Well, it's not breaking news to us, but tomorrow's (the Sunday edition) Times finds it fit to print:

But some in the television industry fret that those with less successful track records or at smaller networks will not be able to fend off aggressive marketers.

Also worrisome is the tendency of advertisers who are creating brand integrations to gravitate toward heartwarming shows like NBC's "Three Wishes," in which the singer Amy Grant ladles out assistance to those in need. "It's got to be noncontroversial," said Mr. Riesenberg of Full Circle, whose productions include "Bound for Glory" on ESPN (with Mr. Silverman's Reveille); the show follows the former football star Dick Butkus as he tries to turn around a high school football team.

Television shows that deal with provocative subjects could find themselves at a financial disadvantage in an environment where networks and studios must rely increasingly on this new source of revenue, Mr. Wells said. "I believe in market forces, but I think the quality of content will suffer," he said.

The whole article is a nice overview. Worth a read.

Adweek reports that Dentsu's Colby and Partners has added two avocado-promoting clients to its roster--the Hass Avocado Board and the Chilean Avocado Importers Association. The Santa Monica shop already has an eight-year relationship with the California Avocado Commission, an account it retains.

It's right and good that Colby could leverage its experience on the thick-skinned fruit to add business without a review. Normally, the old conflict-of-interest flag would be thrown. In this case, all organizations want the same thing--consumers united in their passion for avocados.

Here's a news flash: Religious people are a little sensitive about their deities. From Yahoo:

Irish bookmaker Paddy Power was fending off the wrath of Christians in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland on Friday over an advert depicting Jesus and the Apostles gambling at the Last Supper.

The billboard posters, on display in the Irish capital, adapt Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting of the event to show Jesus with a stack of poker chips, Judas with 30 pieces of silver and other apostles clutching hands of cards.

"There's a place for fun and games," says the caption.

Frankly, I'm a little more partial to The Last Pancake Breakfast.

USA Today: A senior U.S. official rejected calls on Thursday for a U.N. body to take over control of the main computers that direct traffic on the Internet, reiterating U.S. intentions to keep its historical role as the medium's principal overseer.

"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the Internet," said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. "Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable."

Many countries, particularly developing ones, have become increasingly concerned about the U.S. control, which stems from the country's role in creating the Internet as a Pentagon project and funding much of its early development.

In 1998, the U.S. Commerce Department selected ICANN to oversees the Internet's master directories, which tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic. Internet users around the world interact with them everyday, likely without knowing it.

Although ICANN is a private organization with international board members, Commerce ultimately retains veto power.

How stupid is your marketing department?

I leave town for 9 days and what did I find in the stack of mail upon my return?

1) A Visa "CheckCard" I never asked for, but is just sitting in an envelope any moron can feel has a card enclosed. It's just there waiting to be "instantly activated."

2) A letter containing my PIN number. The one that's supposed to be a freakin' secret.

Had anyone other than my trustworthy neighbor collected my mail, they could've taken #1 and #2 and cleaned out my bank account along with trashing my credit rating.

So fine. Whatever. I threw 'em away. But today, I got:

3) An DM invitation to subscribe to a $9 per month "Identity Protect" service that would supposedly protect me against identity theft and credit fraud.

Well, guess what. It's fuckers like you, National City Bank, that are the problem in the first place by sending Direct Mail shit that can cause identity theft.

Your Campbell-Ewald-created ads use The Pretenders' "Brass In Pocket" to build your brand. Well, guess what, I'm feeling pretty fucking far from "special" today.

And since my e-mail requesting no more solicitations came back with a "please call our customer service" non-answer, I'm using this blog to register my displeasure. This is why banks suck. And bank advertising sucks even worse.

Until Direct Mail and Direct Marketing people get their act together, the ad industry will never get any respect, no matter how many icons parade through Times Square.

[UPDATE] A very pleasant customer service rep told me: "We sent a mass mailing out to all our valued customers..." If some nimrod had gotten a hold of my card and raped my bank account, I wouldn't be a valued customer to them for long.

