I am so fucking ready to rant about this; that kind of day.

To recap, Dave Winer starts a BloggerCon thread saying Shirky's Power Laws rationalize a blogger aristocracy. Nick Denton says "in internet media, a peasant can become king." Seth Finkelstein pines for "a session on wealth and poverty run by Martha Stewart." Frank Paynter says you have to be born lucky to break into the A-list: talent and "deadly serious intention" need money and leisure time. Then JT invokes Sturgeon's Law, the ignorant overcoming the expert, our trust in celebrity and cats swarming to move the D-List to the C-List. Seth rebuts: "1) Be content with your lot in life. 2) The weathy deserve it since they are talented and apply themselves (while the poor are shiftless and lazy). 3) Work hard, be optimistic, and you could succeed too. 4) Anyway, it's better here than in Russia or China." jt adds that craving an audience doesn't breed excellence.

First, reading blogs is a zero sum game. Each person on earth has only so much disposable attention. Every content publisher competes for that finite pool. It's not the blogosphere, of course, but the entire mediasphere and the real world fighting for attention.

The very popularity of weblogs and their ease for new entrants means that our marketplace for attention becomes more efficient. Like any nearly efficient market, overall rents (profits distributed) average toward zero. In an attention market, that means you may get your shot at the big time, but your content had better meet some niche's needs superbly or you're toast.

Fairness? Equal distribution of attention means that everyone has to read more dreck and that nobody ever gets to discover classics or bestsellers. What's more, when there were ten thousand active bloggers in the world, you could really see your shot. You could see your stats rise as newbies followed previously blazed blogrolls.

But it's wrong to expect opportunity to scale. Sure, you might get discovered at Schwab's soda fountain. But in attention terms, it's amazing if your neighborhood billboard for the local pub gets noticed, let alone talked about. And you'd be flabbergasted if the Murphy's Dive poster was mentioned in a local trade rag, let alone the town paper, or picked up in syndication. And you'd be right to be surprised. Because Budweiser just spent $100 million in your state, spending it on high production value and primo placement. And what is your little 8x20 foot sign going to do against that kind of presence? Millions of people know Bud's brand, not Murphy's.

But that little sign may do the trick. It may be placed just so around the corner and remind enough locals that yours is the classy dive bar, the one with singing on Tuesday nights. And it could be the difference between breaking even and setting aside a little for retirement.

And you may even do some co-operative advertising. Take a little of that Anheuser-Busch cash and stick a Bud neon sign in the window. The regulars won't care, but passers-by may get enough of a familiar tug to walk through the door. A-list links are like that; someone with a lot of juice throwing a little attention your way, knowing you've got your own readership and you're gonna siphon its attention right back to the A-list's circle, and in spades.

We complain of advertising overload. Spam, ad pollution, telemarketers. Screaming for attention so loud it makes you pluck out your eyes just so you don't have to see one more inanity. Your ears bleed with fatigue. Your thumb builds a callous from using the remote to change channels or TiVo-ahead in commercial avoidance.

And into this we drop vox populi and speak of Voice. So now I must read the inanities published by family, and they mine. And the drivel of my co-workers. And the read of my lackluster performance on last night's date. And the adolescent self-involvement of TRL-addled hormone machines. It's like the Pennysaver on steroids. Listings of ton's of other people's useless trash begging for a new home, in this case a temporary place in my brain.

So we tune the cacophany out, we avert our eyes.

And stick with the three bars we know, along the beaten path. And if word comes about a new beer, we might try it, but it better be worth giving up the comfort of a cold Bud.

Technorati, you say? Daypop? Feedster? All the wonderful tools of discovery and navigation? Yeah, I saw that beer distributor's magazine too. It had picture and reviews and blurbs on all sorts of beers and ales, local and national brands, imports too. But I don't have time to try a million beers. Bud's good enough most of the time. It does the job. And I have better things to do than waste time and my hard earned coin on suds I might not like. I already know what I get with Bud and the occasional Anchor Steam.

Besides, there's a game on. Why am I talking to you?

[aka klogs]