2005年NPR美国国家公共电台七月-Bloggers Look for Profits as Medium Matur

On Mondays we focus on the business of techonology and today we'll hear about an effort to make money with blogs. Millions of people publish internet "weblogs" or "blogs" but among the few people who do it for profit is Jason McCabe Calacanis. A year and a half ago he started "Weblogs, Inc",which publishes and sells advertising 1 for a collection of more than 80 different blogs. Renee Montagne spoke 2 to Calacanis about why advertisers have been reluctant to buy space on weblogs and how he lured 3 them in.

A car company doesn't want to advertise on your blog which only gets 100,000 pages a month and you only write about cars three times a month.So we went and found 15 car bloggers, put them into one place called it" autoblog", made it look like a nice magazine and it has ethics 4 and, you know, correction policy, fact checking except that we said the content is unfiltered.We'll not tell the bloggers what to write,how to write,when to write and it was a very basic idea and it really works for the advertisers,coz the advertizers were just thrilled that with these audience, you know,the earlier adopters which was really nirvana for any advertizer.You wanna get in there with the people who are gonna spread your,you know, new phone around,you know, the new features in a Toyota Prius.

Well, how are they, the main consumers of your weblogs?

They tend to skew to the top five to twenty percent of the audience.So on our largest blog which is called "Engadget".It's a type of people who would replace their cell phones twice a year,the type of people at a dinner party who will, you know, advise you which phone you should get and why, what services you should use and why Varizon is, you know, not as good as Team Mobile, in this area but it's better with this feature and they're the obsessive 5 compulsives of whatever space ,you know,they are unhelpfully obsessed 6 with whatever the topic is.

As an investor 7, you are making a bet that blogs will get really big, right?

Sure.

But as people are increasingly bombarded with information, is it possible though one better filters?

Yeah, I think that's why blogging actually occured. I mean I think people looked at the information they were getting from MSN as we called it "maintrain"Media, and they say:" I don't trust this information any more",you know ,whether it was Steven Glass or Jesson Blare or,you know, CNBC, you know, playing trumpets 8 when Jack 9 Welch would be on the show.You know, he's the guy writing the pay checks.

Right.

You know, I think consumers are smart and they realize: "Gee 10, I don't know if I trust all this.Ah...you know, content out there.I would rather see some other voices and so what happens if the skills of a journalist go to the people with a domain 11 expertise 12.And that's really what's happening.You're taking journalism 13 techniques and training the people who are normally interviewed by journalists to be journalists and it's gonna be a little bit of a rough process at first,but the person who is interviewed for the bio-tech story in the Wall Street Journal now has a blog. So if you wanna get the real information of what's happening in bio-tech, would you go to the Journal? Maybe you wanna a quick overview 14. But if you really want to get to the nitty gritty,why not hear directly from the personel works in biotech everyday?

Jason McCabe Calacanis is the CEO of an Blogger for weblogs Inc.Thanks for joining us.