Lewis Lazare: The Chicago arm of BBDO got a new name Monday: Energy BBDO.

The moniker stems from a two-year effort to develop a model in the Chicago shop, a model that agency executives are convinced has proved effective in winning new business, most recently Wm. Wrigley Jr. brands Life Savers and Creme Savers.

Other new clients include Jim Beam, Dial and Starbucks liqueur.

What is the brand "Energy" all about? According to an agency spokesman, it's an "approach to uncovering powerful brand ideas that re-energize brands by achieving three things: brand importance, brand integrity and marketplace momentum." The spokesman went on to describe brand Energy as "the antidote to consumer brand apathy."

BBDO's Chicago office will be the only shop in the agency network to adopt the new name.

Steve Rubel points to an interesting post on the Socialtext blog.

Google is becoming increasingly prone to Wikipedia. This is because Google's PageRank algorithm, the method by which it ranks search pages, inherently succumbs to the basic structure and social structure of wikis.

The PageRank algorithm is most famously characterized as valuing links that are highly referred to by other people. It seems that is only part of the story. The PageRank algorithm values links to yourself more. That is, a website that has many pages and is densely inter-woven with links becomes a sort of PageRank machine. True, without other websites conferring a little bit of their PageRank onto it, that website will not have a high PageRank, but given enough of a small number of external links from mediocre websites pointing to your very large, densely interwoven website, your website will shoot up through the listings.

There is an important lesson hiding in the subtext here. On the Network, The power of people will kick the backside out of algorithms. While computer sciencey solutions are almost always gameable, communities are equally almost always resilient, adaptive, and intelligent.

The future of knowledge management is not data mining nor document object repositories; that is the science of dead information. The future is telling stories to each other, building knowledge together through those stories, and reshaping ourselves through those actions. That's the vivid, active, powerful future of the Wiki Way.

Reuters: Boeing Co. apologised on Friday for a mistakenly published advertisement for its V-22 Osprey aircraft showing troops dropping onto the roof of a mosque in what appears to be a simulated battle scene.

The ad, coming amid rising concern among Muslims over U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, prompted immediate complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which demanded the withdrawal of the campaign.

But Boeing, which created the ad with partner Bell Helicopter, said publication was a "clerical error" by the National Journal, which ran the ad on September 24.

The ad shows troops rappelling down from an Osprey craft to the domed roof of a building labelled "Muhammad Mosque" in Arabic as smoke billows from a burned-out car nearby.

"It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell," says the ad, published by Boeing and Bell Helicopter, a unit of Textron Inc., which jointly developed the Osprey.

The aircraft "delivers Special Forces to insertion points never thought possible," says the text of the ad.

The ad "clearly portrays special forces assaulting a mosque, a structure dedicated to civilian worship purposes," said CAIR executive director Nihad Awad, in a letter to the two companies. "This gives the impression that 'the insertion points never thought possible' are Islamic places of worship."

Bell said it regretted any concern provoked by the ad, and it was looking into its "creative processes" to prevent a repeat.

Our friends at Talent Zoo have launched a recruitment blog, Hiring Revolution, written by TZ Vice Presidents Amy Hoover and Ragan Jones.

Andrea Rizk, the resident PR expert at Talent Zoo, has launched Chasing The Press, a PR industry blog. And word is, this new ad blog is a Talent Zoo property.

Fast Company: Branding is the self-help industry of corporate America. Sure, it may be difficult to admit--perhaps even a bit embarrassing--but let's face it: Both branding and self-help have experienced booming growth over the past decade, seemingly in reaction to rising levels of personal and professional insecurity. Both fields are populated with self-anointed experts. And both seem to follow the same publishing principal: The less there is to say, the more literature there must be.

Although sales of self-help books have doubled in the past four years, mental illness, obesity, drug addiction, and alcoholism are very much on the rise. Is the craziness fueling the literature or vice versa? Comedian George Carlin captured it when he said, "If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? That's not self-help, that's help! There's no such thing as self-help. If you did it yourself, you didn't need help." So go ahead, leave your shadow alone. Run a good business, and your brand will follow.

