Six Tips For Better Napping

But what’s the best way to grab some extra zzz’s during the day? Here are some tips from the experts:

1. Don’t nap too long, especially if it’s a week day and you’re working. Experts warn that the longer the nap, the more likely you’ll wake up groggy, a feeling that can last up to 30 minutes. So what’s the sweet spot to feel the benefits of a nap? As little as 10 to 20 minutes will leave you refreshed, energetic and mentally sharper. On the weekends when alertness is less important, longer naps are ok, but try to avoid ones that last more than an hour so they don’t interfere with nighttime sleep.

2. Avoid napping too close to your bed time. A late nap could interfere with your ability to fall asleep at night. Researchers aren’t sure what exactly the ideal time of day to nap is, but they say the afternoon – roughly 1 to 4 p.m. – is when our body’s circadian rhythms make us most likely to feel sleepy. (Tell that to the boss!)

3. Napping can be done anywhere where it’s comfortable, be it a parked car, under your desk or a chair. For some, a quiet, dark place may be necessary but for others a subway or airplane seat works just as well. One tip: If you’re trying to stick to a short nap it may help to be partially upright. Studies have found that if you lie supine you’re more apt to fall into a deeper sleep.

4. Napping is a no-no if you suffer from a sleep disorder like insomnia or sleep apnea. It will only make the disorders worse.

5. Catch yourself dreaming during a short power nap? That’s a sign that you’re sleep deprived because you’re quickly slipping into rapid eye movement sleep, which is supposed to be the final stage of the roughly 90-minute sleep cycle. Try getting more sleep at night.

6. Finally, don’t use napping as a substitute for getting a full night’s sleep. In an ideal world where everyone gets adequate sleep at night and wakes up well rested, napping shouldn’t really be needed at all.

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The Tests That Babies NeedThe Tests That Babies Need

Fifty years ago, a revolution began in neonatal care that has preserved the physical and mental health, and often the lives, of thousands of babies: screening of newborns for inherited and congenital disorders.

On Oct. 15, 1963, the first law requiring that all newborns be screened for phenylketonuria, or PKU, took effect in Massachusetts. PKU, an inherited metabolic disorder, afflicts one in 20,000 of the four million babies born each year in the United States. Children with PKU are missing an enzyme that converts the amino acid phenylalanine to tyrosine, and unless they remain on a special protein-restricted diet, the resulting buildup of phenylketone damages the brain and causes mental retardation and physical disabilities.

Today every state tests babies at birth for PKU — and not just that. There are now more than 50 disorders that can be picked up through screening, 31 of which comprise the “core conditions” of the government’s Recommended Uniform Screening Panel. Other conditions are likely to be added to the panel in the future. All but two of them — hearing loss and critical congenital heart disease — can be detected by automated analysis of a few drops of dried blood from a heel stick done within a few days of birth.

Giana Swift, a fifth grader in Sherman Oaks, Calif., was one of more than 12,500 babies who benefit from newborn screening each year. The story of her birth in October 2002 was recounted in The Times. Through a pilot screening program, Giana was found to have an inherited metabolic disorder called 3-MCC (3-methylcrotonyl-CoA carboxylase deficiency). It afflicts about 100 babies a year, rendering them unable to process the amino acid leucine. As with PKU, toxic byproducts of the unprocessed amino acid build up in the blood and damage the brain.

Because she was tested at birth, Giana thrived, first on a special leucine-free baby formula, then on a diet nearly free of protein. Her grateful father, David Swift, 44, recently described Giana as “very bright, precocious, happy and a top athlete.”

“That test and the nurse who talked me into having it done saved my daughter’s life,” he told me.

Some protein is now being gradually introduced into Giana’s diet to see how well her body handles it. All concerned are on alert for symptoms related to 3-MCC: lethargy, weakness, dizziness, dehydration and vomiting. Mr. Swift and Giana, who turns 11 on Saturday, are also “giving back by helping other children with worse problems through the March of Dimes and the Make-A-Wish Foundation,” he said.

