The Million Dollar Blog

Jason Calcanis seems to blog a bunch about the real numbers behind the blogging business, and claims to get between $500-$2500 a day in AdSense revenue  … also see him on on how much a blog reader is "worth."

Pet peeve: can anyone explain why google gets SO much more press and credit for keyword based advertising when Overture originated the concept and probably makes a similar amount of scratch off of it today (especially since the Yahoo acquisition)? The cult of personality surrounding Google is really a remarkable reality-distortion field, especially given the large number of flops they generate and the huge trends they miss out on (viz. social software, and don't say "orkut") ...

I've always felt like what Google basically does well is old school process-automation. Taking something previously done by humans and applying monstrous amounts of hardware to create a brute-force calculation of "the best". They really don't have a slam-dunk aside from search (and sponsored search) .

I guess the question is larger, because it's not like Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL or eBay really do any innovation anymore. They each had one or two ideas when they were in a garage or had just moved out of one, and then grew by copying or buying outside ideas, or rehashing old application concepts (mail, mapping, IM, auctions, classifieds, etc. etc.). Why can't companies like that come up with  de.licio.us, memeorandum (which is where I found Jason Calcanis, btw),  flickr or fotolog?  They can only buy them or make usually hamfisted attempts to clone them. Google Base, if it is going after Craigslist, just completely misses what made CL a smash, which was a real, organically growing community and the image of Craig as a regular guy with strongly held ethics. It rose like a gentrifying neighborhood very specifically out of the counter-culture, which took it as one of their own, were fiercely loyal to it, and buzzed about it at parties and workplaces to friends from all walks of life. And it was years before it saw any revenue, which you would think would make it a candidate for incubation in some giant's research department. But it was such a singular, specific vision that bureaucracy would have killed it ...

Ok this is a bit of a rant at this point, don't know how to wrap it up:) What are your thoughts?