Some smart people have recently asked me pertinent questions about the value of blogs for brands and branded communications. This is a rich topic--one we might spend days exploring at an expensive seminar on a tropical island.

For our purposes here, I'll offer a couple of scenarios to consider. Before I do, I'd like to point out that blogs are narrative in structure. As a writer, I can't help but be excited by this fact. For here's a chance to make copy important again.

1) A blog (and other conversational media applications like podcasts, wikis, etc.) can deliver brand-sponsored entertainment. Think Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom," modernized for this new media sphere. The content needn't have a thing to do with a company's product or service offering. I'm talking about pure sponsorship. For instance, a client like Coca-Cola might create a new soap opera that's delivered exclusively via online channels, as a daily podcast and/or in blog format. The possibilities here are endless.

2) Another ripe arena is event and promotional marketing. Because blogs are structured in reverse chronological order, they lend themselves to tracking a campaign through time. Imagine a promotional tour that stops in 16 cities over a 16-week stretch, where contestants show up and participate with the brand in some fashion. A blog can be used to track this tour from city to city, building anticipation for those who plan to particiapte and giving everyone else a window into this experiential activity.

I'm confident this is but a surface scratch. If you'd care to share your own lofty ideas, please leave a comment.

San Francisco Chronicle: In most ads, a company is trying to sell you a product, or a brand, or some oxymoronic notion of corporate philosophy (as if the pursuit of profit wasn't credible self-justification in a capitalist marketplace).

But flipping through a recent copy of the New Yorker -- the Sept. 5 issue, to be precise -- I came across several ads for leading companies that spoke to a relatively new trend in corporate outreach.

Although the companies in question collectively touch nearly all U.S. consumers and are together worth billions of dollars, they're not selling products here, or their respective brands, or even a clear declaration of philosophy.

What these companies -- Chevron, Altria and Starbucks -- are selling is their own thoughtfulness.

"They're trying to elevate the conversation above what it is they do," said Steve Manning, managing director of Igor, a San Francisco brand consultant. "They want to be thought of as something bigger than just goods and services."

This approach, he added, should be a red flag for most consumers.

"Honest people don't tell you they're honest," Manning observed. "Cool people don't say that they're cool. We should all be wondering why these guys feel a burning need to tell us how good they are."

Adweek: Havas-owned Arnold will begin laying off staff tomorrow as it prepares to lose its largest account, Volkswagen of America, which last month said it would shift its estimated $400 million account to MDC Partners' Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Sources said the agency would trim between 50 and 80 employees from its Boston headquarters, or 10-15 percent of the staff at that location.

VW accounted for about 10 percent of Arnold's estimated 2004 overall revenue of $227 million.

In addition, Arnold's Los Angeles outpost, which opened in April as a branded entertainment unit primarily serving VW, will be shuttered. That office had about five employees, but their fate is unclear.

Arnold is not defending the $40 million-plus Goodyear business, which is currently in play, but is a finalist for the $60 million LensCrafters and $50 million Liberty Mutual accounts.

Well, on Monday I wrote of my displeasure with National City Bank. For the bigger implications of this, check out my new column on Talent Zoo:

Since I work in the ad industry, I know this wasn't a faceless backroom operation. Someone high up at my bank had the idea to send out unsolicited CheckCards. Someone thought the PINs should be disclosed. Someone had to write and proofread the DM letters. Someone had to cross-check the customer database. Someone had to coordinate the printing, the mailing, etc. Dozens of people had a hand in approving this marketing clusterfuck, starting with the client. And no one seemed to think it was a bad idea.

While this week, advertising blogs are debating the relative offensiveness of religious symbols in advertising, I believe what National City Bank pulled, and what other marketers do with consumer data has more far reaching--and potentially criminal--implications. It's just less sexy than the military rappelling onto the roof of a mosque.

Zombie Boy at Beyond Madison Avenue has an interesting rant on the word "copywriter" and its decided lack of sex appeal.

