Some good evidence that “France” isn’t rooting for Saddam, despite claims to the contrary. I put France in quotation marks because, in my experience, “France” doesn’t really exist, except as a blob on a map and a cloud of concepts… and therefore couldn’t be antagonistic towards US interests anyway.

In my experience, most French people love both the idea of America (open, pragmatic and flexible) and Americans (individualistic, idealistic and ambitious.)

NYTimes.com did 30.7 million page views on Monday, March 24, a new record for the site, according to Steve Outing’s post. The site did 29.2 million page views on September 13, 2001. The site, as I recall, averages around 10 million page views a day. Interesting to note that many blogs saw traffic rise 5 to 10-fold after the war started.

The WSJ reports: “The Web site of Major League Baseball saw record traffic on Opening Day, generating 35,000 subscriptions to its multimedia products. MLB.com said it had over 10 million visitors on Monday, the first day with a full slate of games in the 2003 season. Opening Day last year brought two million visitors to the three-year-old site, the lead venture of MLB Advanced Media, which is owned jointly by all 30 Major League Baseball teams. The site’s previous record was 3.6 million visitors, for the last day of online balloting for the 2002 All-Star Game.”

This profile of Gawker does an excellent job of highlighting what makes blogs so powerful — personality — and so tough for corporate media to match.

A magazine can spend years and countless feedback sessions trying to cultivate a personality. People get a personality at around 3 months of age without any extra effort.

Hungary always has trouble portraying itself to foreigners. Tourist brochures and posters offer kitsch photos of Hungarian cowboys, algaic hot baths or Disneyesque turrets. The images rarely capture the Hungary’s incomparable blend of old and new, bravery and cowardice, east and west, hot and cold, idealism and cynicism, wine and coffee, innocence and sin, river and dirt. The place literally straddles a fault line. The top photo on this page is one of the first images I’ve seen in a long time that makes me long for Budapest. (Via Emmanuelle.)

Emmanuelle Richard has updated her blogroll. I love these categorized blogrolls and keep meaning to do more roll slicing and dicing in my own nav bar.

The fog of war.

I invested $29 in a fishing license yesterday and we went fishing at the foot of the falls at Puffers’ pond. No fish for us. But at one point, I sensed a big chocolate-colored dog at my feet and looked down and discovered a sleek fat beaver. He looked up at me, turned and waddled casually up the stream towards my son, then slipped into the water and surfed down the rapids out of sight.

Annoyed by eBay and Paypal’s increasingly restrictive policies, a group of kink vendo are trying to redirect their businesses to a new auctioneer. Network theory suggests that specialist hubs might be able to thrive and innovate when a network monopolist ignores their interests. See also this article by Christopher Null.

Former US senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart has a blog.