“The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.”
—Bill Cosby

This is gross. Some music should simply be off-limits for commercial exploitation. Blecch.

If you happen to be online today, you’re probably looking for this: the official Web site of the National Barbecue Association.

BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, enables you to, well, I’ll let them explain it: “to create your own graphs that plot ‘buzz’ about specific search terms (issues, people, companies, brands, sports, etc.) in the blogosphere.”

One of the example trend graphs they provide is this one, mapping the buzz about the seven deadly sins. I’m not surprised that gluttony and sloth fall to the bottom of the chart, but wouldn’t you have expected lust to overtake pride, and maybe even anger?

In the introduction to the 100 Blogs article I linked to yesterday, PC World notes that Technorati is tracking some 70 million blogs.

This may be a conservative estimate, but I’d wager that about 50 million of those are abandoned blogs that haven’t been updated in months. Or years.

These blogs are like empty beer cans along the information superhighway (to trundle out a hoary metaphor). They make research more difficult. They clog search results. They squat there on countless servers, taking up space that could otherwise be used by some of the 120,000 blogs that will spring up today, 100,000 of which will be abandoned by the new year.

Maybe it’s time for a massive “clean up the blogosphere” effort.