Sadly, for the average person outside the ad industry, the job title "Copywriter", brings to mind either some guy who sits at the end of a long production line of freshly published books with a black ink pad and a rubber stamp bearing one of those little encircled letter c ensignias or some sort of pathetically downtrodden Dickens character like Bob Cratchet hunched over in some extra tiny scribe's cubicle, making sure that all the illegible 3 pt. disclaimer type is spelled correctly with the proper use of style guide grammar or something equally menial and tediously insignificant. Let's face it, to the average person, "Copywriter" is just not the most glamorous sounding job title.

How hard would it be for the industry to replace the title of "copywriter" with something a little more interesting or important sounding?

According to Micropersuasion, Nick Denton of Gawker Media--the English bloke who loves to poo poo the business of blogs--has struck a deal with VNU to distribute Gizmodo's content in Europe.

Gizmodo's content will be translated from English into 6 additional languages, then augmented with local coverage for each market. Besides English, Gizmodo.com now will be available in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian and covering the Belgium market in Dutch as well.

VNU is a global media giant with over 140 print publications and website equivalents. Adweek, Brandweek and Mediaweek are all VNU titles.

Image from Flickr user V1pro

USA Today is running an article on direct selling.

Amy Robinson, spokeswoman for the Direct Selling Association (DSA), says 74% of consumers have purchased something via direct selling.

"If I bring it to you in your home, there's no real distraction, and I can get you to shop for an hour and a half. If you come in the store I'm lucky to get you to shop for 15 minutes," says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at marketing information company NPD Group.

Direct sellers see each party as a way of cementing loyalty to their brands.

"Today, we're more removed from people — we pay at the pump, go through express lines at fast-food restaurants and shop online. So what they value about direct selling is the one-to-one service in a party environment," says Jill Blashack, founder of home taste-testing direct seller Tastefully Simple. "It's the relationship piece of this that makes the business grow."

Industry sales, almost all accounted for by parties, were last pegged at nearly $30 billion in 2003, vs. $17 billion a decade ago, according to the DSA.

Car dealers...

How many times have you been driven out of your mind by the lame stumblings of your car dealer? If you're like most Americans, too many times to count.

Lansing State Journal: As a veteran car salesman, Mark Whipple has seen his share of buyer-seller disagreements.

But never in his 20 years on the job has he witnessed what he saw Friday at Spartan Toyota.

"It was an assault; it was a melee," Whipple said.

He should know. His desk is about six feet from where punches were thrown. And by the time it was over, Whipple said, one of the participants threatened to kill him and bomb the dealership.

Konstantin Dlutskiy writes about marketing and advertising in Russia.

‘Pelmeni’ are Russian ravioli-like pasta envelopes containing minced meat. Always with meat. Envelopes with mashed potatoes or fruits are called ‘vareniki’ and are more popular in Ukraine. The popularity of pelmeni in Russia is immense. It’s one of the most popular traditional fast food. You simply put frozen pelmeni into boiling water and in 5 minutes you get a nutritional meal.

For long pelmeni were regarded as commodity, such as sugar, bread or pasta. The first Russian brand of premium pelmeni that was aggressively marketed and advertised was Daria. It was introduced by Oleg Tinkov – a Russian marketing enfant terrible. He managed to boost Daria brand recognition to 40% on the budget as low as about 20 thousand dollars. The billboard ads he placed in St. Petersburg and Moscow pictured buttocks powered with flour. The inscription on the ad reads, “Your favorite little pelmeni!!!”

This billboard was banned in St. Petersburg on the next day of appearance. Moscow authorities, being less puritan, banned it in about a week. But it was so outrageous and scandalous that in the next months almost all tabloids, weekly and magazines in Russia republished it.

Paid Content is breaking the story du jour. Jason Calacanis is selling his Weblogs, Inc. to AOL for up to $35 million US dollars.

For Calacanis, this is his second company being sold in a space of about two years...his original company Rising Tide Studios was first sold to Wicks Business Information, which in itself was bought out by Dow Jones.

