Mark Nickolas, the visionary campaign manager who last year bought Blogads for congressional candidate Ben Chandler and made a 40-fold return on the investment, has launched a new venture: www.bluegrassreport.org

Lots of traffic for Gilligan’s Pie-fight.

And it looks like the Audi A3 “Heist” viral campaign was a big success. See some blogads from that here.

Shankar Gupta of Media Post does a great job summing up the new mininetworks bloggers are launching.

Though this didn’t make it into the article, Shankar was interested in the “folksonomies” angle of these networks, since the bloggers themselves build/maintain the categorical groupings rather than relying any third-party authority wielding some Platonic taxonomy. (Wikipedia defines folksonomy as “a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories, noted because it is almost completely unlike traditional formal methods of faceted classification.”)

The right word hasn’t yet emerged to describe the bottom-up aspect of these blogger-organized networks — mininets, nanonetworks, ad hoc networks, blogger networks? Maybe “folk networks” or “folknets” captures the spirit?

To remind you, here are the networks currently running:
NewYawkers
Sports
Gay
College hoops
Baseball
Evangelicals
New England Entertainment
Food blogs
LA
Philly
Economics
North Carolina
TV
Liberals
Republican Women
Law
Gossip
Music
Gadgets
Liberal women

More on the pathetic attempts by Old Media to prove its relevance to “The Youth” by buying ads… on Old Media?

Meanwhile, (via Buzzmachine) Starcom’s Rishad Tobaccowala says the disintegration and disintermediation of media means (effective) ad prices are going to rise.

Fragmentation and consumer control will drive the cost of digital media upwards by 20 to 30 percent annually over the next several years, predicts Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe Media and president of SMG Next.

“At some stage it becomes more expensive to buy Google than to buy network television,” said Tobaccowala, citing the pay-per-click auction environment and the costs of re-aggregating audiences once reached via a single network TV buy.

Tobaccowala spoke about the challenges facing media buyers at an online advertising conference in San Francisco this week.

“Less and less are you going to have products that are very broad-based,” he said. “We have a different economic model for our television-based plans, and a different one for the re-aggregated plans, and the second one costs 10 times as much.”

Tobaccowala also predicts media buyers will simply have to pay more to capture people’s attention in an increasingly consumer-controlled culture.

“The cost of getting someone’s attention is going to go up much, much more,” he warned.

Here’s a related thought:

perversely, virtually free and infinite ad space is not necessarily good news for advertisers. As volume increases, the cost of being heard rises even faster. The ad classics ‘ banner, button ‘ have been stretched into 15 shapes and sizes, ranging from the ‘microbar’ (88×33) to the ‘wide skyscraper’ (160X600). But even with this new artillery deployed the basic problem remains: traditional metrics for purchasing advertising like ‘demographics,’ ‘frequency,’ ‘share of voice’ and ‘reach’ are becoming obsolete; so what if you can reach 80% of the males age 20 to 25 ten times a day for free if every competitor and his brother can do the same? In short, traditional advertising strategies for getting and holding the consumer’s attention may become as futile as inflating a zeppelin with a bicycle pump.

A great Friend of Blogads, Brian Clark, has redesigned his company’s GMDStudios to highlight the flawed essence of marketing and his own efforts as a marketer. I love the tipped test tubes and spilled ink. “We have ten years experience with having a hard time explaining what we do here at GMDStudios.”

Chatting with Brian today, who has a few fingers in indie film, he pointed me to The Next TV Network, powered by your computer and mine.

Blogging about Turner Broadcasting’s Gilligan’s Island pie-fight ad, Markos Moulitsas writes:

congratulations — the more people have bitched about the ad, the more successful it has become. It is now the most successful ad in the history of this site, with close to 8,000 click throughs over the low-traffic weekend. And, now that you have demanded I respond to the ad, thousands more will click through to see what the big deal is all about.

Sometimes, the best way to kill something you disagree with is to ignore it.

Reminds me a little of the time The New Republic got tremendous discussion when Markos rejected the magazine’s blogad. Sometimes the echos are far louder than the original retort.

Adding new servers last week, one key script was omitted. This meant that we significantly undercounted impressions on many blogs. We corrected the error this morning, and counts should be back to normal by the end of this week. I apologize for the error.

I saw Arianna Huffington on CSPAN this morning. I’d met her briefly a few weeks ago, but have never heard her talk at length. On CSPAN she was eloquent and on message, doing a great job of avoiding booby traps strewn by her callers on the left and right.

Arianna talked at length about her new fully-catered blogging cruise ship, the www.huffingtonpost.com, which debuted in May and features the posts of 400-odd Hollywood stars, planets, moons and astroids. Some of these folks don’t know how to use a computer, Arianna said, and HP makes it easier for them to express their thoughts in real time.

