Most of the popular blogs, all of which started out as one-person shops, have now hired separate sales staff to handle sales. We have, Om has, etc. Hell, that’s the main reason we are working with FM Publishing, so that we don’t have to talk to advertisers directly. They turned out to be the wrong choice – throwing us under a bus as soon as the found it convenient, but it doesn’t change our position on the matter. We’re a small operation, we work 24 hours a day to break stories and write interesting content, and we’re trying to earn enough money to keep these things growing. Something Cooper would never understand. [CNET's Charles Cooper is] a paid journalist who has the luxury of sitting back and opining on others, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. It’s what too many mainstream media journalists do – write about things they don’t know and don’t care about. And that’s why blogs are stealing their page views at an alarming rate. Based on my estimates, the average A-List blogger generates 10x the page views that the average journalist does. Why? Because we’re running our own businesses, because we support each other with linking, and because we care, deeply, about what we are writing about.

Mike Arrington says, in another paragraph, that he doesn’t care about being linked to by CNET News (a news website devoted to the business of the information technology) because it generates small traffic compared to what some IT bloggers (like Om) can deliver. Entirely true. Midas Oracle was linked to by CNET News in May 2007, and we received a fistful of visitors only, compared to thousands of people coming from the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

NEXT: Google Search, the New York Times, and the blogs