The company's blogs have had an exponential trajectory, with sites like Engadget, Autoblog, BloggingBaby, Adjab and others. In total, the company has about 130 bloggers, with about 15 full time employees, from what I know.

Weblogs Inc. revenues are running at $1 million-plus annually from Google AdSense alone, according to numbers jubilantly released by Calacanis on his own blog; during a panel last week he said the company was bringing in $2 million a year. With that in mind, either of those numbers would be a generous multiple.

Lewis Lazare: Last time we checked, the Coca-Cola Co. wasn't cash-strapped. So it's surprising the company couldn't come up with a more compelling look for the revamped Fresca design hitting grocery store shelves this week.

Fresca's new bubble-inspired design strikes us as something you'd be more likely to find on a third-rate generic cola. Rack it up as another misstep in what has been terribly uneven marketing and advertising across a range of Coke products in recent years.

In addition to the packaging overhaul, Fresca is getting two new flavors -- Sparkling Peach Citrus and Sparkling Black Cherry Citrus -- both introduced as sugar-free, caffeine-free line extensions.

To tout all the changes, Campbell-Mithun/Minneapolis is launching a new ad campaign with the tag "Discover Fresca. Again."

Steve Rubel points to Ogilvy PR's new site where they share their blog reading list and encourage users to put these sites in their own RSS readers, or to use Ogilvy's new site as their RSS feeding trough.

On a related note, Robbin Phillips, Brains On Fire's Courageous President, wants to change the name of RSS.

I suggested we call RSS "Pull Ups," as a tip of the hat to pull technology, the opposite of pushing content out there. Olivier Blanchard suggested we call RSS "Pickles," like morsels selected from a jar.

Hugh MacLeod: One thing you notice when you start attending the blog conferences and hanging around the more well-known and respected bloggers on the planet: None of them seem to take it very seriously. They just get on with it. If what they do works for them, it's because it all comes naturally.

But maybe Big Media doesn't want it to all come naturally- maybe they want it to all come artificially. Maybe that's why it's so utterly dominated by celebrities, advertising and wannabes.

Maybe Big Media is all about being fake and getting away with it.

Mike Davidson points to the launch of Blue Flavor, a new web design studio in Seattle. Actually, they're "an experience design company with a focus on new media." Naturally, a firm such as this will prominently feature their blog. On the Blue Flavor blog, Nick Finck, Director of User Experience, waxes poetic about the brand experience company's hope to offer their customers.

When I started creating sites in 1995, the only experience we were concerned about was if there would be an online experience at all. It’s been quite a long time since those days. Today, most companies are interested in what kind of experience a person is going to have when they visit their site. Now, I am not just talking about pretty logos and cool colors with some fancy interaction. I am talking about the holistic online experience.

In this day and age of the experience economy its not simply about why you're better than the competition, it’s about how you make yourself better than the competition. I feel that the next big factor to extending the experience economy and adopting this new approach is the return of the personal human touch. This is to say moving beyond the sterile brochure copy of business practices of the past, and putting a human face on your product. A person that your customers can trust and can establish a business relationship with.

Ask yourself this: when was the last time you purchased a service or product where the salesperson remembered your name? And I am not talking about reading your name off their computer screen or your credit card. Think about that for a moment. Do you remember that experience? Was it memorable? Is that little step something that set that business aside from the rest in your mind? That, my friend, is part of the experience economy.

USA Today: A spike in gasoline prices is fueling what could be the biggest year for U.S. bicycle sales since the Arab oil embargoes more than 30 years ago.

"It should be close to 20 million units. If you look back historically, the three best years for bike sales were 1972, 1973, and 1974," Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong, a national coalition of bicycle suppliers and retailers said.

Last year's U.S. bicycle sales were just under 19 million.

The New York Times: According to a study released this week by the executive search firm Spencer Stuart, which surveyed 100 companies, marketing chiefs had an average tenure of 22.9 months - compared with chief executives with an average stay of 53.8 months. Nearly half of the chief marketers surveyed had been on the job for less than a year, and 14 percent for at least three years.

