It seems that people have discovered a new hobby - talking about themselves online. And if uploading millions of pages every day about their ordinary lives and loves wasn’t enough – this rising legion of gonzo laureates are demanding their place in the sun. By all acounts, they are getting it. According to studies by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly a third of US internet users read blogs. Eight million of these have created one of their own. The next phase, however, is even more interesting – distributed publicity.

As the old Zen saying goes, if a leaf falls in a forest does anyone notice? Certainly, a random post in the blogosphere could easily vanish without a trace unless you are jacked in via one of the growing number of online publicity groupings. What I have labelled 'distributed publicity' refers to the ability of a network to divide and direct its audience to relevant segments of user generated content, whether this be in the form of web postings, photos, gift wishlists or even classified advertisements. The viral quality of these networks, which rely on their own momentum to acquire more users is also very financially attractive compared to sites which require heavy marketing budgets. No wonder then that Google and Yahoo have placed such companies on the top of their shopping lists.

A good example of distributed publicity in action is the photo sharing site Flickr. Flickr is not only a clever software application to store and manage your photos - its use of social networking brings an immediate and relevant audience to your photo album who will offer feedback and become your own mini fan base. Similarly, while anyone these days can easily set up their own weblog, hitching your efforts to a network like Myspace will allow you to co-author content with a growing number of like-minded bloggers who will leave their own graffiti style commentary on your pages. The addictive quality of such services is not merely having access to a tool to write about your life, but rather interaction with an audience who will share it with you.

Of course, it is not just voyeuristic consumers who are playing the fame game. More sophisticated webloggers aiming for web celebrity status now offer syndication via customised RSS feeds, trackbacks which reveal what other sites are commentating on your posts, and weblog advertising networks such as Blogads. Forget office watercooler notoriety. Today’s Digerati are focused on their Technorati rating, which profiles the number of sources that link to their weblog. Fortunately, the payoffs are more than the trickle feed of click revenue from Google’s Adsense program. Well known professional bloggers are using their new found status to launch books, consulting and speaking services.

The network benefits of weblog publicity are very similar to the kinds of features economists identify when analysing the operation of markets and trading exchanges. Sites like eBay or Monster have worked incredibly well, largely at the expense of traditional newspaper classifieds, for the reason that they deliver a huge volume of active buyers and sellers. The rationale for participation is compelling. You can post the fact that you have a toaster for sale on your own website, but you are likely to get a much better response if that post is on an auction site with millions of potentially interested buyers. Not everyone thinks this will be the case for long.

Bob Wyman, who co-founded Pubsub, recently wrote an influential post recently which argued that a combination of search engines with ‘Structured Blogging’ will force many of today's web businesses to adapt or shut down. By structured data, Wyman was referring to means of including tags in web pages and blog postings which identify information for what it is, rather than just a bunch of searchable text. So a restaurant review, can be identified by a search engine as a “review” and aggregated appropriately. Similarly, a resume in your “about me” page could also be tagged, and then indexed by a headhunter as part of a recruitment search result.

People have been talking about the semantic web for almost as long as the non semantic one has been around. Arguably if better meta data existed, you wouldn’t need Google’s clever workaround of link popularity to find relevant content or a site like eBay to help sellers find buyers. But while on level such order seems irresistible, the highly distributed nature of the web makes enforcing compliance to formal content rules difficult and even undesirable. Further, while the structured data approach makes life easier for people who know what they are looking for, it doesn’t address the importance of passive communities of interest that collect around favoured content.

Most of the people who hang out on Flickr peering in on other people’s lives via their photo albums probably didn’t start the day with the search term “middle aged man in faded tracksuit doing washing”. But, if the subject happens to be one of your photo contacts chances are you will look at that photo even though you would have never have thought of doing so otherwise. In many ways the real magic behind the growing number of distributed publicity networks is the entertainment value of their randomness.

In the early days of the web, sites banded together in web rings and participated in banner exchange networks to cost effectively acquire traffic. The distributed publicity networks of today are very similar in philosophy but vastly more sophisticated in scope and execution. Search engines may eventually become smart enough to find exactly what you are looking for. In the meantime, most of us will continue enjoying accidentally stumbling on what we were not.

If you believe the accepted wisdom, the best way to find a wife, boyfriend or job is to get set up by a friend. That might explain the latest dotcom craze of uploading your entire contact database of friends and colleagues onto the web, and encouraging them to do the same. Something must be working, because millions of people are now happily chatting, mixing and swapping photos of themselves on an emerging multitude of social networking websites. Whatever you are looking for, the only thing you can’t easily find on one of these sites is a clear business model. So far it seems that social networks have been more successful in raising money than making any of their own.

