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# Posted 11:04 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

IT ISN'T HYPE IF IT'S REAL: I'm one of those skeptics who twitches every time someone talks about how the internet -- or even morseo, the blogosphere -- is about to transform some major field of human endeavor. However, the very sober Dan Drezner points out (drawing on The Economist) the ad revenue for Google and Yahoo! is expected to rival the combined prime-time ad revenue of the three major networks.

In the same post, Dan describes the strategy of Roger Simon and Marc Danziger to finally pull in some major advertising accounts for the blogosphere. Roger and Marc want to bring an end to the era of hawking T-shirts and bumper stickers via BlogAds. They want Amex and Lexus to fund the blogosphere. Wow. I hope they succeed.

Another currency in which the blogosphere seems ready to trade is prestige. Dan mentions in passing that TPM will be adding a foreign policy/national security blog in addition to its main site. When I clicked through to find out more, I was blown away to find out whom Josh Marshall had recruited to post on the site: Anne-Marie Slaugher, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at Brookings and former National Security Council official.

Slaughter and Daalder are precisely the kind of people who could ignore the blogosphere and continue to be incredibly successful. They have all of Democratic Washington (and then some) knocking on their doors. CNN, Foreign Affairs and the New York Times all want to know what they think about American foreign policy.

So, if scholars like Slaughter and Daalder think the blogosphere is worth their time and effort, that says a helluva lot about how far we've come.

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