So just how does it happen that a swimming club should rise to second from the top on the blog link-count indexes?

It happens like this: First you start off with one of those unified 'free' blog-hosting companies with a critical mass of subscribers, and then you need just one ubiquitous advertisement on the inhouse ad-server, mix them all up together, heat and serve ... voila, top of the pops for your swim-club, just as if it truly was important! Cool ...

This is the clearchannelled centralized media trap we're rushing headlong into for our 2005 web: while we bloggers cheer the rise of the 6A-2Cow-(we)Blogger-like dot-coms as a mark of our own legitimacy, those same unified-blogfield hosts may be heralding a new danger. Why? Because the blog-host may base themselves on hosting subscriptions, but more and more are realizing the channel nature of their network and shifting their biz-model on converting visits into eyeballs

You see, mass blog-hosting, like any 'free' or budget website hosting, is intrinsically an old-media model based on some subscriptions, which are slow to realize, small-margin, bothersome, tedious to husband, and (mostly) leveraging the brand-channel for advertising, whcih is instant returns (often paid in advance), very low maintenance and with high yields amplified inversely to the broadness of the channel. Blogs beat out the simple Tripod-like webhosts on several points:

• blogs travel in packs -- the blogroll links networks of like-mindedness, which is just another word for 'demographic' and is the reasoning behind the blog-hosts that make it very easy to link to other blogs within the network, but awkward to step outside the channel.
• blogs reach more than readers -- because RSS is (relatively) painless for the consumer, people subscribe to far more blogs than they could possibly read; RSS traffic is often at least an order of magnitude higher than regular page-reads and even though the vast majority of those RSS-fetchings are left unseen by human eyes, advertisers don't know that, so the numbers are easier to finnagle, smoke and mirrors to make the appeal of blog advertising seem higher.
• the big one, blogs are not just aggregated but analyzed -- this innovation of the link-histogram indexing and link-swarm coallating of blogdom that could be it's own undoing, because a high rank in the histograms implies an acceptance. David Weinberg and others had bemoaned the lack of value (positive or negative) associated with linking (eg when linking something you don't like, you'd want to downgrade the blogdex) to which I'd responded that, to any good Rosicrucian, positives and negatives are all at once always psychologically communitive, but what we all missed was the agnostic, cold and hard impersonal and totally disjoint advertiser link is also equal under the bloglink accounting rules.

Advertising on a page gains you a link, but advertising in situo in the midst of the blogosphere's stream of consciousness grants a sociological fame, exactly what Shirky and others wrote about A-Listers and Power-Law, only here, the high-rating in the blogrolls is not because everyone really believes this is the best swimclub ever -- only to the reader/seeker who's asking 'what's hot today' won't know that.

The appeal of such broadcast reputation-enhancing effects as the everybody is talking about me illusion of blogdex toppings are going to be a siren few advertisers will resist, and a carrot even fewer commissioned ad-salescritters could fail to offer or their VC/IPO board deciders fail to approve.

What's worse, we don't need to command any 'market share' to make this happen, we only need to out-vote the usual levels of common-ground linking in the blog-space. To jam google, you need to out-link just about everyone, but to jam the blog-dex, all you need is maybe a dozen links to scream your ad to the top of the lists. You don't need to be TuCows or 6Apart to get those sorts of numbers, and if you do happen to be in the A-list of blog-hosting companies, well, just think of the channel power you wield ...

Just as the global public trackback/comment grid fell apart under the mt-spamfloods of 2004, it seems that for 2005 yet another postulated utility of blogdom's semantic mycellia is poised to bite the dust -- once the bloghost jammers start standing on the shoulders of their resident bloggers, I expect we'll see the cream won't rise nearly as fast as the goat-droppings -- and double jeopardy as the revenue-hungry hosts continue to ramp up on injecting adverts into the RSS streams.