For once the latest showdown in Hollywood is not about a hysterical actor demanding a pay rise, a larger trailer and a rewrite of his fumbled love scene. Instead, four giants of entertainment and retail are all converging on what is becoming one of the most hotly contested battles for customer mindshare – the online DVD rental space. And the funny part is - it all began with a simple idea – nobody likes late fees.

Netflix thought it up first. Customers use a website to choose a list of movies they wanted to watch, cross reference this data with other customers to make useful movie recommendations, and then use an advanced logistics system to ship DVDs in reply paid envelopes direct to people’s door – all for a low monthly fee. Like a juggler with three balls in the air at one time, provided you kept returning DVDs, the system would ensure there was always something you wanted to watch en route to you, and you never had to worry about late fees. Late fees were the hidden profit margin for most video rental stores, and contributed to a wellspring of consumer resentment that provided Netflix with the marketing momentum it needed to sign up three million paying customers in just a few years.

Competition was not long in coming, but arguably for different reasons than the ones that put Netflix into business. Walmat, seeking to protect its strategically important DVD retail business launched a copycat service, and Blockbuster – after significant prevarication – re-adjusted its late fee policy and launched online as well. Although late to the party, Blockbuster has now added the extra twist of offering customers two downloadable rental coupons a month for anything from your local Blockbuster store, and later this year will move to convert many of its 4,500 outlets into DVD mailing centres which will dramatically increase response times. Although the Blockbuster strategy may seem appealing to existing bricks and mortar players, it may be difficult to replicate in other countries where stores are heavily franchised. In the US, Blockbuster directly owns the vast majority of its outlet businesses.

All of this is good news for the post office – which in addition to volumes stimulated by eBay – has been less of a victim of the new economy than you might have thought. However, that may not be the case for long. When Netflix first contemplated their business model, they had hoped to use the internet to directly deliver content. Limitations on bandwidth and digital rights management made the low tech workaround of the postal service a necessary bridging step to offering video on demand. But Yahoo and Google now active in the video search space, higher broadband penetration rates, and the availability of secure distribution platforms – it may not be long before online DVD rental, just becomes online rental.

When that change occurs – the company with the most number of subscribers may not necessarily be the one that wins. Netflix’s most valuable asset is not their million strong customer marketing list but rather its detailed understanding of their users' tastes and preferences which allows it to make incisive recommendations of related movie titles. When you consider the huge number of titles already on DVD, and add that to the explosion in content which will become available when the world’s libraries of movie and television content are digitised and placed online – a reliable recommendation engine based on a large sample of customer interactions will be a powerful barrier to entry to new players.

And there’s the rub. Although Netflix came up with the idea of putting rental DVDs into envelopes first, the clever use of collaborative filters to improve the retail experience was cooked up long ago by book and CD giant Amazon.com. No surprises then that the rumour mill is abuzz with the prospect of Amazon entering the DVD rental space in the US, as they already have done so in the UK. Perhaps even more so than Walmart and Blockbuster, Amazon has the potential to develop a business which leverages its expertise in online merchandising, and combine a rental/retail proposition which could underwrite a very aggressive pricing strategy.

Although both Amazon and Netflix have made pioneering attempts in using recommendations technology, the jury is still out on how well they actually work. Amazon in particular has the problem of trying to deal with the fact that its customers are buying product across multiple product lines, in multiple categories, and often for multiple people. The problem of managing online inventory is as relevant to rental players as it is to retailers. Letting customers usefully navigate 40,000 available titles in the Netflix library is no mean feat. Arguably in the long term, when all entertainment content sits on a server somewhere between LA and Mumbai - the difference between rental and retail products will collapse, and customers will just pay for various types of access licenses.

Of course, it is easy to forget about the long term when all the current players in the game are scrambling to destroy each others' profits with discounting and spiralling customer acquisition costs. But while there is certainly more blood on the bottom line than many are comfortable with, there is also much less than warrants the cant emmanating from some Wall Street pundits.

When you consider the big picture - the consumer appetite for quality entertainment products is seemingly as limitless as the production queue of feature films, TV series and games which are waiting for distribution in as many formats as possible. So, whether the endgame is Netflix being swallowed by Yahoo, or ultimately merging with Blockbuster to create a fully integrated online/offline offering – there is no doubt that subscription rentals are in, and late fees are well and truly out.

Game aficionados will no doubt be curious as to the result of the legal deathmatch between Vivendi Universal games, and Valve, developer of the insanely popular Half-Life 2 blockbuster. The settlement, which will see Valve's entire boxed inventory yanked off shelves and moved to online distribution should raise a few eyebrows and the blood pressure of retailers hungry for software sales.

You can bet that if people are reading it, companies will find a way to advertise on it. So no surprises, that weblogs have become the latest weapon in the war for consumer attention.