Insightful blog story, cute sidebar

That story on blogs in the Feb. 20 issue of New York magazine is a must read. Its writer, Clive Thompson, paints a nuanced picture, too, so I'll quote the nut graf in some detail:

By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that.

In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. “It just seems like it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me. ...

No reason not to blog, as I see it. But plenty of reason to realize you're not going to get rich doing it. The high-traffic blogs, like Arianna Huffington's celebrity blog, tend to be corporate and very professional. Says Thompson:

... the rapid rise of the Huffington Post represents a sort of death knell for the traditional blogger. The Post wasn’t some site thrown up by a smart, bored Williamsburg hipster who just happened to hit a cultural nerve. It was the product of a corporation—carefully planned, launched, and promoted. This is now the model for success: Of Technorati’s top ten blogs, nearly half were created in the same corporate fashion, part of the twin blog empires of Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton.

“The good news is that it’s still possible to create a top-ranked blog,” says Shirky. “The bad news is, the way to get into the top ten now seems to be public relations.” Just posting witty entries and hoping for traffic won’t do it. You have to actively seek out attention from the press. “That’s how they’re jump-starting the links structure. It’s not organic.” Indeed, when Huffington announced her venture and her celebrity guests [including novelists Norman Mailer and Nora Ephron], bloggers grumbled that it weirdly inverted the whole grassroots appeal of blogs.

And now the cute part. There's a sidebar called "Five Blogs to Check Out." The top listing goes to a website called Cute Overload with lots of pictures of kittens, puppies, bunnies, duckies, hamsters, ferrets and other little bundles of fluff and fur, all narrated with a tone that somehow manages to be both suitably edgy and, well, cute.