A friend tells me that McDonalds is doing an Olympics Blog, “Olympic Champion Crew Blog”, to support their bazillion dollar sponsorship. I’m thinking, this is a good thing…right?

So I go to the Blog and I find a sort of self-congratulations bent with profiles of crew members like Lauren A. from France and Ekaterina V. from Russia – lovely - but no place to make comments. Frankly, no value whatsoever and the bright light of corporate fear that I just might report via a comments link that my new Spicy Chicken Sandwich had a finger in it.

Look, either you are in the Blog game or not. Please don’t call it a Blog if it ain’t one.

Seems that CraigsList has decided to end free listings in its NYC real estate section. Surprise, aggressive real estate brokers have been listing the same apartments over and over again.

Here is Mike Musgrove of the Washington Post…

It’s an out-of-character move for the site, which is best known for allowing users to post their ads free of charge. But it’s the users who begged the site operators to do something about the number of repeat listings on the site.

Starting March 1, a $10 fee will be imposed for listings in New York with hopes of deterring the brokers who list the same apartment several times in a single day, Craigs list Inc. chief executive Jim Buckmaster said. There are no plans to impose fees for real estate listings in other cities.

In the highly charged, competitive real estate market of New York, the site has become a victim of its own success. Its simple interface gives the newest listings the most prominent spot, prompting some brokers to re-post the same listings several times a day to ensure that theirs were the first ones that home-seekers encounter.

While CraigsList might be limiting this new fee structure to NYC, it sure seems that as CraigsList’s influence grows that they are going to have to make similar moves in other cities. While a tough move for CraigsList, this might be a good thing, as in a much needed shot in the arm, for our ailing big city newspaper classifieds sections that are still run by a 1965 model.

Since you might not have been romantic all year, give these to your partner. At least they are nutritional. Thank you Cool Hunting.

Into the browser war? That’s Firefox vs. Microsoft vs. Opera vs. Maxthon.

Huh, you might be saying. Is this really important?

That said, have you been smart enough to figure out that Firefox is the best browser? Even after the Microsoft IE7 announcement and beta launch?

Trying to figure out why this is important since browsers don’t make any dough (remember Netscape)?

I am.

I switched to Firefox a while ago. A friend turned me on to it. And, since I am a marketer, this is how they’ve grown – they are the essence of word of mouth marketing. And, WOM works - Firefox hit their 100 millionth download in October with a ten percentish share of the market (a hard stat to get.) Firefox simply has had a better product and Mary told Tim and Tim told Mia and Mia told me.

The big question? Is this still true now that the good folks from Redmond have copied Firefox’s tabs and RSS feeds? But, back to Netscape. Can Firefox survive?

Do they have something else to turn us onto?

Will open source win?

Stay tuned.

According to Technorati, a new Blog is created every second of every day. I am starting to get the feeling that I will need to, ah, do some serious marketing to get noticed (but, hey, that’s what I do for a living)…. This chart shows the growth of Blogs.

I know this chart is impossible to read so head on over to Sifry’s Alerts.