Thanks for the kind words. As far as innovation — I think the innovation in the Web 2.0 sphere was realizing that content creation could be offloaded to users and these “vanity” platforms would attract enough eyes to make ads a viable mode of monetizing. So long as you keep the eyes within your “business” — and that’s the answer to your question of why the blogosphere itself isn’t considered a social app: because it can’t be branded and some 24-year-old can’t sell it for a billion bucks.

HMTKSteve,

Re: ad placement, I agree completely — but this is the advice that our good friends at Google give AdSense publishers about where to place ads:

[AdSense FAQ]

Ads get the highest clickthrough when they are placed in the body of the post and made to look like they’re part of the content. Skeevy, no?

The majority or products and services ( major brands ) aren’t contributing anything new to the marketplace developing online. Some have figured out that they need to create experiences and not just ads however, there’s nothing truly new with regards to their respective products and services. It has been a slow acclimation process. And as the internet gains footing as a medium, let’s not forget, it’s still very small compared to the existing media platforms. And as is the case with all technology, it’s the education of the consumer that defines the true value. As soon as twitter was launched, RSS lost it’s luster. As soon as another social network gains momentum, a blogging platform loses some regular publishers.

The initial agenda is still the greatest contributor to the problem, creating original and relative content, which you’ve done again.

Having said all this; as always–great post.

Thought for the day:
Why is it that a blog isn’t perceived as a social network connected to the largest participant network available?

Its getting way too much at the moment, everything is hype.
And if i found something that was probably worth thinking about getting i couldn’t read the article because of all the AdSense balloons that i opened with one of the 450,987 mouse-over hotspots.

Thanks.
But no thanks.

You have just got yourself a new regular visitor.

I hear you about the Adsense crap — I recently dropped the ads from appearing at the top of posts because, like 90% of all blogs, I wasn’t making any real money from them and they annoyed the hell out of *me*. I’ll probably drop them entirely from the site. Feh.

Everybody and their dog wants to make a few pennies from AdSense (and truthfully the vast majority of blogs make very little revenue) so they punish those that actually generate revenue through their visit to their blog by force-feeding huge blocks of ads.

I sense another bubble about to pop…here’s hoping…

By the way, I just finished reading the Lord of the Rings in lieu of mindless StumbleUpon-ing. Who would have thought that one could actually enjoy some spare time that is NOT in front of the laptop?