POLITICS OF BLOGGING: Speaking of Charles, he offers these intelligent comments on Why We Blog:

Frankly, if you show me an Instapundit-style blogger who isn't trying such a maneuver for his or herself, I'll show you a blockhead. (Bloghead?) 90% of us got into this after seeing Glenn Reynold's dazzling success; whether or not we are trying to get rich on the web, we are all at least trying to boost our public profile, to generate the sort of buzz that we can parlay into bigger and better things.

The "maneuver" he refers to is Virginia Postrel's busting on Andrew Sullivan for comments like these:

But it's interesting to see former labor secretary Robert Reich report over $750,000 in corporate speaking fees last year. "I do the speeches because it's very, very easy money,'' he told the Boston Herald. "I am utterly amazed the businesses are willing to pay so much for my economic expertise . . . but, if they want to pay that much, it's a free market, I'm delighted.'' Among the companies that have given him money - at $32,000 for a sixty minute speech - are Ford Motors, Panasonic, Merrill Lynch, Aetna Financial Services, Standard & Poors, Deloitte & Touche, Forbes Management Conference Group and Behrman Capital. Now, he's running for governor of Massachusetts, and pandering to the left in the primaries. There's nothing wrong with what he has done; and he has disclosed it all. But he's also a journalist and founding editor of the American Prospect - a magazine often railing against corporate excess. It's useful to know - however belatedly - just how much Reich has benefited from corporate speeches recently, while writing columns that often deal with economic issues that affect such corporations. I guess, like Paul Krugman, he is in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls. Fair enough. But I hope he doesn't push his new-found populism a little too far in the campaign. It would sound just a little bit phony, don't you think? He even backed out of an early candidates' debate in order to cash in on a $40,000 IBM gig. Those are his priorities. Or maybe they're just a Third Way. Take it away, Mickey Kaus!

To which Virginia responds (an excerpt; of course you should read the whole thing):

Like many other people who sell their ideas, I get paid to make speeches. Just recently, for instance, I went to Rochester, New York, to talk to a conference on local economic development issues. I was invited because some of the people involved wanted to inject a dynamist perspective into a discussion that is usually dominated by various sorts of technocratic planning. In other words, they hired me for the same reasons that editors hire me: because I had something unique to say. I'm not planning to write anything about Rochester, and if I did the speech would be part of the story. (I'm prohibited by contract from writing such a story for the NYT, although it wouldn't fit the column format anyway.) The client paid $7,500, and I netted $5,250 after my agents' fee. That's considerably more than I make for writing, but I wouldn't have taken this particular speaking job for less.

I see no more reason to apologize for taking speaking fees than I do for accepting manuscript fees from the NYT or D Magazine or the WSJ or HarperCollins. It's just another form of compensation, in this case for oral rather than written communication. While my fees are nowhere near the Robert Reich range, that's a matter of supply and demand, not principle. He's a TV celebrity and former cabinet secretary. I'm an obscure public intellectual (so obscure I didn't make Richard Posner's famous list). If a reputable organization wanted to pay $32,000 to hear me speak, we'd be living in another universe, but I'd take the money (minus 30 percent for my agents). Reich and I have this much in common: Our messages are consistent, regardless of who's paying the bill. The people who hire us get to hear our ideas, not to determine them.

Charles adds these comments:

She goes on to a larger and more interesting examination of the economics of authorship in the digital age, where me-ziners like her give away most of their written content for nearly nothing, but parlay the resulting fame into better-compensated gigs, such as speeches to corporations and conferences.

Which takes me back the Murtaugh-comments I started off with, where he trains his cold scientist's eye on his and mine and our motivations for blogging: to increase our status in the public eye, or at least one sliver of it, ", to generate the sort of buzz that we can parlay into bigger and better things." I would have to agree with Charles there, at least in my own case, even if in my own case the bigger and better things involve me making sense to myself (as the corner blurb says, I'm trying to put my thoughts out there, whatever that means) because I can't really envision what kind of material gain I could exchange this thing for --I mean, I'm mostly a linkmeister, as you can tell from the left there. But I'm all for the hopefully bigger and better things gained via blogging. Ken Layne pointed out this Far Eastern Economic Review piece by Jeremy Wagstaff, also on the money (or lack of it) in blogging:

I'd like to think that blogs do what the much vaunted portal of the dotcom boom failed to do: collate, filter and present information from other sources, alongside comment. Bloggers-those that blog-will be respected as folk who aren't journalists, or experts in their field, but have sufficient knowledge and experience to serve as informal guides to the rest of us hunting for stuff on the World Wide Web.

There's not much money in this, though doubtless they're likely to upset the media barons who realize that their carefully presented, graphics-strewn home pages are being bypassed by blog-surfers stopping by only long enough to grab one article. But that may be the future: The editor that determines the content of our daily read may not be a salaried Webmaster or a war-weathered newspaper editor, but a bleary-eyed blogger in his undershirt willing to put in the surfing time on our behalf.

He ends with the hopeful and futuristical "Who knows? We may even be willing to pay to read their blogs. As long as there are no grinning, laptop-carrying hand-shakers in sight." The grinning hand-shakers, of course, are the symbols of the failed corporate portals. So I guess the moral of all this is: there is certainly no money in blogging, at least not in the short term. The end.