I’m much less cranky this week, I promise. Plus, it was a pretty slow news week so there are more fun apps to tell you about than egos to deflate.

News from the Social Media Vortex

–There’s never a lack of pope-wears-a-funny-hat items in the technosphere. This week, it’s the discovery that “well-known” bloggers aren’t much known outside of Palo Alto. Mark Dykeman did some number crunching based on Google Blog Search results and found that household names in the blog world don’t necessarily equal household names in the real world. Check out his handy table for full results.

–CNN ran a funny piece on the 12 most annoying Facebookers. It’s pretty spot on and I couldn’t help categorizing my friends, and myself, as I read it. Post it on your wall and see if any status updates change for the better.

–And the latest Twitter parody is Woofer, a “macroblogging” service that requires a minimum of 1400 characters to post. Or as some call it, standard prose.

Apps on the Radar

–If you’re a fan of Qik like I am, you’ll be happy to hear that it’s finally arrived on the iPhone. Though of course you need the new 3G S for it to work.

–If your Tumblr account hasn’t been updated since, oh say, early June, maybe the new Facebook Connect integration will prompt you to get off your lazy bum and post something.

–The Google Wave preview opens to the public September 30th. Wheee! I am stupidly excited about this but can’t precisely explain why.

–The TomTom Navigation app is now up in iTunes. I could really use this app but will need to read more in-depth reviews before I fork over $99.

–In my ongoing search for a great iPhone news app, I’m encouraged by Mashable’s rave review of the NPR app. Doesn’t look like it has push technology for breaking news yet, but still worth trying out.

–And finally, check out Spider posthaste. Reviewers are fawning all over it, calling it one of the most ingenious games yet devised for the iPhone.

Tweet of the Week

–Thanks to one of my favorite tweeters @rainnwilson for notifying me that Paris Hilton now has a verified Twitter account. If I’m not careful, she could easily sweep tweet of the week regularly.

“On my way to go visit some of the most poverty stricken villages in Central America. Going to be a very emotional day, God bless them all.”  No, Paris, God bless you.

We didn’t make the list, not that we’re surprised or even disappointed, really. The list? 24/7 Wall Street’s ranking of the 25 Most Valuable Blogs.

While I might argue the nuance of “value” (does audience size and ad revenue trump meaningful discourse?), I am impressed by the analysis Douglas McIntyre put into valuation and ranking of the top blogs. While admitting at the outset that “there is no way to accurately put a value on blogs,” the site drew revenue estimates from data and assumptions about advertising and other commercial revenue, quality and quantity of ads, traffic and traffic growth. The site then based total value on a multiple derived from estimated operating margins, longevity of the blog, outside funding, and the dependence of a blog on its founder or lead personality.

Omitting the blogs of large media companies and blogs as the market-facing vehicle for another primary business, 24/7 Wall Street’s list shapes up like this:

1. Gawker (including Gawker, ValleyWag, Gizmodo, and Wonkette, among others): $150 million.

2.MacRumors: $85 million

3. Huffington Post: $70 million

4. PerezHilton: $48 million.

5. TechCrunch: $36 million.

6 (tied): Ars Technica $15 million.

6 (tied): Seeking Alpha $15 million.

8 (tied): Drudge Report $10 million.

8 (tied): Mashable $10 million.

10. GigaOm: $8.4 million.

Valuations quick tapper off. No. 23 Talking Points Memo is pegged at $860,000. McIntyre assigns no price to No. 24 Travelpod and to his No. 25 pick, his own 24/7 Wall St. (I recommend reading the post in which McIntrye explains his reasoning for each blog, expecting his own.)

There are a couple of take aways from this analysis, and the first is clear: only very, very few bloggers will get wealthy at this game, at least as it is played today. With literally thousands of people and companies trying to make a business of blogging, it must be disheartening to learn that fewer than two dozen blogs are valued at more than $1 million businesses. And we can assume that the valuations drop fairly dramatically from there.

In high-flying Silicon Valley, we might also observe with some surprise that many of the popular tech blogs weren’t valued more highly. In fact, some of the most credible tech blogs (I’m thinking of VentureBeat, for example) don’t even make the list.

But it doesn’t take too much parsing, though, to figure out why. If blogs are to be valued as media companies, then the value of the brand lies in the value of the audience, or more accurately to the value the audience generates for advertisers.

While bloggers are big on growing traffic and page views, they too often to so without considering who is behind that traffic. In the world of brand advertising – and let’s face it, that’s where the big advertising money is – quantity doesn’t equal quality. A popular tech blog may attract 1 million visitors a month, but if that crowd doesn’t buy anything, if they don’t move product, they really aren’t that valuable in the eyes of major advertisers.

Indeed, this is a chorus in an on-going debate I’ve had with Shel Israel who argues that blogs have become more influential than mainstream media. In some quarters and for some purposes, sure. If your aim is to drive traffic to another blog or Web 2.0 site, then yes, coverage in or advertising on a popular blog can move the needle…if your target audience is the technical elite. If your objective is to sell toothpaste or canned soup or family sedan, well, then, not so much.

Let’s face it, young technophiles who live with their parents, bathe irregularly, and don’t pay for anything are not an attractive demographic. Popular blogs have a lot of readers, just not readers who buy stuff. In fact, if you look at the ads on these blogs, they’re all about cranking up the noise in the echo chamber; they aren’t about selling consumer packaged goods and luxury vehicles.

And it’s likely to stay that way, at least for a while.

Don’t get me wrong. Blogs are an important new media. Yet without the independent audience measurement and audit mechanisms to certify performance, qualify audiences, and justify ad spends, they remain the wild frontier for the richest brand advertisers.

I saw a great post this morning from Kristen Nicole at Mashable. She covered several of her favorite companies here at DEMO, including good2gether, Redux, and Huddle. What got me thinking though, was a point in her intro.

I thought perhaps I’d be able to organize this roundup by grouping the type of company. However, each of these companies is so different, that such organization turned out to be quite impossible. This observation can be applied to more than just this handful of companies I’m covering in this post, which speaks to the deeper integration and cultivating of niche capabilities that is a product of our current application economy.

It’s a point that merits further consideration: the tech economy, once easily classifiable into broad strokes – enterprise, consumer, software, hardware – has transmuted into a rich landscape of niches. Even a newer label like ‘social Web’ no longer fits; one has to append it with ‘shopping,’ ‘graph,’ ‘storytelling,’ etc etc.

It’s the natural evolution of tech cycles and sure to be repeated many more times down the road. One big revolution hits the tech sector – the Internet, mobility, Web 2.0 – and a thousand (or more) companies follow in its wake, attempting their own spin on the same story. Once the dust settles, interesting little ideas begin to pop up; innovative angles on the original big concept that remind us of just how much ingenuity exists in the tech world.

As Kristen notes, this is readily apparent at DEMO this week. Now that every possible niche social network has been created, it’s time to play around and see where the social Web can really take us. There are a myriad of directions in which to go and DEMO is exploring several of those. Some great examples: YouChoose, a distributed commenting widget that brings much needed critical mass to a highly disparate space; Standout Jobs, bringing social media tools to recruiting efforts; Delver, a search service based on your social graph; and Movial, a company putting the social graph in your pocket.

There are more notable companies exploring new niches in technology. We’ll take a look at few more intriguing themes later today.

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