It seems increasingly evident that the blogosphere is growing large enough and permanent enough that the advertising game is well and truly changing. The new announcement of Amazon's investment in 43 Things does nothing to dilute that impression.
Blog posts are becoming the copy and images that catch our attention - a complex mix of issue, personality, skill, the technology of distributed networks, and link strategy. Some prominent Internet leaders such as John Battelle, Ross Mayfield, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Mitch Ratcliffe and a wide range of others have offered some sort of opinion along the lines that blogging represents the future of online publishing, or 'social' publishing, or citizen media or the 'new' news network.
Bloggers are the new journalists and the new copywriters .. writing from their heads, hearts and guts in a new way, a less objective but often more honest level of critical thinking perspective that offers us useful facts, analyses and understanding. We then get to engage with the ideas, and think about what we believe and what we want to do with the information.
If blog posts are the copy and images then contextual ads (which will become increasingly granular and useful because they will be more and more closely related to the content of individual blog posts), are the ways a reader's attention is attracted, obtained and then in the context of the online advertising business, monitised. This makes the notion of 'sell-side' advertising both more real (because - eventually - it won't be tolerated and won't perform as advertising unless it's honest and authentic and works) and more feasible (applications are appearing that will make this do-able). Sell-side means this thought in an advertising target's head ... "I'll use advertising if it actually means something to me and offers me something useful".
This emerging dynamic very much begs the issue of how advertisers will also get increasingly granular feedback from bloggers about the what's-my-experience-and-what-do-I-want-to-know aspects of the advertising.
Why is this happening in the blogospere ? Because increasingly people are finding out ways of building up trust and credibility whilst carrying on or out some kinds of exchange of value .. whether it's referrals to others and ways to tap into other networks, or by acting as 'information pivots' not unlike the old railroad turntables in train yards, pointing seekerfs of knowledge to other destinations, or by connecting and then building communities for advocacy, distribution, influence or activism.
The feedback, and a two way flow of author-ity is now with us, and looks like it will be here to stay. We're watching the early steps of what we can and may well do with it
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