In the decades before Giana was born, the number and quality of newborn screening tests varied widely from state to state. In 2008, the Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act was adopted, establishing national screening guidelines and financial help for every state to create a comprehensive screening program. The law, which also provides professional education, parental support and a check on laboratory reliability, is up for renewal.

Conditions that can be detected through newborn screening include hormonal disorders like thyroid and adrenal abnormalities, blood disorders like sickle-cell anemia, severe immunodeficiencies, and dozens of enzyme disorders that result in a wide range of serious and sometimes fatal conditions.

Each of these disorders is relatively rare, but the effect of widespread screening has proved to be economical as well as lifesaving, sparing countless children years of costly medical and educational services and institutional care.

The short life of Kaylin Peters is a testament to the need for these programs. Kaylin was born last year in Syracuse, N.Y., with an initially undetected critical congenital heart disorder. The defect afflicts 18 in every 10,000 newborns.

Although Kaylin seemed normal at birth, a major heart defect was found weeks later when she failed to thrive, bled abnormally and began to turn blue. Despite surgery to repair the large hole in her heart, Kaylin died in December at age 9 months. Her mother, Krystal Peters, 31, is now working hard to make sure children with life-threatening heart defects are diagnosed before it’s too late.

Ms. Peters wants every newborn to have a pulse oximetry test that can reveal a shortage of oxygen in the blood resulting from a heart defect. As of last January, the test was required and fully implemented in only six states, including New York.

And because an oxygen deficiency may not be apparent within a few days of birth, Ms. Peters also wants every parent “to go home from the hospital with a list of symptoms” of critical congenital heart disorder, which include excessive sleepiness, sweating while nursing, and skin with a bluish or purplish color.

Pulse oximetry checks the baby’s pulse and blood oxygen level through a sensor attached to a finger or foot. Ideally, babies with normal results in the hospital are tested again at the first visit to a doctor.

“More than half of affected children require lifesaving surgery within the first months of life,” Ms. Peters said in an interview. “I don’t want what happened to Kaylin to happen to any other baby.”

Each state decides which conditions to test for; most now screen for at least 20 disorders. But with more babies now born outside hospitals, it often becomes the parents’ responsibility to get newborns screened before they are a week old.

An abnormal result on a screening test does not necessarily mean the baby has a problem; additional diagnostic testing is required. If a diagnosis is confirmed, parents are told how best to care for the baby to maximize the chances of normal development. If a newborn is found to have hearing loss, for example, a treatable cause may be responsible. If the condition cannot be corrected, speech therapy, sign language or cochlear implants may minimize its severity.

Dr. Edward R. B. McCabe, a pediatric geneticist and medical director for the March of Dimes, whose career has spanned the history of newborn screening, envisions an exciting future for early detection and treatment of inherited and congenital disorders. In an interview, he said the National Institutes of Health has awarded several research grants for DNA sequencing of newborn blood, which could facilitate the earliest possible diagnosis of health-threatening problems.

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The Show Me State (of the art)

I could ask you to bear with me through this urgent and important post, but I'm not optimistic that many people will.

The punchline matters more than it ever has before.

"Show me what this is about before I commit to it."

And the follow up: "Now that I know what it's about, I don't need to commit."

It started with the coming attractions for upcoming movies. By packing more and more of the punchline into the TV commercial or the theater preview, producers felt like they were satisfying the needs of the audience to know what they were going to see before they bought their ticket. Instead, they trained us to be satisfied by merely watching the attractions. No need to see the movie, you've already seen the best part.

SportsCenter piled on by showing fans a supercut of every great or heroic play of the weekend--a sports fix without investing the time or living through the drama of the game itself.

Record albums used to require not only listening to the entire side (no fast forward on an LP) but actually getting up and flipping it over. The radio wasn't going to play anything but the A side of the single, so if you liked an artist, you surrendered yourself to 45 minutes of her journey, the way she had it in mind.

A performance artist was on the local public radio station the other day. He didn't want to talk about the specifics of his show, because giving away the tactics was clearly going to lessen the impact of his work. No matter. The host revealed one surprise after another, outlining the entire show, because, after all, that's his job--to tell us what we're going to see so we don't have to see it ourselves.

