You have to shake your head at Microsoft's refusal to adopt/accept Podcast as the standard way to describe audio downloads. Apparently, Microsoft calls them "blogcasts" internally. It is probably too late for Microsoft to change the vernacular. Once an activity gets described - e.g. "I'll Google it" or "Just Blackberry me", it's hard to get people to call it something else. As an aside, I wonder if Steve Jobs insists that Apple employees describe Windows as "the other operating system" or "Bill Gates Evil Beast"?

If you didn't get a chance to read Saturday's National Post, I wrote a feature looking at where the money will be made in the blogging industry. It explores areas such as advertising, publishing (creation and content management) and search. Some of the people I interviewed were Business 2.0 senior writer and blogger Om Malik, Technorati's David Sifry, FeedBurner's Dick Costolo and Tucows' Elliott Noss. While the BusinessWeek feature in May focused on how blogs are changing the business world, I'm looking right at the money.
Update, August 2005: another story on blog-nomics can be found in MIT's Technology Review.

Here's my story:

Om Malik is one of the most popular bloggers but he barely makes enough money from advertisements on his Web site to cover his costs.
For the time being, however, Mr. Malik is not bothered by his lack of financial success because he realizes the blogosphere is still in its infancy and it will take time before successful economic models emerge -- much like it took several years for e-commerce and paid-search to become lucrative Internet vehicles.
"I'm very patient so I know one day my blog will make money," said Mr. Malik, a senior writer with Business 2.0 magazine whose technology blog can be found at gigaom.com. "The problem is at some point I do need to make money. I have enough traffic and enough money from Google ads to pay the bills but the profits [now] are just enough to buy me a carton of cigarettes."
Mr. Malik's willingness to stay the course could be rewarded as a few business models are gradually emerging at a time when the number of blogs nears 13 million. The markets attracting the most attention are tools and services to publish, advertise on, search, track and manage personal and corporate blogs.
Some of the more interesting players include Technorati Inc., which operates a blog search engine; Newsgator Technologies Inc., which provides people and businesses with a tool to create a "library" of blogs rather than visiting multiple Web sites, and Tucows Inc., which sells a Web-based product called Blogware that lets people create feature-rich blogs.
While tools and service providers jockey to position themselves, the investment community is also trying to get a handle on where the action will be. The interest among investors in blog-related companies has been, at best, pragmatic. According to BusinessWeek, there was about US$60-million of venture capital investment last year -- a far cry from the dot-com frenzy.
Another difference from the dot-com boom is the lack of hubris and self-promotion among blog companies. "This is a young industry," said Jane Anderson, a spokeswoman with Six Apart Ltd. "We don't jump up and down saying, 'We make lots of money.' We don't talk much about money because we are investing in the business."
So where is the money in blogs? The area with perhaps the most potential is advertising, which is surging as the Web becomes a bigger part of marketing budgets. Last year, the online advertising market jumped 33% to US$9.6-billion, and it is expected to climb 34% to US$12.7-billion in 2005.
"Advertising is going to be big because advertisers are running out of good places to put ads, and blogs are such a good area," said Tris Hussey, a professional blogger and consultant. "It's going to be huge but it's untapped."
So far, most blog advertising has been focused on Google Inc.'s paid-search service called AdSense but there are only a handful of people making enough money to be deemed a business.
One of the reasons advertisers have yet to embrace blogs may be the fragmented nature of the blogosphere and the advertising community's need to get a better grasp on how to approach a market still in its infancy. There are a few blog publishers making enough advertising revenue to be seen as viable businesses.
These include Gawker Media, Weblogs Inc. and Boing Boing, which is co-edited by Toronto native Corey Doctorow. New York-based Weblogs, which operates a network of 80 independent blogs, including Engadget and Autoblog, makes more than US$1,400 a day in revenue from Google paid-search ads.
One company aiming to capitalize on the advertising market's growth and address the advertising community's adoption hurdles is FeedBurner, which is attempting to position itself as the middleman between blog publishers and advertisers.
Dick Costelo, FeedBurner's president, said a key part of the company's strategy is amalgamating different sites into groups or syndicates so advertisers can effectively reach a particular audience. An example of this approach, he said, would be right-wing political sites banding together to attract advertising from the U.S. Republic Party. This would let them collectively sell one million page views a month, which is a more attractive proposition than trying to do it individually. As blogs attract a larger audience as they become a mainstream way to get information, Mr. Costelo said advertising is gaining more momentum.
"There was a question in the past whether blogs and [blog readers] were a fad," he said. "It is very clear now, neither is a fad. Both are important trends. In an economy of attention, the advertisers and marketers will follow eyeballs. On a weekly basis, I see more attention paid by advertising to this space."
Another part of the blog market with strong potential is publishing tools, given that there are 30,000 to 40,000 new blogs created each day. The most popular tools are Blogger.com, a free service owned by Google Inc.; Six Apart, which sells two subscription-based services -- Movable Type and TypePad and offers a free service called Live Journal; and Microsoft Corp., which has a free service called MSN Spaces that has attracted more than 10 million users since December.
Elliot Noss, Tucows' president and chief executive, said there is room for free and fee-based publishing tools to serve the needs of different users. The free services, he said, are ways to introduce to blogging people who want to communicate with friends or simply express an opinion. For bloggers looking for more sophisticated tools, migrating to a paid service makes sense.
"The free services service a niche, but the $8 to $10 a month that a premium service will cost you will more than make up for itself in convenience time and usability," he said during an interview last month.
Clearly, one of the more intriguing parts of the blog market is search, given how Google has become so popular and lucrative. Technorati has emerged as the leading player in the blog market with claims it tracks 12.6 million blogs and 1.2 billion links.
Technorati makes money in three ways: It has Google paid-search ads that are linked to search queries; it strikes content syndication deals with sites such as Salon.com and CNN.com that want to attract traffic; and it offers a subscription service to companies that want to keep track of what blog publishers are saying about their products and rivals.
Technorati CEO Dave Sifry believes it can stay ahead of rivals, including traditional search engines such as Google, because it has been tracking blogs for a long time and has an extensive database. "The amount of data we are able to collect this way is anywhere to two to 10 times that our competitors have," he said. "What we do is hard, takes time and requires smart people. I can go to Google and do a search for a press release but when I go to Technorati, I find cool stuff. It is hard to do, there is value in it and we do it well."
While blogging companies work to expand their businesses, there has been a modest, but increasing, amount of M&A and venture capital activity. Most of the deals are fairly small but they are strategically important. In the past couple of months, Yahoo Inc. has made two deals -- acquiring Vancouver-based Flickr Inc., which lets people create photo blogs, and Blo.gs, which offers tools to read and search for blogs.
Other noteworthy deals include Ask Jeeves Inc.'s purchase of Bloglines Inc., Six Apart purchase of Live Journal Inc., and NewsGator purchase of Feed Demon. Most of the firms being bought are privately owned, so financial details are not available, although Yahoo reportedly paid US$35-million for Flickr.
The amount of venture capital investment may accelerate as the blog industry matures. This month, RSS Investors LP unveiled plans to create the first fund specializing in companies using technology called Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a key blogging technology -- much like HTML programming language drives Web sites.
The fund, which plans to raise up to US$100-million, will focus on news aggregators, blogs and search engines. As for whether blogs will become big business, Technorati's Mr. Sifry is confident it will eventually happen.
"Any time you see a strong vibrant community of people doing something, keep your eyes open because there will be interesting businesses there."