Marketing experts attribute the job's short lifespan to several factors, including the tendency of the chief executive to have unrealistic expectations.

"I think at the end of the day, there's a malalignment of expectations of what a true C.M.O. can do," Greg Welch, a consultant at Spencer Stuart, said. "These people who are being bounced out of these jobs are quality, smart, creative, proven marketers. Either they're not giving people time to be successful, or our expectations for what they can achieve are just too herculean."

Rob O'Regan, the editor of the 25,000-circulation C.M.O. Magazine, said the nature of the job makes it difficult to quantify results. "It's hard to measure some of the effectiveness of what marketing does, especially when it deals with customer loyalty and brand building," he said. "It makes it hard to justify all the budgets that you're getting."

In the end, who has the power in the boardroom depends on the economy, said John Quelch, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.

"Marketing always receives a little more respect during upticks in economic cycles," Mr. Quelch said. "When the economic cycles go down, the finance and economics guys will get to the forefront again."

According to C|NET, software baron Dave Duffield is returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, and he plans to do it in style.

The PeopleSoft founder has drafted plans for a mansion bigger than the Hearst Castle on 22 acres of land in the town of Alamo, about 30 miles East of the city by the bay. At 72,000 square-feet, the house would also surpass the White House and Bill Gates' home in size.

A move to Alamo would bring Duffield, 65, closer to the Walnut Creek offices of Workday, his new software company. He founded it after a brief return to the helm of PeopleSoft that ended when the company finally succumbed to hostile takeover by rival Oracle.

PeopleSoft made Duffield a wealthy man. With a net worth of $1.1 billion, he ranks No. 320 on Fortune magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans this year.

Contra Costa Times, Alamo's local paper, supplied a list of other large edifices, for reference.

Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris: 64,108 s.f.
Hearst Castle: 60,645 s.f.
The White House: 55,000 s.f.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates' Medina, Wash., home: 40,000 s.f.
Michael Dell's Austin home: 33,000 s.f.
Oprah Winfrey's Montecito home: 23,000 s.f.
Apple founder Steve Jobs' Woodside home: 17,000 s.f.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's Atherton home: 8,000 s.f.

Lewis Lazare: While breweries are scrambling to come up with a national marketing strategy to elevate beer's image among a customer base that increasingly has turned to other drink options, a number of major liquor and spirits brands are positioning themselves as classy alternatives to beer.

Add Brown-Forman's Appleton Estate Jamaica Rum to that group. This month the brand is launching a print campaign with the telling tagline "Raise Your Rum."

The various executions from Northlich Advertising in Cincinnati juxtapose a photograph of a hand lifting a glass of Appleton V/X over various atmospheric background shots, including a jazz player, an upscale patio party and a high-end nightclub.

The copy includes the line: "Sip or mix. But always raise."

Coke asked for ideas. Now they're about to get some.

According to Adweek, Portland-based independent, Wieden + Kennedy has picked up duties on the soft drink giant's flagship brand. Billings are rumored to be in the neighborhood of $200 million.

Pio Schunker, vice president of advertising for the Atlanta-based soft drink giant, made the decision to move the flagship brand.

W+K already handles Coke's PowerAde brand, and had produced Coke ads for the 1996 Olympics and the 1998 World Cup.

Steve Rubel shares Yahoo's data on RSS penetration.

• Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.

• 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.

• 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe to podcasts.

• Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).

• My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product.

I know I'm old-fashioned, but I actually enjoy seeing posts in their original context (unless the site is poorly designed).

Monster Outreach is a new viral from Coors Light. The brewer purports to want to help monsters, since they are only in demand one day of the year--October 31st. This clever ruse to support the Halloween selling period is good to see from a marketer who really hasn't embraced the web up to now. Only one small problem. Capitol One is already doing this idea in a big way on TV, with their efforts to help the rampaging Vikings from previous commercials who now can't find work because everyone has Capitol One.

According to this site, brand evangelism does not stop at the human race.

For yet another twist, see this iconic cowboy enjoying his sucker.

