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Is there a blog empire (a blogpire?) in the making? According to yesterday’s New York Sun, a group of conservative blogs are banding together to create a first — a vast ad-supported network of hundreds of blogs, anchored by heavyweights ArmedLiberal.com, RogerLSimon.com, and LittleGreenFootballs.com.
Called Pajamas Media (tweaking CNN executive Jonathan Klein’s comments a few months ago that the typical blogger is just “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas”), the venture also has ambitions to become a news aggregator. Last week, Roger Simon wrote in his space an “open letter” outlining his hopes for “aggregating blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service.” They’ve even set up an editorial board consisting of bloggers Glenn Reynolds, PowerLine, Lawrence Kudlow, Hugh Hewitt and Marc Cooper. In a progress report yesterday, Simon wrote that their network now boasts of about 200 blogs.
Given the organization and drive shown by the Right side of the ‘sphere, Akkam’s Razor asks, “So what should the left-blogosphere do? Sign up for this network? Form a competing network? If so, what kind? Maybe something bottom-up as opposed to top-down? How about measuring and segmenting the audience and pricing ads? This is an issue that requires anyone with an interest in the future of the Internet to contemplate — what happens here may influence the future of Internet advertising. Whatever happens, could we be seeing the beginnings of an interweb dominated by conservatives, like talk radio?”
Other busy little bees are trying to organize their own little slice of the ‘sphere. According to Good Reputation Sleeping, the Washington Post Magazine is launching a new feature for D.C. area photographers, called “Blog City –Seeing Ourselves Through the Lens of Washington’s Photobloggers.” How it works is this: Anyone with a photoblog or a Flickr account can send in three photos a month in hopes of being featured in the magazine. (How does that work? Street clothes for actually taking the photos, then switch quickly to pajamas to launch the pix from your photoblog to the Post‘s magazine?)
It’s election time in Great Britain (you know those guys, our main squeeze in the coalition of the willing?), and Tony Blair appears to be on the ropes. Just one of the recent problems Blair has run into is highlighted in Windsor, England’s very own Phylotopian blog. Since we’re self-obsessed Americans, many of us are probably only vaguely aware of the sloppy terrorist trial in London a few weeks ago of five men in a ricin plot. (Ricin is a toxic chemical made from castor beans.) Phylos says that “The trial collapsed though as there was no real evidence against the men. No ricin was found … the story is of note in that it shows Blair’s paranoia as his lies come back to haunt him.”
Don’t bet on it, Phylos. We seem to recall something about an election a few months ago in another country where quite a few people actually thought the same thing …
Owen at Owen Speaks! isn’t much happier with Blair or his Labour party, writing that Labour “are officially the biggest bullshitters of the election.” Stateside, Nominal Me weighs in, calling Tony Blair the “Big Loser of the Iraq War.”
Speaking of big losers, Clublife, a blog about bouncers, writes today of the saga of Bobby O, “the worst bouncer with whom I have ever had the misfortune to be thrown on a staff.” After reading “The Doorman’s” story about Bobby, you’ll likely agree.
–Paul McLeary
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