ClickZ's Zach Rodgers offers up an entertaining and instructive compare-and-contrast exercise in the form of a feature article profiling the lives and work of two larger-than-life blog advertising "moguls," each a "celebrated bubble-era publisher, an internet consultant, a book author and - currently - a blog advertising entrepreneur" but two different personalities with different approaches to business: John Battelle and Philip "Pud" Kaplan, the former of Wired and Industry Standard fame, the latter of FuckedCompany.com infamy.

Whatever the differences in style, the two are brothers in arms fighting for a business idea - "building a market for advertising in so-called consumer-generated media," Rodgers writes.

Four years after the bust, the two "are once more treading parallel paths. Each is building a weblog advertising venture geared toward the needs of publishers," Battelle with his "sophisticated" and service-focused Federated Media (FM) Publishing of A-list blogs, and Kaplan with his "democratic and technology-driven" AdBrite that's like a noisy bazaar of buyers and sellers.

And both have to contend with giants like Google making forays into their respective realms: "You've got kind of a mash-up of Pud's and my idea," according to Battelle, referring to Google's testing of AdBrite-like direct, "advertise here" as well as FM-like CPM pricing approach on site-targeted units.