The New York Times picked up the Weblogs, Inc. story today from Bloomberg News. The piece is so poorly written, I can hardly believe it appears in the Gray Lady.

The America Online unit of Time Warner agreed yesterday to buy Weblogs, the owner of 85 Web sites that serve as hosts to the popular online diaries called blogs.

The closely held Weblogs publishes about 1,000 blogs a week on topics including technology, parent issues and video games, AOL said. The company, based in Dulles, Va., did not disclose the price, but it was widely reported as $25 million.

The acquisition will help AOL attract advertisers as the company looks for new sources of revenue. Although anyone with an Internet connection can post a blog on the Web, Weblogs hires experts to write the columns on the 75 topics it covers.

1) Weblogs, Inc. blogs are websites. They're not sites that "host" blogs.
2) Blogs are not online diaries (for the most part).
3) Weblogs, Inc. publishes 1000 posts a week, not 1000 blogs a week.
4) Anyone with an internet connection can make a comment on a blog that allows comments. Not the same thing as making an actual blog post.

Image courtesy of Room 116.

Associated Press: VeriSign Inc., a supplier of Internet security products, said Friday it has acquired Weblogs.com, an Internet site that automatically notifies subscribers each time a blog or Web site is updated.

Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign said it paid $2.3 million in cash to purchase Berkeley-based Weblogs.com, which was started by Web log pioneer Dave Winer.

VeriSign said it will continue to operate Weblogs.com, which supports thousands of daily feeds from bloggers and other publishers, as a free service. But a VeriSign spokesman said the company could charge for additional services in the future.

Weblogs.com started as a host for scores of bloggers before Winer changed directions and transformed it into a "ping" service that provides automatic notification to subscribers.

Weblogs.com uses really simple syndication, or RSS, a format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content.

Winer said in a phone interview that Weblogs.com had grown too big for him to handle. The site is sending nearly 2 million pings a day.

Note: Weblogs.com and Weblogs, Inc. are two different business, both of which sold for millions this week.

So there I was, getting a haircut on Thursday and lamenting that I was getting a few grey hairs. But I'm feeling better today. Why? 'Cause I know things could be worse...

I could look like Boy George. Yes, that's freakin' BOY GEORGE! He's only 44, by the way.
He got arrested on Thursday. They found a stash of coke in his apartment. He's denying it, of course. C'mon now folks, do we really want to hurt him?

No, it's not really advertising-related. But so what. It's the weekend.

Inbound links are commonly used to rank blogs by services like Technorati. The more inbound links a blog has the more status it enjoys in this ranking system. Clearly, it's but one key factor, but this simple model has become a leading indicator for the bloatosphere at this early juncture.

One blogger, Tristan Louis, compiled Technorati's numbers for each individual Weblogs, Inc. blog. He determined that one incoming link to a Weblogs. Inc blog is worth betweeen $564 and $903 depending on the exact amount of the AOL/Weblogs, Inc deal. Reports have the deal ranging from $25 million to $35 million.

AdJab, a Weblogs, Inc. blog on our blogroll, has 593 inbound links, or 1.34% of the network's overall count. This creates a blog valuation of $334,831.51 on the low end or $535,730.42 on the high end of the deal.

Tristan further considers the data:

Should we now assume that traditional media companies are willing to pay between $500 and $1000 per site that links into a blog?

Not quite. The incremental value is in the size of the network and the underlying tools. Jason and Brian have been working on developing a blog authoring technology, called BlogSmith, that sits at the core of their network and one has to believe that AOL saw some value in the software too. However, one can easily say that blog valuations are going to be easier to make after this deal since it provides the first yardstick in that space.

AdPulp has 569 inbound links according to Technorati.

Blook (bluk), n. A printed and bound book, based on a blog (cf. web log) or web site; a new stage in the life-cycle of content, if not a new category of content and a new dawn for the book itself.

Not only do blooks already exist, there's a new competition to judge their merit, the Lulu Blooker Prize. The Blooker will be awarded in three categories—fiction, nonfiction and comics. $4000 in prize money is available to the winners.