I have jaded tastes, a contrarian's eye for the obscure and unusual, and little patience with hustlers, grifters or fan-boys. "Popular" is an insult, usually a badge of mediocrity, and in those few instances when this isn't so, it isn't the most interesting attribute of whatever is popular.

So naturally I have little use for popular blogs, the ones that are famous for being famous. I've read them, they're sort of unavoidable, but I always go away with the sense of having gone nowhere, seen nothing and done nothing. When a group of them decided to do a joint effort of some sort it barely registered. So what? Will a group of bland bloggers be more or less bland than the individual blogs of the members? Who cares?

I was wrong. There is something interesting about the project. It has been a resounding bust and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, blood on the tracks, but not in places I usually haunt. Today, since the world seems to be in a tryptophan stupor and there is little or nothing going in in those usual haunts, I visited the backlist, the blogs that I have encountered at one time or another and had some post I found interesting. Often they just had attitude, or at least that's all I remembered about them.

For example, there's Alice.

OK, I was wrong. And it was my own misjudgement: nobody in a suit ordered me to do it! Terrible. What seemed like boredom was just my stomach giving way, and now it has recovered ready for another assault.

So I might actually look in on this pajamas thing. The second part, obviously. Blogs of the Macy’s parade seem a bit beside the point. With or without “mystery guests”.

Won’t be clicking on any of their ads, though. Despite Roger Simon’s excitement over their recent hit count, gore-goggling doesn’t indicate the trust you need for advertising to work.

I do think the pajamas fiasco is the biggest story on the blogosphere right now, even though plenty of people seem to be ignoring it. These people are selling/ trying to sell “the best of the blogosphere” (ugh); that’s in all of our names. It makes me very annoyed, and the more I read, the more very annoyed I get.

She may be right, and she surely has attitude. What was a boring non-event has become an event by failing noisily. She has a series of attitudinous posts you might enjoy, or not, and some links to other views, such as this review of the OSM launch party by Jim Lowney. The closing scene:

Soon Blair and I were chatting with the beauty again.

“So what do you do?” he asked her.

“Anything,” she smiled

“No, I mean how do your earn money?”

“I believe she already answered that question,” I piped in.

She just smiled, still looking for a ride back to her hotel, and for the first time ever I saw Tim Blair speechless.

Once he was able to talk again, Blair and I went outside once more for a smoke. The bloggers faded away from the bar and the beauty thanked us for the drink and said good night. I watched her walk away up Lexington alone and realized she was the only person I had meet at the Open Source Media after-party who was truly open and who had a solid business plan.

Of course the plan must be well executed too, providing a consistent product that meets the requirements for availability and quality at a price consumers can, and are willing, to pay. I think that's the problem with trying to make money in journalism. There's no way to get separation, to consistently provide quality at a level that isn't equalled and often exceeded by amateurs. And since the cost of entry is so low - no printing presses required, no distribution network to groom and feed - there are only small niches available for professionals.

A vigorous community of amateur practitioners limits the scale and scope of this business as well as the older one Lowney admires, but opens up a variety of specialty niches. Those businesses will endure but are essentially irrelevant, beside the point - journalism isn't a profession, it's a behavior, one that isn't very difficult and that doesn't require rare skills. You might make the analogy that the net did for journalism what birth control pills did for sex since the result in both cases was a great increase in availability from a much larger community of practitioners. Anyone could do it and anyone could "consume it" in the many-to-many source-sink sense.

It is the amateur community that is the most interesting and important in both cases. The broad dissatisfaction with professional journalism can't be cured by new management, new journalists or new presentation methods. Journalists have no advantage since the things they report are for the most part widely witnessed, and they are a bit slow off the mark. A fresh point of view compellingly articulated is far more interesting, and there's a continuous supply of them. Fresh meat.

There are those who blog for pay and some are doing OK. There are those who blog for a variety of other reasons but who have advertisements and accept tips who do OK too. But I don't find them to be interesting or even significant except as the inevitable clumping that occurs in any system. It is the system that is interesting and important. The system will always have a big tail as well as some big dogs, and it's debatable who is doing the wagging. I think it is most often the tail wagging the dogs, and a few of the biggest dogs think so too. They are happy to relax and enjoy the ride and passing scenery, eager to point out notable sites, cites and sights. And I'll continue to ride along somewhere near the tip of the tail where the high amplitude excursions are most common. E-Ticket blogging of sorts.