Live Blogging of Iraq Elections: Jesus what a waste of time. Not a thing posted that wasn't on TV. Even the almost always informative Belmont Club is just hot air. There are uses for MSM and uses for blogging, they rarely coincide. I'm beginning to think realize that only other bloggers are reading blogs, a finite audience. As I analyze my own traffic (40,000 per week) I have lots of Google but tons of bloggers. BTW I ran a test ad for two days within the blog (not on a sidebar) and had traffic of 11,000 readers, not page views. Out of eleven thousand visits the ad only had five click throughs and four buyers of the cheapest choice. My Madison Ave pals tell me that this is about par for the course regarding blog response; book ads do better, mainly because the ads are not announced but placed serreptitiously inside a posting as a link to a source when it is actually a link to a commission for referring. In the real world placing a link in order to make money without notifying the reader you are being paid is a crime. All the Pajamas Media slugs linking to OSM without notifiying the reader that there is financial reward for the poster is a crime. Speaking for me, my eyes never wander to anyone's sidebar, I just read the text and I NEVER click a link to Amazon.