What happens to all those logo-festooned tote bags, pens and other pieces of corporate schwag that get handed out ad-nauseam on the convention circuit? Sure, some of it eventually goes on to serve some useful purpose. But much of it goes straight into the bin.

Enter the Schwaggin’ Wagon. Born just ten days ago over lunch in LA, the Schwaggin’ Wagon has cut a high profile at this year’s Web 2.0 expo.

“I was having lunch at a Thai restaurant and I brought up the fact that there is a lot of waste in this schwag game,” says Michael Liskin, an LA-based social media consultant who is one of the group’s six founders.

Schwaggin’ Wagon’s mission is to raise awareness about wasteful schwag practices and, eventually, to find a better use for the mountains of conference bric-a-brac that would otherwise end up in landfills.

In just ten days, the Schwaggin’ Wagon crew has built a website, procured a van, and attracted more than 150 followers on Facebook. They plan to collect schwag from conference-goers and donate it to Innerkids, an LA non-profit that hosts after-school programmes local youth. 

Eventually, the group hopes to act as a bridge between conference producers and a number of charities who can distribute things like leftover t-shirts and pens to people who really need them. 

It is still early days, but judging by the reaction among conference-goers, Schwaggin’ Wagon has struck a nerve. Several Web 2.0 companies have lent their support to the project and organisers are looking for more sponsors.

Mr Liskin stresses that the group’s goal is not out to eliminate schwag altogether -  a potentially Sisyphean task. Rather, it is to make everyone involved think twice about what happens to their wares once the party ends.  “It’s not about putting anyone out of business in any way,” he says. “It’s about streamlining and giving it more thought.”

Sometimes, even a blogging queen has to escape the blogosphere. Mena Trott, co-founder of the blogging company Six Apart, visited the FT’s London headquarters today – fortuitous timing for us, as it was hot on the heels of a storm about the Six Apart-sponsored conference held in Paris earlier this week, Le Web 3.

It’s the kind of saga that takes a dedicated blogosphere watcher to get excited about, but in a nutshell:

Some bloggers were unhappy with Le Web 3. The organisers disappointed a lot of attendees by making changes to the programme at the last minute to accommodate speeches from politicians: French presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy, fellow French politician François Bayrou of the UDF, and former Israeli PM Shimon Peres. The collective finger of bloggers pointed firmly at Loic Lemeur, MD of Six Apart Europe. Sam Sethi of TechCrunch UK & Ireland was one of those to criticise the conference; you can read the full account here on GU but the upshot is that Sethi is no longer writing for TechCrunch, and indeed as of today, TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington has put the UK/Ireland website on hold.

Mena Trott herself was of course at the centre of a similar furore at last year’s conference (called Les Blogs), when she called an attendee, Ben Metcalf, an ‘asshole’ after he used the conference’ IRC ‘backchannel’ to label her speech "bullshit".

She hadn’t heard about Sethi being sacked and I was braced for a slightly uncomfortable exchange, but Trott seemed genuinely sanguine about the episode – and even a little amused that Loic had used the same word she had used last year.

She admitted, however, that while she would’ve liked to have spoken at Le Web 3, last year’s episode had given her “more stage fright than I would normally have”. And she is no longer an avid reader of tech blogs. “I’m so out of the loop, thankfully, about all this stuff.”

Unsurprisingly, Trott is sceptical about what the future holds for the A-list bloggers (perhaps not such a controversial view these days), noting acidly that most of the usual suspects are only too keen to get exposure in the mainstream media whenever they get a chance.

The blogosphere is still growing rapidly, but blogs are being squeezed out of the ranks of the top online media sites. That is the lesson that Nick Carr has drawn from his analysis of the latest State of the Blogosphere report by Technorati’s David Sifry (see our brief note on SOTB here). The numbers are striking:

Just two years ago, in October 2004, blogs accounted for 16 of Technorati’s 35 most influential and authoritative media sites. They represented, in other words, 45% of the short head, with mainstream media (MSM) sites holding the remaining 55%. By March 2005, the number of blogs in the top 35 had dropped to 13, or 37%. By August 2005, it was down to 11, or 31%. By February of 2006, blogs held only 4 of the top 35 slots – or 11%. Finally, in [Technorati’s] new October 2006 report, just 2 blogs - Engadget and Boing Boing - were in the top 35. Blogs’ share of the short head has fallen to a piddling 6%.

Nick thinks the shift has to do with mainstream media sites becoming more tech-savvy. As big media succeeds in its transition from print to digital, he says, more and more blogs are transforming into niche sites - the 21st century equivalent of trade journals and newsletters.

The idea of there being an A List of bloggers, then, is something of a misnomer now. The real A List of online media is made up almost entirely of the sites maintained by mainstream media companies. Bloggers seem fated to be, at best, B Listers.

According to Nick’s numbers, the big shift came between August 2005 and February 2006, when blogs’ share of the top 35 sites dropped from 11 to 4. Any thoughts about what happened during those six months to cause the trend to hit its tipping point?