I have been criticized soundly here by the early leaders of the blogging business community,(Pictured is one of these leaders, Jason Calacanis. From Vertikal.Dk.)

And why should these people listen? They have what they consider success. I'm a "low traffic blog." If I'm so clever I should be doing it, not talking about it, right? (Right.)

But the plain fact is, most of today's top blogs are using the wrong business model.

Their model is a media model. I tell you, you listen, and maybe I advertise to you on the side. This is what newspapers do, what magazines do, what radio does, what TV does.

But is the Internet a newspaper? Is it radio or a magazine or TV? No, it is not. The IN in the word Internet is short for Intimate. So why then should a business model imported from one of these other industries be appropriate? Only because, like TV entrepreneurs in the late 1940s, you can't think of a more appropriate one. You don't have the right vocabulary. You weren't born to this medium.

What would work better?

The community business model would work better. This is driven, not so much by what bloggers want to say as what their readers want to say. There are many high-traffic sites now using the community model -- Slashdot, Plastic, Groklaw, DailyKos. What they have in common is true community software -- Scoop, Slash, even Drupal.

The problem (and this is the nut of the issue) is that most of these community sites have deliberately shied away from having a business model. The only site I mentioned above that has a true business model is Slashdot, and Slashdot is so unusual people with an editorial background can't get their arms around what that business model is.

The model, in a word, is sharing.

Slashdot is at the heart of a number of sites in which file sharing and community building are encouraged and (more importantly) enabled. Developers can talk about what interests them, find others of like mind, and launch projects together, which can be developed and brought to fruition all within the same site network. In fact, Slashdot itself is really just the news portal to this larger site, and more effective business model. Looking at Slashdot itself in isolation leaves you with a false impression. Where are the ads, you ask?

Those who have been successful in creating blogs with a large total readership have not yet begun to plumb the depths of their audiences, or serve the needs of those audiences. So here's now you can start doing that, a simple verbal analogy that will rock your world and get your head spinning in the right direction.

It's not a theater.

It's a trade show.

In other words you don't have an audience. You have people prepared to be engaged in a subject, driven there perhaps by news, perhaps by personality. Each blog, at best, is a sideshow attraction, and the vast majority don't even have a little theater in which they can take the rubes for showing "more."

Of all the media out there consumer magazines come closest to understanding this in their creation of new titles. They don't want to create a new book about food, but something devoted to the "food lifestyle." Or the "plastics workstyle."

Create an audience, in other words, then enable all types of commerce within it.