I’m fascinated by “thin media” — news sites staffed by 0.25 to 1.5 writers.

Matt Drudge was the first thin media mogul. He eschewed reporting and sought to distill, popularize, accelerate and aggregate other sites’ stories.

Drudge was expected to ride Clinton’s coattails into obscurity. Instead, he’s stronger than ever and has spawned 100s of other thin media link-peddlers, each finding a progressively tighter niche to itch.

Cougars in South Wales, animal sacrifice rituals, an orange orb, Berkeley weirdos… Weird Files is a fascinating front for Ken Layne’s print syndication business. Gizmodo‘s doing its thing with million-color printers, combadges, camera phones, portable hard drives for photogs and 1cm thick mini-disk players. Romenesko’s MediaNews links a FOIA about FOIAs, Bradlee on Neuharth, and Trudeau on Doonesbury. Rough & Tumble links Orange County crime, Davis signs law against burglary tool, and Santa Cruz officials fume over medical pot club bust. And ScienceBlog touts Dust-sized chips, electronic cars, and synthetic diamond film.

Although all are blogs, each eschews personal anecdote, agenda or banter and sticks to the new.

Style books differ. Rough & Tumble knocks out one to four straight sentences. Gizmodo holds the line at two sentences, with an occasional Economistic twist. ScienceBlog and WeirdFiles introduce adjectives and storytelling. MediaNews adds quotations and reax. Meanwhile, Drudge cooks on with his griddle of hot headlines.

Other great examples: Obscure Store, LAExaminer,Arts & Letters Daily…

Editorializing: Why is it worth writing about thin media at 5.50 AM EST? Because there will be 100s of thousands more of these things in just a couple years. The sooner the model is perfected, the sooner it can MIRV. And (cue commercial) Blogads [url=http://www.blogads.com:8080/BlogadzPreview2/order_html]classifieds will power their cash registers.

(In theory, other layers of thin media should materialize as traditional publishing constructs dematerialize, right? BlogCMS is already well-populated. Sekimori is carving out a design reputation. Nothing Special and Hostmatters have nice hosting practices. Sitemeter and Extreme Tracking keep score. Will ambitious bloggers ever hire elite editors to probe for excellence? Itinerant blog copy editors? What else are we missing?)

Doc Searles writes: “Blogging for me is a way to leverage time in the extreme. For worthwhile-ness per unit of effort (say, per keystroke), blogging kicks ass more than anything else I’ve ever done.” I agree. Blogging is somehow the virtuous twin of spam — cheap, text, mass communication that is (nonetheless) non-obtrusive, personalized, contextualized and pursuasive.

Ray Ozzie looks at the way his Groove groupware is being used. “Approximately 35% of shared spaces are between a single pair of individuals, 60% of shared spaces are between 3 and 25 individuals, and 5% of shared spaces have more than 25 individuals. Amazingly to me – given the design center of the UI – I found that within this 5% there are actually hundreds of spaces with 100-250 members each; I’d surely never have expected this. One other incredibly fascinating tidbit: 25% apparently use shared spaces with only themselves as a member, using Groove as a ‘briefcase’ to transparently and securely synchronize files across multiple computers that they own – e.g. Office documents being synchronized between home and office PCs.” (Fun stuff, but shouldn’t these percentages = 100?)

A BT-funded study of mobile telephone use says that “gossip” accounts for 2/3 of human conversation, and then looks at the mobile phone as a gossip tool. Plenty of observations can be ported to blogs. I’ll quote just a couple here:

Texting [SMS] is particularly important in maintaining contact with a wide social network – allows us to maintain social bonds even when we do not have the time, energy, inclination or budget for calls or visits. Texting re-creates the brief, frequent, spontaneous ‘connections’ with members of our social network that characterised the small communities of pre-industrial times.
…
In the fast-paced and fragmented modern world, social bonding through gossip becomes even more important – but also more difficult. We no longer live in the kind of small, close-knit tribes or communities for which we are ‘designed’ by our evolutionary heritage, where we would naturally be in daily contact with the members of our social network. Our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer brains, hard-wired for constant grooming-talk with a tightly integrated kinship and friendship network, are struggling to cope with the social isolation of modern urban life. Most of us no longer enjoy the cosiness of a gossip over the garden fence. We may not even know our neighbours’ names, and communication is often limited to a brief, slightly embarrassed nod, if that.
Telephones have helped to alleviate some of the stresses caused by fragmented modern lifestyles, but before the advent of mobiles most of us were severely restricted in both the quantity and quality of communication with our social network.

