Give little kids a big bowl of free candy, and they’ll keep eating until they get sick. Give adults the same bowl, and most of them will pick out a couple of their favorites and then walk away to do something else. That’s pretty much the way it goes with any freebie – you consume a whole lot for a while, then you start tapering off, becoming more selective.

Blogs (and, I’d suspect, other free media) are no different. Recently, we’ve seen people start to fret about the looming attention crisis, which is a highfalutin way of saying they’re becoming overwhelmed by the number of blogs in their RSS feeds. Om Malik speaks for many of us when he writes, “I have been overwhelmed, and have started trimming the feed list.” This is the blogospheric equivalent of “Mommy, my tummy hurts.”

Some people max out at 5 feeds, some at 50. I’ve even read some people claim they’re topping out at a truly nauseating 200. I currently have 27 feeds, and that’s way too many. I’ve gone from adding to pruning. Most of us will ultimately cut back to a handful of blogs that we read regularly, supplementing them with the odd post from here or there. That’s only natural.

What it means, though, is that the blogosphere is going to end up looking a lot like the old “mainstream media.” Rather than being a great democratic free-for-all, the blogosphere will become steadily more rigid and hierarchical. Structurally, it’ll resemble the magazine world. A relatively small number of high-traffic blogs will dominate the market, and then there’ll be a whole lot of more specialized blogs with fewer readers. (I’m not including here the zillions of “my diary” blogs, which are not aimed at gaining broad readerships and tend to be short-lived, anyway.) It won’t be quite as hard for blogs to climb the hierarchy as it is in the print world (simply because the costs of blogging are so much lower), but it won’t be easy, either.

Indeed, the technologies we use to manage our blog reading will reinforce the hierarchy. RSS, for example, imposes the old subscription model on the blogosphere – it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, as it tends to lock us into a set of favorite blogs. (Even though blogs are free, the subscription model imposes real switching costs.) Also, the inevitable (in my view) shift away from blog search engines based on posting date (like Technorati’s traditional default mode) to ones that use measures of “relevance” based on traffic or link intensity (like Google or Sphere.com or Technorati’s “authority” engine) will also make the hierarchy more rigid and less democratic – as will third-party headline aggregators like Memeorandum, which also tend to reflect and reinforce established patterns of popularity.

The fact is, truly democratic media is good in theory but exhausting in practice. Our natural bent toward efficiency in consuming information will turn blogs into another mainstream medium.

The elitist-hippie-boy-scout culture of the Web 2.0 intelligentsia is funny in itself, but that doesn’t mean a good parody isn’t welcome.

Having been on a plane earlier, I’ve been trying to catch up on Microsoft’s announcements today. (The best rundown on the event I’ve seen is Tim O’Reilly’s; the best analysis is Dana Gardner’s.) Much is still fuzzy, particularly the precise tiered-pricing model for Office Live (as opposed to Office Dead, I guess) – and how much is covered by ads alone. But in general it looks like a good, smart move by Microsoft, surprisingly aggressive in its breadth without being excessively risky.

The company’s challenge in moving to the software-as-a-service era has always been more about timing than technology: Shift too late, and you risk losing the market; shift too early, and you leave lots of traditional license profit on the table. With its Live plan, it seems to have struck a balance that, on paper, at least, looks smart. As Gardner writes: “By targeting small businesses with Windows- and Office-like services and juxtaposing them to contextual advertising, Microsoft diversifies its business model closer to what Google and what other software-as-a-service vendors do, but does not really dent its historic money making machines: the Windows operating system and Office suite of personal productivity applications. At least not for some time.” And by integrating the utility version of Office with the on-premise version (it remains to be seen how that will work), it has the potential to put a tough barrier in Google’s path into the business market.

Now, we’ll see how well Microsoft can actually execute the plan. Can it make its battleship maneuver like Google’s cigarette boat?

One final note: There’s a real rush right now to give software away and make money from advertising. The strategy is built on aggressive projections for on-line ad revenues as far as the eye can see. What nobody’s talking about is the fact that advertising is a very cyclical business. If you’re publishing a newspaper or magazine, you have considerable variable costs (paper, editorial content) that you can trim when there’s weakness in the ad market. With software-as-a-service, you don’t have that flexibility in the cost structure of your business. (Your customers aren’t going to use your software less because there’s an ad recession going on.) At some point, and it will probably be sooner than the current rosy forecasts suggest, the on-line ad market will take a dip. Then things will get very interesting very fast.

Back in January, I described the bifurcation of the home PC market – into a dirt-cheap low end and a fashion-driven high end – and the challenge it posed to Dell. Back then, the challenge was theoretical. Now, it’s real.

The company’s announcement of a major sales and revenue shortfall yesterday underscores the problems it’s having, particularly in the consumer market. Dell’s been extremely successful for many years in riding the IT commoditization wave – streamlining its operation to make money at a price point that’s unprofitable for competitors – but now it’s finding that sometimes cheap can be too cheap. Unlike in the business market, where Dell has been able to offer attractive value-added services to keep box prices off the floor, a large number of home buyers are just grabbing the cheapest machine available. With competitors, including a resurgent HP, now willing to battle Dell for market share, particularly in the expanding laptop market, Dell’s in a squeeze. It’s lost its margin on home PC sales. Although the consumer market represents a relatively small portion of the company’s overall revenues, it’s big enough to wreak havoc with Dell’s results, a fact that’s led investors to flee the once bullet-proof stock.

Dell’s response? To shift away from its traditional, scale-driven commodity strategy and try to boost profits by selling high-end machines to the well-heeled. Because the new positioning goes against the grain of its low-cost, anti-innovation heritage, the shift will be a tough one to carry out. Dell will have to compete more on the terms of high-style companies like Alienware and Apple, rivals it hasn’t had to worry about much in the past. It’s leaping, in other words, into a new world.

Michael Dell is from Mars, Steve Jobs is from Venus. Planetary convergence is rare, in business as in the heavens.