Pajama Party: Perhaps I'm missing something, but this sounds like it might be a pretty good idea. In the tradition of United Artists Films, a number of uberbloggers have decided to pool their resources and create the New Media version of U.S. Steel, a conglomerate that will do to blogs what AOL did to the Internet, transforming Our Thing from a hobbyist's playground into a grand entrepreneurial venture. The idea is to aggregate the muscle of some of the more popular websites into something more attractive for big-time advertisers, creating an economy of scale that would allow smaller sites affiliated with the big boys (such as the site you're reading) to wet their beaks, as it were. In addition, they hope to create a blogger "news service" that would provide better access to a wider range of websites, particularly overseas. In short, a mighty ambitious calling.

I have no idea whether these people will ultimately make a fortune, but I'm pretty certain that a business along these lines will inevitably succeed. Someone will eventually bring together the independent blogger and corporate advertiser, and it makes sense that the first people willing to travel into this brave new world are proprietors of websites that already reach hundreds of thousands of readers. The fact that many of them are conservatives (but not all; one of the prime movers is an editor at The Nation) has no relevance; who even knows what politics the creators of E-Bay or Amazon have. This isn't a liberal or conservative idea; it's the future.