Having mastered Beethoven’s Minuet in G on the violin, a first grader I know has moved on to a subtler art: burping. I never mastered the trick of gulping air and letting it escape at the right raucous tempo, but this kid can crank out a dozen belches in 30 seconds. I try strenuously to frown.

Arellanes reports from the front lines in Prague.

Listening to Chris Lydon’s interview with Len Apcar, editor in chief of NYTimes.com, it’s clear Apcar takes blogs seriously. Apcar: “There are some terrifically informative blogs that are breaking news, shaping events. And… the NYTimes has always been an information leader and we cannot ignore this, we need to be involved, and thinking about it, and thinking about how it can be adapted to our purposes and our standards for our audience.”

The interview is incredibly revealing about what the Times gets… and doesn’t get about blogs. Per utterance, blogs generate more page views and passions than traditional media, and I’m pretty sure that big media simply adopting the pace and the style of blogs isn’t going to close that gap. I’ll try to transcribe more later.

I’m constantly pleasantly surprised by the blogosphere. Matt Welch posted about Atrios’ fantastic success raising money for a new laptop, and the post’s comments set off a heated but valuable brainstorming session about SoCal grocery strike.

Joyful and brash, my old Budapest bud Rick Bruner still keeps me giggling daily with his blog.

Music critic Kate Sullivan, sister of my buddy Ben, writes:

i don’t know how to explain it exactly, but i think the process of having to critique music all day for money fucks with the way you hear it. because critiquing music becomes tied to your income, and your sense of who you are in the world, you can easily lose track of the real reason people listen to and make music in the first place. music becomes a platform on which to prove your intellectual superiority, a tool for the construction of your ascendancy–you have to become superior to the music. i understand this because i am a critic, too, and a writer, and i do understand the necessity of “mastering” your subject before you sit down to write. when you sit down to write, you have to feel that you can “kill” your subject–you have to become its master, or you’re sunk. or so the logic goes.

the problem is that you start to build a kind of resentment toward your subject–and why not? it’s your adversary. you’re the gay vegas guy in a codpiece and it’s the white tiger. you gain all your glamour and mystique through the wild beauty of the animal you have tamed. you think those guys would be rich fuckers if they were working with carp? critics secretly know that their whole gig is based on someone else’s glamour and power and freedom. and so they get a little baby chip on their shoulders, that just grows and grows–especially since most of them have musical yearnings of their own.

(Via Matt Welch and Amy Langfield.)

Jeff Jarvis, one of the wisest scribes I know and boss of media giant Advance Publications’ Internet arm, sums up perfectly: “bloggers are influencers talking to influencers.”

Italian journalist Robin Good writes a clueful overview of Blogads: “Blogads are addressing the great potential made available by those independent publishers, reviewers, columnists and commentators who, on a frequent periodical basis, communicate and address relevant issues with wit and intelligence and which specialize in some very clearly identifiable theme.”

He mentions Blogads’ Cluetrain-ness, as Seyed did earlier this week. This makes me really happy, since the Cluetrain Manefesto is what sparked my own first blog entry in August 2001. (One of my joys attending Bloggercon was that I met two more of the authors of Cluetrain — Chris Locke Doc Searls. I’d broken bread with the good Dr. Weinberger previously.)

Cluetrain begins with the thesis that “Markets are conversations” and hammers corporate robots and robotic corporations for forgetting to converse humanely. The idea is profound and companies have gone only 0.01% of the way to incorporating its lessons.

But hey, is it too early to consider the next step? Drunk on caffeine and words at Bloggercon and playing a game of antimetabole, I started musing about the idea that “conversations are markets,” particularly conversations conducted through weblogs. We speak of “getting” or “winning” links for our own good thoughts… and we also commonly “give” or “reward” links to the good work of others. We “pay” attention to others and “earn” attention ourselves. Seyed Razavi has distilled several dimensions of this whole “conversation as market” metaphor with his great simulation Blogshares.

Blogads also tries to close the circle on the “markets are conversations are markets” idea. We help authors who earned conversational “riches” — respect and links and eyeballs — to arbitrage some of that intellectual capital back into the stuff you buy groceries with.

Of course, publishers do the same thing, but they take 80% of the juice, versus the 20% we charge.

Neil Postman died Sunday at the age of 72. I read Postman’s indictment of television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in 1987. The argumentation was brilliant and the conclusion unescapable. I unplugged my television and haven’t watched anything on it since but videos. I’m deeply in Postman’s debt –so far, the TV-hours he liberated add up to roughly three years of conversation, reading and musing… life.

As California’s new governor likes to say, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” The dollar has dropped more than 5% in recent days for no apparent reason. In fact, the economic reports have hinted at US strength and European weakness — both are usually good for the dollar.

So what gives? Although rumors that Russia is considering pricing oil in euros rather than dollars have now been denied, it is worth reflecting on the double-whammy that could be cast by our spiralling budget deficit and the de-dollarization of the world’s reserves.

But hey, Europe’s problems — geriatric populations, sclerotic businesses, paralytic bureaucracies — are even worse than ours. Perhaps the rupee or yuan shoud be the next reserve currency?