The Washington Post has just announced that it aspires to sell ads on blogs, which it calls “the next big, slightly-outside-the-mainstream idea.”

If the Post is going to peddle blogads, they’ll have to sharpen the pitch beyond “big, slightly- outside-the-mainstream,” obviously. May I suggest “faster, smarter, more passionate and more wired than the Washington Post” as the sales pitch?

More details here here.

Four years ago yesterday, Blogads.com opened for business. We had high hopes, expecting a rush from bloggers looking to make money and advertisers craving influential, highly networked audiences. Neither bloggers or advertisers materialized for quite a while, as it turned out. We’d been working nonstop on Blogads.com since March of 2002 with huge expectations, so as time trickled by and sales baaaarely dribbled in, my wife and colleagues were shaking their heads, concluding that I’d wasted six months of their lives and enthusiasm. The shaking kept up for a quite a while. In all of 2002, we sold $2000 worth of ads, then a whopping $10,000 in all of 2003. We kept programming and chattering because every month, sales were a little higher and advertisers were a little more interesting. And, most importantly, we saw nothing that contradicted the original three hypotheses that undergirded the creation of Blogads.com: a) that blogging is a unique and powerful new force in the information economy b) that blog readers are uniquely valuable to advertisers in this emerging universe of p2p communication and c) that Blogads.com can play a unique roll in connecting bloggers and advertisers.

Here’s the birth announcement post from August 13, 2002.

Thank you to the many bloggers and advertisers (and readers of this blog) who have invested precious trust, ideas, time and money in Blogads.com and allowed it to grow and thrive.

Radova n Grezo writes: “Only 2 advertising agencies served all 15 million citizens of Czechoslovakia. One, called Makro did ads for the Czech part of the country; the other, called Rapid, produced work for the Slovak part (not because of linguistic differences, but for purely political reasons). But having no choice in agencies wasn’t all that bad. Both agencies produced equally awful ads, anyway.”

Matt has a superlative day.

Poaching in the hills of Western NC, I’ve been rereading Cluetrain. What a great document.

I’ve been meaning to write about blog advertising done by mobile phone company Alltel. But seems other folks have done a good job covering it, so I’ll just be a blogger and link.

Ever the copywriter, Steve Hall at Adrants says, “Some witty copy turns the tables and makes the argument that paying to call your friends is better because it will eliminate turning people into gaggling idiots and somehow lead to anarchy.”

Writing at AdAge Ken Wheaton wants to hate the campaign but keeps clicking:

On a personal level, we’re getting fed up with ridiculous viral efforts (see the billboard post below), yet we bit. We found ourselves at the site of PAMCF, the People Against My Circle Foundation. Yawn. Snooze. We will admit, though, that Edward Maxwell Von Houten is our kind of guy–a crank that mocks friendship and urges litigants to do it “for the children … Or the puppies, kittens, dolphins, or whatever other defenseless creatures elicit an emotional response from you.”

And today, Andrew Lavallee gives WSJ readers the full scoop, deconstructing all the campaigns nuances and richochets. He quotes campaign auteur Brian Clark with the money line, “curiosity is a great way to start a relationship with the audience.” The ads have been running on about 400 law, humor and entertainment blogs since early July.

We spent a couple of very pleasant weeks at a lake called Bohinj in Slovenia. A friend just wrote to ask where we’d stayed. Best I can tell, it was this B&B.

Welch and his peeps scratch at their musical roots in this post and comments. Sitting in DC with a spotty Tmobile connection (really bad these days right?) I’m reduced to such passtimes.

Mark Z. Barabak gives a good overview of the Internet’s trajectory in politics.

Since his story started out with the premise the Internet is causing audience fragementation, I’m grateful that he incluced my quote about de-fragmentation… the re-assembly of powerful audiences in new communities.

Interesting to see the disconnect between investors in two industries.

NYT, a company with zero revenue growth year over year and rising costs, trades at 17 times profits.

And YHOO, a company with revenue growing 30% a year and stable costs, trades at just 20 times profits.

AP reports:

CBS Corp. is enlisting eggs in its scramble to attract viewers.

The CBS logo and slogans promoting the TV network and its series will appear along with coded expiration dates on eggs sold by grocers — another promotional measure in the competitive world of television.

More than 35 million eggs will be marked with phrases such as “CSI: Crack the Case on CBS” and “The Class, New Grade-A CBS Comedy” as part of a deal between the CBS Marketing Group and EggFusion, an egg-coding company. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The campaign will begin in September, when the fall TV season begins, CBS said Saturday at a meeting of the Television Critics Association. EggFusion, based in Deerfield, Ill., will use laser technology to create the expiration dates and “On-Egg Messaging,” the company said in a statement.

However, CBS isn’t putting all its eggs in one marketing basket. The campaign is part of what the network is calling its “Outernet strategy,” an effort to reach viewers “outside their homes as they go about their daily lives,” the network said in a statement.

Other networks have tried offbeat ways to attract viewers, such as putting messages about shows in public restrooms and Walt Disney Co.’s use of dry-cleaning bags to promote the ABC hit “Desperate Housewives.”

Nothing like hitting the right people at the right time with the right idea. Congratulations guys! (Free bonus: lots of people wrote about how stupid you are, so you get all that earned media too!)