Word has started to leak out in the blogosphere about Creative Weblogging's deal with the Washington Post/ Newsweek Interactive (WPNI).

So I thought I would share a few details.

This past week the Washington Post quietly kicked off its new Sponsored Blogroll, which appears on the Washington Post home page. (Go to the Washington Post home page and look down the right side.)

Selected Creative Weblogging blogs will be featured in the new Blogroll. This means Creative Weblogging blogs have the potential to be introduced to the Washington Post's audience of 8 million readers monthly.

WPNI sales reps also will provide assistance in selling advertising on participating blogs.

The Washington Post website says it is a Beta program. When last I looked, three entities were listed as Beta partners, of which Creative Weblogging is one. The other two are All Business and Bootsnall.com.

For Creative Weblogging it means the potential to give expanded visibility to the 80+ talented bloggers who are part of the Creative Weblogging network from 16 countries around the world.

Right now it is our Personal Finance and Gadgets blogs that appear on the blogroll, but I understand different blogs will rotate on and off periodically.

It's gratifying to see Creative Weblogging come such a long way from the day back in 2003 when I first read on Torsten Jacobi's blog that he was starting a blog network.

UPDATE: Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion gives the Washington Post praise for a program that sends traffic to and sells advertising for bloggers.

Greg Narain at SocialTwister concurs, noting: "This is fascinating in a number of ways ... blogging, and it's other social media kin, are not only important to the media landscape but that those we look to most for it increasingly recognize the value."

Jeff Burkett of the Washington Post, whose brainchild this program is, notes: "At this point this is an experiment to see what kind of interest we get from the bloggers out there. We have 3 partners at launch. Creative Weblogging, BootsNAll and AllBusiness. They each have tons of high quality blogs under their wings and have been great to work with so far."