The genie is out of the bottle. Roger Simon, Charles Johnson and Marc Danziger have now launched their Pajamas Media initiative to the outside world and are inviting other bloggers and investors to take part. The two-tiered business plan (corporate advertising and a news service) offers a clear route to make blogs commercially viable which is good news as a business model for blogs has so far been somewhat elusive.

The advertising part, getting the Lexuses and Microsofts to spend some of their big budget ad-dollars on blogs rather than on The Economist and Time Magazine, is straightforward and kudos to the Pajamas folks for moving this forward. By pooling blogs in order to expand eyeballs and get a bigger chunk of advertising dollars all participating bloggers will benefit.

As Roger rightfully comments, the newswire service is a bit more complicated. The news generating capability that blogs have is phenomenal, from Rathergate to part-time writers with a laptop on the scene disseminating newsworthy stuff from places like Iraq and Lebanon. Yet, the implementatation is somewhat more complicated (it will require a separation of free and subscription-based content) and it requires financing which prompts the question: is there a clear market need and if so, who are your direct competitors? Here Pajamas will go head to head with existing media and newswire services who have deep pockets. Traditional media have so far been unable to adapt to the blogging phenomenon - it wasn't a major threat initially - but now that blogs are creating news and providing sound analysis, their franchise is under pressure, but it's certainly not dead. The shift of corporate ad-dollars is a wake-up call and while bloggers are ahead of the curve now, their advantage won't last long. My advice to Pajamas: move fast.

NOTES:
Marc Danziger has a fairly detailed description of the rationale behind the Pajamas project, here. For bloggers a must-read.

Dan Drezner is excited and has initiated a discussion on his site.