Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. [...] In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.

What has changed? For starters, blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale: They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.

At the same time, advertisers--shunning old-line media in favor of the Web--are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers--which naturally has made advertisers take notice.