Down with FT

Quick, before it disappears behind the subscriber wall, you can read another article about blog ads, this time in the Financial Times. I'm proud of it because the reporter hit me at a cynical, bitter time. I had talked to three reporters from different outfits the previous week, all doing rah-rah "anyone can do this!" stories on blogs. So I unleashed a bunch of bile on the tech journalists' attempts to fluff up the latest bubblet. Here's me sounding like a pompous jackass:

Surprisingly, some of the most cautious notes are being sounded by bloggers themselves. Matt Haughey runs a number of blogs, the most famous of which is Metafilter, a vast community weblog whose members number in the tens of thousands: "Together, the ad revenue from all of my blogs represents a pretty decent salary," he says, "but I've been very lucky. I'd like to stress that there are a few dozen people at the most who can be like this - everyone else will make $5. People are trying to make a bubble. Every article I ever read says that anyone can do this. But anyone can be Britney Spears."