Jay Niemann writes: “This Weblog is an experiment in grassroots entrepreneurship. Specifically, it concerns the sale of unusual vinyl records.”

Meanwhile, Ken Layne launches a blog called Weird Files to promote print syndication of his columns about weirdness, specifically UFOs, crop circles and Black Helicopters.

And Ben Sullivan is promoting his Blogads by advising buyers, “If you’re selling something, I’ll keep your ad up until it gets sold, or you tire of all the responses you receive. Something I called Guaranteed Classifieds.”

The Washington Post reports: In the early days, when Starbucks “had little advertising money, it used its storefronts as billboards and clustered them close together. The goals: to intercept consumers on their way to work or home or anywhere in between, and to build brand awareness through ubiquity.” Today, 1 in 3 Starbucks is cannibalizing a neighboring Starbucks’ sales, but those sales recover within a year. (Via Obscure Store.)

By creating blog metadata standards, the BlogMD Initiative hopes to make it easier for readers to find bloggers and for bloggers to find each other.

Jeff Jarvis writes: “The bottom line is that entertainment and media can build a new, more profitable and efficient bottom line if only they let the audience help them. They can eliminate many of the middlemen. … Some companies will wise up and prosper. And many new companies and relationships will grow; I see huge opportunity in creating new collections of talent, new ways to produce, and new ways to distribute.” (Via Matt Welch.)

Here’s the first report of a marriage proposal precipitated by a blog. I’ve speculated before about the potential for blogs to cannibalize conventions, clubs, churches, corporations, and cities,… but I didn’t think about singles bars. (Via Instapundit.)

Mark Pilgrim writes: “I am consistently getting over 200 referrals a day from people searching [Google] for Ellen Feiss, a query for which I have ranked in the top 10 for the past 3 weeks when I discovered the Ellen Feiss store and an assortment of fan sites.” Six thousand unique visitors a month for one topic: many publishers would kill for aggregate readership like that.

Tara Sue Grubb, 26, is being hailed as the “first congressional candidate with a weblog.” She doesn’t offer a bio and doesn’t like linking, whether to other ideas or other community organizations or individuals. She doesn’t mention her opponent by name. And she writes things like “Prudent followership in a leader yields prudent leadership for the people.”

Well, we’ve got to start somewhere, I guess. I like the boldness of Dave Winer’s claim that “in five years every member of the US House will have a weblog and will be communicating directly with the electorate.” That may be true. But Dave doesn’t state the corollary: 98% of Congress will be new before every member blogs. These old dogs just won’t blog, or at least do it naturally enough to convince the public. Furthermore, the political infrastructure that manufactures Congressmen also will have to be junked/rewired.

Building new markets takes decades. (See prior post.) Unless armed with guillotines or AK40s, revolutions are the same.

(8/26/02: Dave has worked up a new site that includes a blogroll to Grubb’s opponent.)

Dave Winer writes: “Ten years isn’t enough time to create a new market.”

Using Blogrolling, I just added a link to Hylton Jolliffe on my personal blog. I then went to Blogrolling’s “latest links” page, where Jolliffe was now The Latest Link. Amazing to see the synapses wire in real time. (Time-stamps would be nice addition.)

Continuing to fulminate against blogs earning advertising or commission revenues, Dave Winer writes: “I can’t believe people still think that advertising and commissions on catalog sales have anything to do with this medium. That’s so ink-stained and so wrong.”