our sentiments exactly.