Just as a cellular phone is portable in space, a blog is portable in time — it waits patiently for new users to come along and then imparts our message. (Found in the October issue of The Atlantic.)

A study of Saudi censorship shows limits on information about women’s advances, writes the NYTimes. “The ‘Women in American History’ section of Encyclopaedia Britannica Online (www.women.eb.com), which summarizes the women’s rights movement from 1600 to the present, is blocked. IVillage (ivillage.com), a popular American advice and support site for women, is also blacklisted.” Other blacklisted sites: www.rollingstone.com, www.wbr.com, www.seznam.cz, www.theonion.com, and www.ifrance.com See most of the list here. The study notes that “28 pages were blocked from Yahoo’s Swimming & Diving category.” Interesting that no bloggers made the list.

Newly launched Blog Network charges you $3 a month to access its stable of blogs and publish your own. Bloggers get 50% of the take in proportion to their traffic. It’s a creative hybrid of hosting, subscriptions and revenue sharing. The post and comments over at Bill Quick’s site summarize the pros and cons.

My take: the blogmachine’s atomic-fusion-like power comes from cramming many minds into an open space and letting them interact with fervid recklessness. Barriers or impedances sap this power, so participants will find balancing public versus exclusive content to be a delicate job.

If enough people joined, the math might work. Assuming 1000 bloggers and 9,000 subscribers join, bloggers get to split a pot of $15,000 a month. A power law distribution (the norm for site traffic distribution) would yield roughly these results: 1 blogger gets $4,000 (net $3997), 10 get $400 (net $397), 100 get $40 (net $37), 1000 get $3 (netting 0.) The question for the 999 bloggers who don’t get to net $3997 will be, of course, what opportunity for ad revenue or fame has been lost by putting their best content inside the walled garden?

(8/29/02: Over at Bill Quick’s blog, the debate about the Blogging Network rages on like some Arizona forest fire. There’s also a good debate at Blogroots. I’m excited that Bill is now a Blogad beta user, selling his own ads. On her own blog, Joanne Jacobs tosses lukewarm water on any blogger’s chance of making money, then admits that both ideas tempt her. It’s early days for blogonomics. 8/30/02: Ken Layne notes, “I’ve already got a premium/free system. I sell articles and columns to publishers for money, and write for fun on this here site. And there’s a nice overlap — almost everything I’ve written for publication in the last year is the result of editors reading this site and offering some paying work.” And more Bill Quick readers battle each other over the issue here and here. 9/03/02 Bryan Preston compares Blogads to the Blogging Network. And I noticed that the Blogging Network provides a (new?) interesting page full of blogbites about remunerative blogging. I wonder why no mention of Blogonomics? Dave Copeland’s pre-launch thoughts about the network. Joanne Jacobs reports $0.30 for her first two days in the network. Not bad, since the membership is still small; but so is the competition. 9/06/02 John Scalzi notes, “A fair chunk of my income comes from people who found out about me through material on this site,” so putting information behind a fire-wall wouldn’t be worth risk.)

An estimated $236 billion will be spent this year in the US on traditional print, broadcast, radio and online advertising.

Frustrated that their money is being wasted, some advertisers are resorting to hiring models to infiltrate us with their products. Here are some other wacked promotions: “Procter & Gamble sent out a trailer of elegant, air- conditioned Porta Potties, complete with hardwood floors and aromatherapy candles, to state fairs last summer to extol the virtues of Charmin toilet paper. Bottled-water producer Evian paid to repair a run-down public pool in the London neighborhood of Brixton and tile the bottom with its brand name ‘ a message that was hard to miss for passengers flying in and out of nearby Heathrow Airport.”

Umm. Why not spend some of the $236 billion on media that people actually shout about?
Hint. Hint. Hint.
Hint. Hint.
Hint.

Cory Doctorow writes: “when I was a kid, I used to go downtown and peel off (expired) street-posters and save them in a scrap-book as a record of all the events and shows happening in my city.” A unique chronicle of a community’s stream of conscious vanishes with each trash can of ephemera.

Leaving Washington for Rhode Island, Anne Holland writes: “the heart of journalism in America is going virtual. Many of the editors and reporters I admire most now live in places like Wisconsin, Arkansas, and the backwoods of Connecticut. All you need is a headset, a sensible long distance phone plan, an ISP, and you are in journalism central my friend!”

Launching Gizmodo, Nick Denton says, “Media has never before been this lean.” Go, thin media!

Update: Blogroots readers debate Gizmodo’s prospects, and the word “catablog” is born (but still not bought.)