What I do spend some time doing, in addition to writing and managing the content by myself, is to ensure that spam-oriented incoming links and comments are eliminated, so that I can get a proper measure of traffic. Under the previous blog name, Trader Wizard, which I ran til mid-December, I do not feel I had the most accurate tallies, although we used super web stats software.

I am aware that various aggregators and LANs do generate additional numbers of unique readers that do not show up in my stats.

I'd be surprised if, with no advertising or promotion whatsoever, the Bill Cara website/blog receives fewer than 20 million hits in 2005. I have removed the usage numbers from the above chart because, frankly, they are not important. You saw the numbers under Trader Wizard, and, suffice it to say, these are much better.

What is meaningful to me is the overall trend. That validates to me the readers' interest in what I have to say.

That's not to say everybody agrees with me. I know many of you agree with very little of my content. In fact I'd be surprised if across the full readership you agree with more than 80 pct of this content. But the fact that your interest is growing shows me that people find value in return for their use of time.

So, in a nutshell I'm happy, and I intend to continue.

Now why I decided to get into this subject today is a discussion I heard on Kudlow & Company a couple days ago that remains in my consciousness.

Kudlow started his show by stating: "Bloggers are kicking the newspapers' butt," and he then gave some anecdotal evidence that mainstream media is reporting fewer readers these days, while bloggers are gaining readers in leaps and bounds. His guests for the day were his friends and business associates, Charles Johnson (www.littlegreenfootballs.com), Glenn Reynolds (www.instapundit.com) and Roger Simon (www.rogersimon.com).

Now and then I suffer from political foot-in-mouth disease, but I truly am apolitical, so I'll stay away from referring to let's say the political leanings of this group. I do, however, want to say that all of them are excellent communicators whom I find entertaining.

The pitch (Larry always has a curve ball coming) that we heard from Kudlow was that this group, which I presume includes Larry, had started a new business called Pajamas Media (PM, I'll call it). PM, we were told, is going to revolutionize the blog-o-sphere by aggregating the content of thousands or millions of bloggers from all over the world into a "news" service that would (I paraphrase) "put Associated Press out of business".

PM, one of the Kudlow guests told us, would put corporate advertisers onto the pages of the bloggers, thereby turning them into legitimate commercial enterprises. I thought his pitch sounded like one for snake oil.

Just so we didn't miss the meaning of the pitch, Kudlow dropped a leading question (aren't they all?) at the very end of the show, when he asked, "Is Google rejecting conservative ads and sites?"

So I guess his message is that true conservatives like him should be participating in some group blog, contributing "real time" reporting from the field, while Kudlow & Friends take editorial control, which would overwhelm the "message" of the so-called liberal mainstream media.

Do I have it right? If not, I'll back off.

I have written previously about why I believe blogging is growing in usage and importance. The reason, I believe, for its acknowledged popularity is that blogging media is based on the self-empowering many-to-many network model, whereas traditional media is based on the easily controlled one-to-many broadcast model.

Whether or not it is a fact, most of us in the blog-o-sphere believe that what can be controlled is controlled eventually. And, I think it's true that we also believe, rightly or wrongly, that today's mainstream editors are basically managed by the sell-side, who put a lot of money into their bosses' cash registers.

The bottom line is that, for too long now, the very few people who own and operate broadcast media have treated the public as consumers rather than as human beings who are interested in being fully informed. The editors are too much interested in telling the public what to buy, how to think, and so forth.

I'll accept the evidence put forth by Kudlow and others that the public is rebelling, and dropping out of the broadcasters' net and into their own small networks where very many people are perceived as being more trustworthy, more transparent, and providing more value. Those independent individuals are becoming the new centers of influence.

Some readers, for some unfathomable reason, even tune into www.moneypolitics.net. :-)

For years, western capitalists salivated over prospects of putting a pair of shoes on every Chinese, or selling every Chinese family an automobile or whatever. They saw China as representing a consumer market, which could be controlled, rather than as a nation of one billion human beings who happen to share the same life goals and objectives I do.

Now that these same capitalists have seen that the Chinese can manage the average business processes themselves, whether it be rocket science or not, they are turning to another humungous market, which is the international blogger.

It's the same old capitalist mantra: "Sell to the masses; live like the classes."

I gather there will be ten million bloggers by year-end, with a reach of maybe one or two billion. So I guess that Kudlow and Friends have seen the potential value of that massive prize, if it could ever be captured.

One problem I see for the PM group is that they will soon have competition from mainstream media who would want to work co-operatively with independent bloggers. I suppose the Sumner Redstones, and Rupert Murdochs, and General Electrics, and Martha Stewarts, all have similar views to Kudlow, and since they already have a subscriber base, and the delivery tools at hand, will likely try to meet the blogger community somewhere in the middle.

But the biggest problem for PM, as I see it, is that readers are accepting of deficiencies of the blog-o-sphere because they (at least most) are independent. No-spin blogging is what the readers want.

As successful as they might be as business people, the Kudlows, Kernans, Cramers, and Greenspans are the very people my readers don't want to hear from " because there is a spin-filled message in every case. My readers even react in a negative fashion if they happen to think I let down my intellectually honest guard for a second, and parrot something from the mainstream.

No, I think Kudlow and his buds, some of whom are very successful bloggers in their own right, ought to re-think the model they propose with Pajamas Media.

I think there is a faulty logic in believing that independent bloggers are going to be seduced to join the Kudlow Spin Gang because of $20 or $50 a month in advertising revenues they could just as easily get elsewhere if that happened to be important to them.

I suppose PM will source a large number of bloggers who bite on the idea until they see the editorial bent of the PM gang. But we all know there are suckers in every crowd. We don't need PM to prove that old adage.

As I see it, if left to its natural course, there truly is no limit to the growth of independent blog media.