The ultra-sweet blogads for Anne Rice’s latest book, Christ the Lord, link to blog posts about the book. The conversation continues: “suddenly my blog traffic spiked. It felt like Anne Rice was sending all those people over to read my stuff.” Yes, when things go right,“markets are conversations.”

Every time I come to Chicago, I’m impressed. Today I’m attending Blawgthink, a gathering of 100 lawyers which is being held in Catalyst Ranch, a retro-space in a rehabbed warehouse in the middle of town. A really cool spot.

The Molnar brothers, friends from Budapest now living in Berkeley, have just launched the Tricycle Wine Company.

Just won a political race but new to politics? Rush order Taegan Goddard’s book “YOU WON–NOW WHAT? — HOW AMERICANS CAN MAKE DEMOCRACY WORK FROM CITY HALL TO THE WHITE HOUSE.”

Here’s the first chapter and here’s where you can buy the book.

Geraldine Hartman, author of Not Just for Vegetarians, Delicious Homestyle Cooking, the Meatless Way, writes:

As an author, my experience with Blogads.com has been wonderful. Excellent customer service (especially follow-up) is often hard to find these days; it is alive and well at Blogads.com. Thanks to Lanae and everyone at Blogads for making my first experience such a positive one, placing ads on some of the great food blogs that they represent. Cheers from Canada!

From the organizer of SpeakOutCalifornia comes this comment on DailyKos:

Of the $300 billion spent…I can’t help but think the best roughly a thousand dollars that anybody spent on this thing was on Speak Out California’s tiny little blogad buy.

Here’s their ad.

AdAge asks: Should employers allow their staff to read blogs in the workplace?

Next up: is breathing a waste of time? Should coffee machines be licensed? Should toilets be metered?

Thank you Tig.

Created by Karl Frankowski and referred by Josh Rubin of Coolhunting. Karl gets $1000 and Josh gets $300. Both get our thanks. And the blogosphere gets another case study of the fun things that emerge when a swarm of people brainstorm in public.

Thank you to aeveryone who contributed logo ideas. You can see all their submissions and comments here. You can see the finalists here. And for background, here’s the original manifesto.

(We’ll be getting the new logo live on this site once we can adust a couple of things in the current layout.)

coming as soon as we get a signed W9 and AI file.