We don't want to organize the course or go to the lecture or read the book until we know precisely what it's going to be about.

College wasn't like this. You committed to four years, you moved somewhere, and then you saw the curriculum. That's part of why it works. A huge part.

We hesitate to surrender our commitment so easily today. It's easier to read the 140 character summary or see the highlights or read the live blog, so we can check the box and then move on.

But move on to where?

To another box to be checked? We become like the tester in the ice cream factory, surrounded by thousands of flavors, but savoring none of them.

We each have a fixed amount of time. One thing you can do is invest it in knowing the summary of what 23 people said. The other thing you can do is to commit to living and breathing and learning from one of those people. Perhaps you will get more by being exposed more deeply to fewer.

One reason an audiobook can change your life is that you can't skip ahead. And the other reason is that you might listen to it five or six times, at the pace of the reader, not at your pace.

My full-day live seminars have impact on people partly because I don't announce the specific agenda or the talking points in advance. It's live and it's alive. I have no certainty what's about to happen, and neither do the others in the room. A morphing, changing commitment by all involved, one that grows over time.

Yes, I get that there's never again going to be a need to buy an album or to listen to all the songs in order, that you can get the quick summary of any book you're expected to have read, that your time is so valuable that perhaps the only economic choice is to live a Cliffs Notes version of your life.

[Oh, that's right, Cliffs Notes' sales are way down because they're too long.]

In fact, you could do that, but when you do, you've surrendered to efficiency and lost some life, some surprise and a lot of growth.

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4 risky places to swipe your debit card

Would you give a thief direct access to your checking account?

No? Unfortunately, you may be doing just that by regularly using your debit card. Debit cards may look identical to credit cards, but there's one key difference. With credit cards, users who spot fraudulent charges on their bill can simply decline the charges and not pay the bill. On the other hand, debit cards draw money directly from your checking account, rather than from an intermediary such as a credit card company.

Because of that, even clear-cut cases of fraud where victims are protected from liability by consumer protection laws can cause significant hardship, says Frank Abagnale, a secure-document consultant in Washington, D.C.

He cites the example of the The TJX Companies Inc.'s T.J. Maxx data breach that exposed the payment information of thousands of customers in 2007. The incident resulted in $150 million in fraud losses, and much of it was pulled directly from customers' bank accounts. While credit card users got their accounts straightened out and new cards in the mail within a few days, the case created major problems for debit card holders who waited an average of two to three months to get reimbursed, Abagnale says.

While debit card fraud is always a possibility, being careful where you use it can help keep your checking account balance out of the hands of criminals.

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Blogs Will Change Your Business

 There's a little problem, though. Many of you don't visit blogs -- or haven't since blogs became a sensation in last year's Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we're going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story -- call it Blogs 101 for businesses -- in the style of a blog. We're even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story's online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it's the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.

First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

Give the paranoids their due. The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital -- photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup -- or even a cell phone. If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here's the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

Yet not all the news is scary. Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.More tomorrow.Tuesday 6:35 a.m. How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.

The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. This elite still holds sway at most companies. You know them. They generally park in sheltered spaces, have longer rides on elevators, and avoid the cafeteria. They keep the secrets safe and coif the company's message. Then they distribute it -- usually on a need-to-know basis -- to customers, employees, investors, and the press.

That's the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head. Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.

Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That's not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art -- like how to get other bloggers to link to them -- they reach a huge audience.

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it.

Want to get it back? You never will, not entirely. But for a look at what you're facing, come along for a tour of the blogosphere.Wednesday 7:38 a.m. Hmm. How to start this post? Idle talk about the weather, or maybe that red wine with dinner last night? No. Let's dive right in: One misstep and the blog world can have its way with you -- even when the coolest, most tech-savvy companies are involved.

Google (GOOG

) is regarded as a secretive company. So in January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the Googleplex, folks in the 'sphere instantly linked to him. Jen certainly wasn't dealing out inside dirt. But he griped that Google's health plan was less generous than his former employer's -- Microsoft (MSFT

) -- and he argued, indignantly, that Google's free food was an enticement for employees to work past dinner.

