Mark Redetzke: “Plenty of traditional shops talk about media strategy and include the Web. More than you might think don’t ever talk about it (or if they do, they bring up interactive as window dressing only, then quickly move on). They’ve never done anything online. Why? It’s a self-perpetuating stalemate. They don’t have enough Web business to justify hiring experts. So they stick to what they know and don’t create strategies or campaigns that include meaningful Web components. Obviously, they never get enough web business to justify hiring subject matter experts. And the world passes them by. I blame this on the laziness that pervades most media departments. They work seasonally. Most don’t challenge themselves to learn more about a medium that currently penetrates nearly 70 percent of households. Shameful.”

Bloggercon was a stimulating as a thermos full of espresso.

A big part of the fun was renewing conversations with Hylton Jolliffe, Jeff Jarvis, Liz Spiers, Josh Marshall, Pressflex/Blogads investor Esther Dyson, Biz Stone (moving to Google!), Glenn Reynolds, Shannon Okey, Phil Wolff and Scott Johnson.

I met Matt Gross, Eric Folley, Oliver Willis, Ed Cone , Doc Searls, Chris Locke, Halley Suitt, Sooz, Scott Rosenberg , Scott Heiferman, Sanford Dickert and Joi Ito.

The intellectual ferment of the weekend is too much for me to try to recall here with all the other work I’ve got to do. Three random anecdotes:

Len Apcar, a editor in chief at NYT.com, told me he’d come to Bloggercon skeptical about whether blogging had a place inside the newspaper… but had become convinced blogging does fit in. Apcar said he’d gotten a chuckle out of my answer on the Bloggercon website to the question, “what’s the first thing NYTimes.com’s blogger in chief should do?” (My answer: short NYT shares. Click “comments.”)

Liz Spiers told me her parents, fundamentalist Southern Baptists, had only very recently learned of her big city blogging exploits at Gawker. Her local newspaper paper published an article on blogging and did a side bar on her. Her mother was shocked and her childhood pastor wrote to say how sad he was that Liz had strayed so far from her moral upbringing. (Update: my mom, herself a child of the South, writes to say “I didn’t realize blogging is immoral!”)

At dinner Saturday night, I brought up Swartzennegger, asking Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Jarvis to help me understand their nonchallance about his verbal and manual assaults on women. Glenn and Jeff, along with Liz Spiers, each said they’d rather have a competent scumbag in office than an incompetent angel. I proffered the “what if this was your daughter/wife/mother/sister?” debating line, to which Glenn responded: there’d be nothing left of Arnie if he tangled with Instawife. I asked if this is because Glenn knows his way around a handgun. “No, it’s my wife who would rip Arnold apart. I’d show up with a broom afterwards to clean up.” Only Hylton seconded my unhappiness with Swartzenegger. He said later that he knows a number of people in Telluride who say AS is notorious there for accosting women during the annual film festival.

Cooking tonight, I pulled out an odd little cook book we acquired in a pile of used books in Paris a few years back: Snob in the Kitchen, published in 1967.

It’s written by one Simonetta, “one of the world’s top fashion designers;” she’s memorialized in a photograph on the back cover in a leopard-skin coat talking on a huge telephone holding her cigarette at a rakish angle. The book was illustrated by her cousin, HRH Giovanni de Boubon, Prince des Deux Siciles, and as luck would have it, our copy is inscribed by Giovanni to his aunt Isa, “the only one in the family who was kind enough to buy the book.”

I’m making spaghetti capri, which is basically anchovies, tuna, bruised garlic, basil, parsley and pepper. Zowee!

Pre-apology, Andrew Sullivan passed off the LATimes expose on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sexual aggression as “a politically motivated smear-job.”

After Arnold admitted “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Sullivan does some quibbling, which he caps off with the comment that “there is a distinction between public and private life.” He concludes “vote for Arnold.”

Come on, Andrew. The LATimes piece could be politically motivated. But Arnold’s admission proves the article’s tightly woven portrait fits him like a wet-suit. The guy is arrogant and abusive. The least he deserves is derision.

I’ve been talking to Hylton Jolliffe about dinner tomorrow night. Anyone want to join us?

To date, we’ve done pitifully little advertising for Blogads. We’re gearing up to launch a neat new feature and, after months of tinkering and talking to folks, think we know what the heck a blogad is and why it is Good. So now for some marketing.

My blog buddy Hugh of www.gapingvoid.com fame has designed us a terse and evocative blogad for promoting… blogads. Which one do you like?
Or

Or (update)

Know somebody who has a guest bedroom near Bloggercon and wants to disintermediate a hotel Saturday night? I’ll pay $50 or bottle of Oban whiskey for a place to lay my exhausted, blog-riddled head. Write me. (Update: I’m set. Thank you Barbara!)

Steven Johnson, author of Swarm, has created a punchy campaign ad for Clark that would look great as a blogad. Good size, good emphasis on witty use of words and images. Which campaign will be the first to recognize the explosive and cost-effective potential of advertising on blogs?

Joe Queenan:“…it is true that residents of the New York area wake up every morning and turn on their radios to find out if the bridges to Manhattan are still standing. This is certainly no treat. But at least they do so knowing that if the bridges are still standing they can go across them and look at the Vermeers. Or the van Goghs. Or the Yankees. In Raleigh, if the bridges are still standing, the only thing you can do is go across them to Durham.” The creativity formula he’s poking fun at is here.

Josh Marshall publishes an unbroken string of 100+ questions & answers from a White House Press conference this morning. This is the kind of “I publish, you decide” journalism that can only appear on a blog. In juxtaposition to the sound bites published by traditional media, this is a factual banquet. Finally, the message is the message.