Arianna said she’s creating an entire business infrastructure — with offices in NY and LA — to support (aka bleed) the venture. Sounds like she’s drafting rules too. Arianna was asked about her views on anonymous sources. She said, in essence, “No way we’ll allow anonymous sources in the HuffingtonPost.” (Does this mean Arianna will be acting as an editor, something that may eventually rile those 400 headstrong stars?)

That declaration notwithstanding, a good chunk of airtime was devoted to revelling in the fact that the New York Times picked up on HP’s “scoop” yesterday: “*** Exclusive*** IS PARAMOUNT READY TO PULL THE PLUG ON CRUISE AND ‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III”?”

Getting into the office, I checked. Yep, the source for yesterday’s Huffington Post Cruise scoop was anonymous, her identity not even hinted at. This was a classic “we have learned…” lede.

Update: is my hearing completely distorted? Arianna e-mails: “I definitely did not say I would not allow anonymous sourcing at the Huffington Post. Of course I will and have in the Tom Cruise story. And I praised the anonymous sourcing in Deep Throat. And I said I hoped the wall-to-wall coverage of Deep Throat would encourage anonymous leaks from inside the administration on Iraq and how long they plan to stay there. What I took issue with was the widespread use of anonymous sourcing that, as the New York Times ombudsman has also argued, has led to so many false stories, as in the WMD leading up to the war.” In theory, the video is here javascript:playClip(‘rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/wj060205_huffington.rm’) but I can’t get it to work, even using the CSPAN-mandatory Real Media player. Can you?

Update 2: Finally got the video to work. Section begins at 2 minutes and 15 seconds. The host asks: “Should journalists be allowed to use anonymous sources?” Arianna answers, “Well I’m very much against the use of anonymous sources unless there’s some compelling public interest and I believe that was the case with Mark Felt and Watergate. Yes, absolutely.” To be fair, though the answer sounded fairly categorical, Arianna was answering a question about journalists, not bloggers. And Arianna is obviously the only authority on her own beliefs and rules about blogging at the HuffingtonPost.

Perhaps she thinks that bloggers have a lower threshold for sourcing than journalists, since obviously Cruise’s fate in Mission Impossible III has no compelling public interest, at least on the scale of Watergate or Iraq. My point is not to pillory the HuffingtonPost nor (just) to have fun, but to highlight how quickly blogging can take on the institutional burdens of journalism — rule parsing, nitpicking, ombudsmanizing — when it rises above the level of an individual accountability and conscience.

(To be clear on my own views: HP’s sourcing was good enough for Hollywood gossip. Indeed, anonymous sources are a crucial part of journalism and the informational osmosis that makes societies function. When people (journalists/bloggers/gossips) rely on anonymous sources who are untruthful or so strongly biased that the story disintegrates on further investigation, the quoter, rather than the concept of anonymity, should lose credibility.)

Hmm, maybe HP will need to hire an ombudsman to explain self-contradictions and variations from the internal style book. More darn overhead. Ed: or maybe you need an ombudsman Henry?

Business logic aside, I’ve been vaguely uncertain what role this 400-strong Hollywood cast-party would play in the blogging ecoysystem, a place dominated at the top by experts, insiders, lawyers, mavens, Phds, business executives… and lots of plain old folks with grassroots opinions and experience not otherwise traditionally captured by corporate publishing hierarchy. But now I realize the HP may destined to become a real-time Vanity Fair/People magazine cum autobiography, covering Hollywood from the inside out. The Cruise scoop may suggest a promising future for HP.

Putting on my hat as a citizen journalist, I’ve dropped Arianna a line asking about the anonymous sourcing contradiction. I will keep you my loyal three readers (hi Mom!) informed.

Oops, I almost forgot to say: Unfolding!!!

Blogs cover every angle and orifice of American culture, so it is fitting that blog advertisers should exhuberantly reach for the same highs and lows.

Yesterday, I blogged about the blogad for academic theorist Camille Paglia’s poetry book.

Today, we’ve got Ginger and Maryanne thrashing each other in a Gilligan’s Island reality TV show pie-fight, courtesy of Turner Broadcasting (one of the first advertisers to push the envelope, with last year’s much-discussed Sex and the City blogad.)

Also today, covering another essential and under-covered angle of American culture, we’ve got a ticklish CareerBuilder ad featuring the Idiot Boss.

The Wall Street Journal features Glenn Reynolds writing about the changing news business news business. Glenn sees himself as an anchorman for a new kind of news network:

On my own InstaPundit.com weblog, I feature firsthand reports, often with photos, from places like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. My “correspondents” are correspondents in the original sense — people who correspond — rather than in the modern sense of people with good hair and a microphone. Other bloggers have broken stories from Iraq (involving both alleged war crimes by U.S. troops and large anti-terror marches left uncovered by American media), from the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and from Canada’s government corruption scandals.

Glenn slips in a nice plug for Blogads.