Two weeks later, Google fired Jen. And that's when the 22-year-old became a big story. Google was blogbusted for overreacting and for sending an all-too-clear warning to the dozens of bloggers still at the company. A Google official says the company has lots of bloggers and just expects them to use common sense. For example, if it's something you wouldn't e-mail to a long list of strangers, don't blog it.

Jen clearly flunked that test. "As the media got hold of it, I was quickly educated," he says. He says he should have understood the company's goals and concerns better and been more sensitive to them. Still, his adventure turned him into an overnight celebrity. He was wooed by recruiters at Amazon.com (AMZN

), Microsoft, and Yahoo! (YHOO

) A month later, Jen landed a job at Plaxo, an Internet contact-management company. A key part of his job, says a company spokesperson, is to help coordinate Plaxo's blogging efforts -- a pillar of Plaxo's promotional strategy. So what got him fired turned out to be his trump card. Plaxo, like many other companies, is now drawing up norms for blogging behavior, so that employees know what's in bounds, and what's not.2:22 p.m. It sounds like the joke answer on a multiple-choice exam. Name a leading company in blog communications: General Motors?

That's right. For a company that's slipping in the auto biz, GM is showing a surprisingly nimble touch with blogs. GM uses them on occasion to steer past its own PR department and the mainstream press. In January, Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz launched his own FastLane Blog. Bloggers applauded, and car buffs flooded Lutz with suggestions and complaints. Lutz posted lots of barbs from outsiders and won points for balanced responses. Like his answer to criticisms of new Pontiacs: "Did you take a look at seat tailoring? Carpet fits?...hood gaps, hem flanges? We used to be bad at those, too."

But Lutz is only part of GM's blog strategy. In April the company yanked $10 million in advertising from the Los Angeles Times and demanded that the Times make retractions. Journalists asked GM for specific complaints, and the car company held off. It said it wanted to work quietly with the Times and not battle it out in the press.

How to get the word out through a back channel? GM directed journalists to a blog, AutomoBear.com, that detailed GM's beef. (It had to do with a comparison between two cars, which GM thought was unfair.) Both GM and Miro Pacic, the blogger at AutomoBear, say that GM provided Pacic with information but that no money passed hands.

Fair enough. But even if GM doesn't pay for positive coverage in blogs, just consider the possibilities in this new footloose media world. There's little to stop companies from quietly buying bloggers' support, or even starting unbranded blogs of their own to promote their products -- or to tar the competition. This raises all kinds of questions about the ever-shrinking wall between advertising and editorial. We'll cover that later, when we get to the blogs' impact on our own business -- the media.Thursday 8:56 a.m. It's the latest wrinkle on Descartes. I blog therefore I... consult. An entire industry is rising up to guide companies into this frightening new realm. And the consultants establish their brands and reps with their blogs. Perhaps the biggest is Steve Rubel. A year ago, the exec at the PR firm CooperKatz & Co. started his blog, Micro Persuasion. He was already pushing such clients as WeatherBug and the Association of National Advertisers into the blog world. Then early one Sunday morning, as he recalls it, "my wife was sleeping, and I was sitting in the living room, laptop on my lap, and thinking if I am talking to clients and reading these blogs, I should jump in." When launching his site, he had the smarts to contact big shots such as Dan Gillmor, who was a leading blogger and tech reporter with the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor linked to Rubel's site, and his traffic took off. It was great for his brand, and it also gave Rubel a blogger's education. "I became a living guinea pig for what I preach," he says.

Now Rubel is positioned as an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis. The first job, he says, is to monitor the blogs to see what people are saying about your company. (An entire industry is growing to sell that service. Even IBM's (IBM

) banging at the door.) Next step: Damage-control strategies. How to respond when blogs attack. He says companies have to learn to track what blogs are talking about, pinpoint influential bloggers, and figure out how to buttonhole them, privately and publicly.

