Washington Post’s media pundit writes: “It seems this morning that bloggers have taken over the world. Or at least the 2004 presidential campaign. Or at least the not-so-invisible primary leading up to the campaign. The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging. Who needs television? Let’s just eliminate the middleman.” (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Josh Marshall wracked up 1.4 million page views in March. Indricotheriums beware, the grass is being eating from beneath your toes. (Via Mr. Jolliffe.)

Andrew Sullivan writes: “March was another record traffic month: 1.88 million visits to the site from almost half a million separate people. 2.5 million page views. But my favorite piece of data is from Alexa.com. They rank websites, and like most such rankings, they’re fallible, so don’t put too much weight on this little piece of information. But according to Alexa, this site is now neck and neck, in traffic terms, with the Nation. In fact, the very latest data show this site just ahead of the Nation: we were ranked 6,116 Monday; they were ranked 8,728. No, I’m not putting out a full-fledged magazine, but the more you think about that simple statistic, the more remarkable it is. This site didn’t exist three years ago; the Nation has been around for a century. This site, thanks to you, is comfortably in the black with no debt. The Nation has bled money for decades, as most such magazines do. Moreover, compare the stats for last month with the same month a year ago: we had 805,000 visits in March 2002 and 1,880,000 in March 2003.”

Business 2.0 figures out that proto-blogger Matt Drudge is getting rich. Drudge has the highest ROI in online media, strike that, any media, strike that, any business other that’s legal. (Via Hylton Jolliffe and Nick Denton.)

The genius of Drudge’s model is very, very, old news, but Business 2.0’s math is good.

Unfortunately, big media won’t be able to copy Drudge’s model. The DNA just isn’t right. As I wrote previously, “as commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit the new environment.”

‘We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices,’ Drudge said in his 1998 speech to an assembly of sneering National Press Club members. As usual, Drudge was first with the story.

Matt Welch, who coined the term warblog in 2001, has seen Google referals for the term jump from 27 in February to 942 in March.

Testing Nick Denton’s new Vonage line, I called his number and got a crisp connection.

I asked Nick how the tech blog he publishes, Gizmodo, is doing. He said traffic is growing 50% a month and is currently at 6,000 page impressions a day… with no marketing expenditure.

“We’ve sold a ton of Samsung phones” recently through Amazon affiliate links, he said. There are good days but also “long dry spells,” he said. When page views get to 15,000 a day, the site will add banners, Nick said.

Nick thinks Gizmodo could do 100,000 page impressions a day in 12-18 months. At that point, relative to its cost “in the very low thousands per month,” Gizmodo will be a “remarkably profitable little media.” Nick figures that a blog publisher can buy 200 posts for $1000, whereas a print publisher might pay the same money for just three freelance articles.

Based on what he’s learned from Gizmodo, Nick is planning a blog focused on New York high society. Real estate ads will be a prime revenue source. “The advertisers target old money in the New York Observer. We’ll serve the advertisers targetting the young money,” he said.

“We’re getting the formula refined for thin media.” If he could identify the right niches and locales, Nick said, “I’d love to launch one of these a month.”

Newspaper columnist James Lileks describes how he felt when the paper’s Internet connection broke and he was unable to read blogs:
“I felt cut off from the world. It was as if my window had been bricked up. I needed to know what was going on out there. Keep in mind that I had this feeling in a newspaper, where I had access to every wire service on the planet.” Yep, reading the news without blog context is like listening to an old Sony portable radio versus sitting in the midst of an orchestra. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Clay Shirky writes: “Weblogs aren’t a form of micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary. One obvious response is to restore print economics by creating artificial scarcity: readers can’t read if they don’t pay. However, the history of generating user fees through artificial scarcity is grim. Without barriers to entry, you will almost certainly have high-quality competition that costs nothing. This leaves only indirect methods for revenue. Advertising and sponsorships are still around, of course. There is a glut of supply, but this suggests that over time advertising dollars will migrate to the Web as a low-cost alternative to traditional media.”

If you write something long enough, people will draw diametrically opposed lessons. Jeff Jarvis reads the same post as “very depressing to the community of bloggers.”

My view: the pie for professional writers is going to get lots bigger.

Doc Searles writes: “I already have a dependency on Google News, without which I wouldn’t have found the last three links in the item above.”

Me too. Noogle makes writing about the news a completely different and more interesting game.

In months of scouting, I’ve never found a Drudge with a business focus. Now this page serves me.

You can do the same yourself with agriculture, sex, the NFL. But why not get more specific? There’s the Cleveland Browns, mutiple sclerosis, NRA or even the Google itself.

Of course, Google can probably never (in the next five years?) filter out the crud and provide the necessary context. Which leaves a huge amount of room for bloggers to add value.

Noogle may create a wonderful opportunity for bloggers to refine and interpret the spew of news. Energy that went into crawling the web can now be devoted entirely to thinking and writing about the product of that crawling.

Millionaire and aspiring LA publishing mogul Dick Riordan is a “rebel without a blog,” quips this article.

Hell, why doesn’t Riordan stop putzing around and just pay the LAEXAMINER team $300,000 a year to cover five journo salaries? Three scribes would report, with the other two copyediting and blogging.

Riordan could be battering the LAT next week rather than sometime in 2004. He could turn a profit quicker with far lower risk and, more importantly, have a bigger impact on LA life.

(Looking for further thoughts on the idiocy of funding a newpaper rather than a weblog swat team, Riordan should read this post, and this, and… in fact, he should read this whole blog.)