In last week's issue of my free weekly e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.com, I took a look at business models , following a weekend at beautiful Belmont University in Nashville (left).

This week I continued the discussion, asking why so many responded to that piece denying they had any such thing as A Clue, let alone A-Clue.Com.

Enjoy.

There was an interesting reaction to my piece last week, denial.

Many of the leaders in the blogging business read it, and all of them denied its inherent truth, namely that they had A Clue.

I'm not a business, insisted Jason Calacanis. Never mind that he has 65 blogs, a uniform look-and-feel, that his writers don't even get their pictures on their blogs and, when they leave, they leave with nothing. No, it's all about passion, he insists. We do this for love, he says. Business? We're not building one of those.

So it went.

I'm not a success, insisted Rafat Ali of Paidcontent. I'm not powerful, insisted Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos. I'm a dilletante, said Glenn Reynolds. I'm only here for the beer, said Dave Winer. I'm no one at all, said Pamela Jones of Groklaw.

Well these are early days although Moulitsas, to his credit, at least admits he's now a public figure, making him harder to libel. (I shall refrain here from testing that statement.) You don't want to encourage competitors, especially when you're still undercapitalized.

But I'm not worried about that possibility. I think this is a Microsoft fear. Over the last decade Microsoft has steadily eaten its young, taking every successive new niche into the operating system, destroying the incentive to innovation Gates champions politically. (Virtualization is the latest example.)

As a result innovation has moved heavily into the open source space. But there's not as much money there. It's almost considered gauche in open source to try and charge for software, let alone claim a serious business model. Yet this is where the venture capital is going. It's like the music business in the late 1960s. Everybody says it's not about the money even though, in the end, it's all about the money.

Calacanis has another reason for concern. I question how well his business model can scale. His blogs, such as EnGadget, are content, most with only short content threads attached. He can bring in a lot of writers, but none can earn more than the ads on their pages gather. And most items don't even jump to a second page.

If Jones or Moulitsas were interested in making more money they easily could. They don't. Ali's PaidContent has just brought in its first employee, who appeared at Blognashville. Even a hash house is a bigger business.

In terms of success all these people are just at Jerimoth Hill. Don't know it? It's the highest point in Rhode Island, my mom's native state (where many of my own ancestors lie buried). It's all of 812 feet above sea level (although there are access issues involved in getting there). My home in Atlanta, by contrast, is 1,003 feet above sea level (according to Google's Keyhole).

No one in the blogging business wants to be accused of being Yertle the Turtle, or Napoleon the Pig (from Animal Farm). We're all equal here. No one is more equal than others (yet). Not while our bankbooks show just three or four digit balances, and we're having to spend all our time just keeping our blogs operating.

This is indeed a problem. Even top bloggers are spending too much time in their businesses, not enough time on their businesses. I praise them because they have learned to please readers, or they have generated a lot of interaction. The next step, should any choose to take it, is to please advertisers, to define their blogs in terms of the link between buyer and seller of something.

Of the bloggers I've described Moulitsas comes closest to this ideal. He learned in the last year that he could deliver dollars to those he anointed. He could even keep candidates in the money race. What he, and all the other liberal bloggers failed to do last year, was simply win, baby. Older technologies - radio, direct mail, printing - brought out the winning margins in most races they targeted. So even in blogging's biggest niche there is much to learn.

As a result the way is open, right now, to publishers. The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News are launching a version of MSN Spaces with the promise that the best entries might be published in local versions of the papers. I've got a gig at ZDNet, and I get paid to write about Open Source there. (I've learned a lot in the process.)

Publishers understand the need for income to exceed outgo, and they're not shy about admitting it. The owner of Lingeriedreams put this into perspective for me this weekend, a quote I'm certain will get Calacanis nodding his head: "I come at this from the webmaster/SEO perspective...where's the traffic? Where are the valuable clicks on AdSense? How can I put these two together and make money?"

I've said before, advertising is just one business model. I also question the need to fear publishers, whose instincts to avoid controversy and "vet" everything mean they can't handle blog-speed interactivity.

I will repeat one of my favorite sayings. The "In" in the word Internet is short for Intimate. Today's successful blogs create intimacy between writers and readers.

The next step is to create intimacy between buyers and sellers. That is the Denali (above, in Alaska) of a scaled, successful blog business model.

And you already know where we are now.