gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

"making blogs a business"

Jeff Jarvis is giving a talk at Bloggercon (the big annual blogging conference at Harvard) on "making blogs a business". If this is an area that piques your interest at all, please, please, you must click on this link.

Steve Hall from Adrants makes an excellent point in the comments:

It's not all about using a blog to make money though. A blog can also be a representation of a company's intellectual capital through "expert opinion" posts. So many corporate sites are flat and without any redeeming information value. Blogs can fill a gap here.

Henry Copeland from Blogads.com does likewise:

"Potential business"... why the future tense? Blogs need PR? What better PR than having 200 going on 200,000 of America's smartest writers mentioning blog advertising to their friends, neighbors and co-workers?

A rising tide of advertisers is placing ads on a network of the best and brightest -- bloggers like Tim Blair, Markos Moulitsas, Atrios, Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, Daniel Drezner, Kevin Drum, Daniel Drezner and hundreds of others -- through blogads.com.

Who wouldn't want to see these infopreneurs succeed and call their own shots? And who wouldn't want to shake the opinion epicenter?

Blogs have already run more ads this year for different political campaigns and causes than the Washington Post or CNN or Advance.net. Blogads are THE STANDARD for online political advertising.

Folks on the street may not realize it yet -- particularly if they don't read the WSJ or MediaPost or NYSun or Minneapolis Star Tribune or Raleigh Observer -- but blog business is Here and Now.

My two cents: the blogosphere is ablaze with gossip about Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis. Frankly, I think Henry's Blogads is a much bigger story.

UPDATE: Speaking of, Nick Denton will be moderating a Bloggercon panel to do with Clay Shirky's Power Law. Thanks for the tip, Cynthia.

Posted by hugh macleod at March 26, 2004 2:07 PM