He gives the example of Netflix (NFLX

). When a fan blog called Hacking Netflix asked the company for info and interviews last year, Netflix turned it down. How could they make time for all the bloggers? Predictably, the blogger, Mike Kaltschnee, aired the exchange, and Netflix faced a storm of public criticism. Now Netflix feeds info to Kaltschnee, and he passes along what he's hearing from the fans. Sounds like he's half journalist, half consultant -- though he insists Netflix doesn't pay him.Friday 10:46 a.m. The question came up at a panel discussion last week: Any chance that a blog bubble could pop? The answer is really easy: no.

At least not an investment bubble. Venture firms financed only $60 million in blog startups last year, according to industry tracker VentureOne. Chump change compared to the $19.9 billion that poured into dot-coms in 1999. The difference is that while dot-coms promised to make loads of money, blogs flex their power mostly by disrupting the status quo.

The bigger point, which is blindingly obvious when you think about it, is that the dot-com era was powered by companies -- complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and -- that's right -- no bubble. The role of the blog startups is to build tools for this grassroots uprising. Six Apart, a four-year-old San Francisco company, leads in blog software. Technorati and PubSub Concepts are battling it out in blog search. The founders all insist that they plan to remain independent. But if recent history is any guide, most of them will wind up in the bellies of the blog-minded Internet giants -- led by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The latest to disappear was Flickr. A photo-sharing service that spread madly across the blog world, 13-month-old Flickr was still running its software in its beta, or testing, phase when it was acquired by Yahoo in March for an undisclosed sum. Caterina Fake, Flickr's co-founder, wrote about the deal in her blog the day it happened: "Don't forget to breathe. It's not the end, it's the beginning."Monday 10:23 a.m. If this were a true blog, that last post would have generated a mountain of comments over the weekend, most of them with the same question: If there's no clear business model, why are the Internet giants so bent on getting a foothold in blogs? Look at it from their point of view. A vibrant community that has doubled in size in the past eight months is teeming with potential customers and has a mother lode of data to mine. "Blogs are what's causing the Web to grow," says Jason Goldman. He's project manager at Google's Blogger, the world's biggest service to set people up as bloggers. David Sifry looks at it a bit differently. He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of Technorati , the blog search engine.

For Sifry, it's not the growth of the same Web, but an entirely new one. It's wrapped up far more in people's day-to-day lives. It's connected to time. The way he describes it, the Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much. Try Googling Donald Trump, and you're more likely to find his Web page than a discussion of his appearance last night on The Apprentice.

Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.

Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two tables. But the caf? goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones. Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures up to their blogs.

The racket is deafening. But there's loads of valuable information floating around this cafe. Technorati, PubSub, and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.

Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking. Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating buzz. Advertisers are tracking responses to their campaigns. "I'm amazed people don't get it yet," says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice-president who heads up search. "Never in the history of market research has there been a tool like this."Tuesday 9:12 p.m. Back to that coffeehouse. Sitting at one large table is a collection of some of the most gifted geeks you can imagine. These folks built the blogosphere. And they're using it to link with each other. They share ideas, test them, and get them up and running in a hurry. Many of them transform the network itself, making it more muscular -- and disruptive.

The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called "aggregators." For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them.

In time, aggregators could turn the Web on its head. Why? They discourage surfing as users increasingly just wait for interesting items to drop onto their page or e-mailbox. Internet advertising, which traditionally counts on page views and clicks, could be thrown for a loop. Already Yahoo is packaging ads on the feeds. Google is testing the waters.

But here's the really insidious part. If you set up your own aggregator page, such as my.yahoo.com, and subscribe to feeds, you soon discover that blog and mainstream postings mingle side by side. Feeds zip through the walls between blogs and the rest of the information world. Blog posts are becoming just part of the mix, swimming on the same page with the Associated Press, and yes, BusinessWeek.

