Doc on Advertising and Blogs
Doc has a lengthy piece on Harry Copelands Blogonomics piece in Pressflix:

Agreeable stuff, indeed. But Henry's going somewhere with this, and it's not a place all of us will want to arrive at. .... Advertising..... So maybe there's a market there. But it's one that will exist between bloggers and advertisers. Not between bloggers and readers. ....The minute this blog turns into an intellectual property business, or the minute that I need to "monetize" it in some way, it will have a different purpose than the one that brings readers to it now.

I tend to partly agree with Doc. But I think we're looking at this blogging and business concept from the wrong angle. It's not about placing ads on blogs. It's about turning bloggers into advocates for your products and/or service and connecting networks of common communities (i.e. common groups of blogs) to larger websites of mass appeal. So several micromarkets are connected to a corresponding mass market (i.e. corporate web site).

Blogging opens up honest conversations about products, issues, companies, hobbies and habits. With that said, it is essential that "the system" helps maintain the integrity of bloggers. I think Jeff Jarvis has got it dead right (in a Gonzo marketing kind of way) when he says, "the wise marketer will recognize a community of shared interest and will underwrite that community .... 'we share an interest and affection for this community.'"