Blogs are chaotic.

What if I went to the news stand and all the magazines were listed not by their subject but by their circulation? Maybe I could sift through the titles and find some promising candidates, but what if inside the magazine, people were writing articles off-topic? What if there were articles from other magazines attacking the magazine's authenticity and its very right to exist?

Chaos.

What if there were self-appointed tracking system gurus who claimed they accurately tracked popularity? Even if they are right - despite all indications - is popularity the goal? Readership is not leadership. If "Playboy" outsells "MS Magazine," what conclusions should I draw?

If there was one thing, and only one thing, that I took home from the July 2005 BlogHer Conference was that the playing field is flat. There is no clear leader. There are millions of blogs.

Who can keep up with it?

Seriously, the volume of output is staggering.

Is the conversation in Yankee Stadium better than in a graduate seminar at Stanford just because there are more people there? And who can hear it at the Stadium, and they're all watching the same game out on the field.

There are two factors as I see it - the gate and the quality. If the blog is out to make lots of money, the traffic numbers become important and the barriers to entry are rather small. The readership is it's own staff - not like Playboy or MS that need to generate content. The readership is its own content. Granted, there may be servers and hosting fees, but nothing like the costs associated with publishing the New York Times or Sports Illustrated.

Although a few individuals seem to have made a living for themselves in the blogbiz, most are labors of love and people who feel they have something to add to the conversation.

The question is, if the blogbiz can become profitable, what is the revenue model?

Recall the dot.com crash? Everyone rushed to sell things via dot.com, from books, to desks, to cars. The ads are fresh in my mind. Mortgage companies were going to electronically line up at our door and be begging to loan us money. We'd have an infinite choice of vehicles that would flash past us. Trouble was, with the actual vehicle off in North Dakota, we couldn't kick the tires.

Blogs are happening, but hardly anyone is getting rich.

To take another model - newspapers. The New York Times outsells the San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley's and the San Francisco Bay Area's major newspaper). I live in neither location, but if there is a paper I would read, I prefer the Mercury News over the New York Times because my issues have more to do with Silicon Valley than New York City even though, as I said, I live in neither place. Maybe I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and maybe that paper has what's playing at the Cineplex. What do I care, really, what's hot on Broadway?

In short, newspapers serve local needs and local tastes and circulation has more to do with a population and it's great for the Times to get massive circulation and advertisers, but the only reason the advertisers are in the papers is that they ride along in the media.

Let's stop and think for a second. If I am taking an ad in a big newspaper (which I have done in my work-a-day world) I have a readership in mind. In my case I was looking to hire a mainframe computer sales engineer. I put an ad in the paper, the Wall Street Journal - a small ad for $5000 and it ran one day only, one time. I got 2500 resumes. The ad was very specific. Of the 2500 resumes, 2400 were not even close to the qualifications. A carpet salesman promised me, "I'm a fast learner."

Of the 100 that had experience in computers, only 30 had anything close to the other requirements. After a phone screen, I narrowed it down to five who actually could carry on a conversation about handling such a job - and I am a very easy interviewer, too.

So, $5000 brought me five candidates. You do the math.

In 2005, I would go to Monster.com for the search. Would I go to the top blog site on the internet to look for my candidate? It would not be cost effective.

Advertisers do not need blogs to get access to the internet, whereas they do need the Wall Street Journal to get access (at least at one time) to the Wall Street Journal readership who are pounding the pavement for jobs.

All but the youngest remember magazines, especially trade journals, that had perforated cards in the back of the magazine. They are called "bingo cards" in the biz. The reader circles the product that he/she is interested in, and the information is forwarded to the company. If I took an ad in the magazine, that might cost as much as $5000 for a two page spread running three times, I'd get the bingo placement, gratis. If I put a postcard in a cellophane package inside the magazine (we've all seen these) it would run $50 to $200.

The response was pathetic - and we were offering fine products, too.

This is not to say the internet is a poor place to advertise, nor am I saying blogs can't make money, nor that readership is irrelevant. Far from it.

I am saying it is too early to make any prognostications.

Let's go back to the introduction of the pocket calculator. Who were the players? Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instrument and Bomar. Only Texas Instrument is in the biz. HP left it and Bowman went under.

In word processing, Wang lead the pack along with Lanier. Where are they now?

Yet people calculate with pocket calculators and do word processing on computers.

Polaroid once dominated instant photography and today more picture are snapped instantly than ever before, but the original Polaroid headquarters, last I saw, was a historic site.

The bell has rung. "There' off an running" says the announcer. They break for the first turn, but it is too early to call the winner. For that we'll not only have to wait for the home stretch, but also see who finally crosses the line - and that won't be any time sooner than 2010.