Winer also ushered in a second tech breakthrough, podcasting. A back-and-forth between Winer and Adam Curry, a blogger and former MTV host, led last year to a system that easily distributes audio files. Looking for National Public Radio's On the Media or the latest ska compilations from a disk jockey in Trinidad? Sign up on a Web page, and the program gets automatically delivered to you -- as an audio feed. Last summer, Curry created software called

iPodder so these MP3s could hitch a ride on an iPod (AAPL

). That was the birth of podcasting: radio programming whenever and wherever you want it. Since then, some 5,000 podcasting shows have sprouted up. They cover everything from yoga to the blues.

It's an overnight sensation. Before podcasting, only about 150 people a month bothered to download the audio files of Morning Stories, a show on Boston's public station WGBH. After the station switched to podcasting in October? Eighty thousand. Chalk it up to the bloggers. They pushed podcasting to their own circles, and it grew from there.11:48 p.m. One more idea. Think of TiVo, (TIVO

) think of the iPod. When you're using one of them, do you consider the company that provides the programming? CBS, for example? Not much. You're putting together your own package. The pieces come from lots of companies and artists. Often you don't even know where.

Aggregators do the same job for the Net. So, just like the record companies, which have figured out how to market bits and pieces of their albums as standalone songs and ringtones, the rest of the media and entertainment world is going to have to think small. Content, whether it's news or a Hollywood movie, is going to travel in bite-size nuggets. The challenge, for bloggers and giants alike, is to brand those nuggets and devise ways to sell them or wrap them in advertising.Wednesday 6:31 a.m. A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like -- you guessed it -- blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it "an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes."

Take a look at blog advertising today, and it's hard to see a glittering future. Sure, enterprising bloggers make room on their pages for Google-generated ads, known as AdSense, and earn some pocket change. Some blog entrepreneurs, such as Nick Denton, publisher of New York's Gawker Media, sell ads for everything from Nike to Absolut Vodka (FO

). Popular blogs can land sponsorship deals for as much as $25,000 per month, say consultants. O.K. money for an entrepreneur, but a rounding error in the ad industry. Blog power simply doesn't translate yet into big bucks. For now, it's running mostly on people's passion to communicate -- especially in developing markets. Consider Hossein Derakhshan. He's a 28-year-old Iranian blogger based in Toronto. He has thousands of readers, and politicians respond to his postings -- even as the Iranian government frantically tries to shut down the servers hosting his blog. Yet Derakhshan can't yet cash on his fame. "Google doesn't have AdSense service in Persian yet," he says.

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media's core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocaf?, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals -- and their friends. That's every marketer's dream.

The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches. Already, Yahoo and Microsoft have been investing heavily to position themselves for niche advertising. And in February, the New York Times (NYT

) laid down $410 million for About Inc., a collection of 500 specialized Web sites that smell strongly of blogs. "What's to stop them from turning those 500 sites into 5,000?" says Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA Systems, an Internet advertising company.Thursday 9 a.m. Hate to get wiggy here. But if the blogs eventually swallow up ad revenue, what's going to happen to us?

Yes, we, too, are under the gun. MSM, the bloggers call us. Mainstream media. And many of them delight in uncovering our errors, knocking us off that big pedestal we've occupied since the the first broadsheets started circulating.

We have to master the world of blogs, too. This isn't because they're taking away ad revenue, at least not yet, but because they represent millions of eyewitnesses armed with computers spread around the world. They are potential competitors -- or editorial resources. Blog reporters showed their value following the Asian tsunami in December. Thousands of them posted pictures, video footage, and articles about the disaster long before the first accredited journalists showed up. MSNBC, which ran hours of tsunami footage on its Web site, has since opened an entire page devoted to citizens' journalism.Dan Gillmor, who quit his San Jose newspaper job, is lining up investors for a new type of media company, Grassroots Media. He's interested in elements of an online journalism business in Korea, called OhmyNews. It mingles articles from 50 staff journalists with reports e-mailed and text-messaged in from thousands of citizen reporters. OhmyNews says it has been profitable for a year and a half and expects revenue this year of $10 million. "I keep hoping that all of the new conversational forms will augment the existing one," Gillmor says.11:57 p.m. Thinking out of the box here for a minute. What would this article look like if it were a real blog, and not just this glossy simulacrum?

Think of the way we produce stories here. It's a closed process. We come up with an idea. We read, we discuss in-house, and then we interview all sorts of experts and take their pictures. We urge them not to spill the beans about what we're working on. It's a secret. Finally, we write. Then the story goes through lots and lots of editing. And when the proofreaders have had their last look, someone presses the button and we launch a finished product on the world.

If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what's wrong, what we're overlooking. In many ways, it's a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It's a discussion.

Why draw this comparison? In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.Friday 11 a.m. So why not start here? We've done our research on blogs, made our dire pronouncements. Pretty soon, someone in production will press the button. But this story should go on, as a conversation. And it will, starting on Apr. 22. We're launching our own blog to cover the business drama ahead, as blogging spreads into companies and redefines media. The blog's name?

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Understanding luxury goods

A luxury good gets its value from its lack of utility and value. A typical consumer would look at what it costs and what it does and say, "that's ridiculous."

When a good like this (and it might be a service as well) comes to market, it sometimes transcends the value equation and enters a new realm, one of scarcity and social proof. The value, ironically, comes from its lack of value.

The owner of a $12,000 Birkin bag might tell you that it's worth every penny. Obviously, one can carry a wallet and a few other essentials in bag that costs less than 1% of what this bag costs, and we can even imagine making something just like a Birkin for a fraction of the price. But that would be a copy, not the real thing, and so the story, the narrative, the specialness and most of all, the social element would go out the window. A Birkin bag is at its most valuable when your friends admire you for owning it, not when they admire its ability to carry your stuff.

The ring in the blue Tiffany box or the speaker cables that cost more than a car--these are purchased as (perhaps perverse) testaments to the (take your pick) power/taste/wealth of the person buying or owning it.

Discount luxury goods, then, are an oxymoron. The factory outlet or the job lot seller or the yoga studio that's selling the "same thing but cheaper," isn't selling the same thing at all. They don't offer scarcity, social proof or the self-narrative of a splurge. What they sell is, "you're smarter than other people, but you know, you're also a little bit of a fraud because this isn't actually a luxury good, because it's a better value." Circular, but true.

It takes guts to invent a brand new luxury good from scratch. Shinola watches don't tell time any better than a $16 Timex, but they do tell a better story. Their creation is part of that story, but so is the identity of the stores that sell them and the fact that they sell out regularly.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who invented the industry (yes, one person invented luxury goods as a category) understood something that flies in the face of the non-scarcity of the internet: social proof among the wealthy is based on beauty plus scarcity plus expense. The fact that others believe a good is overpriced is precisely why a certain segment of the market chooses to purchase it.

This even works in b2b situations. McKinsey certainly offers a luxury good (only the biggest, wealthiest corporations can afford them) as do furniture makers like Herman Miller.

We're also seeing luxury goods being purchased by people not ordinarily thought of as wealthy. A teenager with a rare pair of new sneakers qualifies as luxury in her tribe.

It's interesting to note that first class travel isn't the luxury good it once was. The airlines stumbled, started playing with both service and scarcity, and unravelled the myth. Hence the need for a private jet as a luxury good, even when there's a perfectly fine commercial jet going to that very destination.

One place where the luxury goods idea has been underutilized is philanthropy. The rich guy who gives $20 million to a university isn't doing it because the school is likely to spend his money in the most efficient way. He's doing it because they will name a building after him. The building is a scarce good, overpriced for what it appears to deliver, which is precisely why it's a form of luxury.

One opportunity for non-profits is to use their true needs as only part of the conversation about giving. The dreaded gala, for example, is best seen as a luxury good. All the time and coordination and busywork are actually providing utility... not to the charity, but to those attending.

Sorry to drone on... wrapping up then, when luxury intersects with the web, conflicts ensue. First, because the net makes pricing transparent, which inevitably makes some people feel stupid for paying full price (and stupidity doesn't work with the other pillars of luxury). And second, because the new sorts of social proof have to do with how connected and respected you are, not how much you paid for that handbag.

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