Rick Bruner hears the President say Iran when he means Iraq. Rick looks at the NYTimes’ quotation but the mention of Iran has been omitted. What gives, Rick asks?

As I recall, there’s some long-standing tradition among journalists of quoting Presidents EXACTLY. No cleaning, no sanding, no smudging. (Is this even codified in the AP style book?) Presidential words, after all, have incredible de facto and de jure power; they are, in some quasi-religious sense, the utterances of the United States itself. So this retouching shouldn’t go unremarked.

While visiting Rick’s blog, don’t miss the BUSH SPAM one slot higher on the page.

Ever dryly hilarious and sloshingly brilliant, Ken Layne explains why a new column in an Australian newspaper is called The Continuing Crisis.

Dave Winer says he gets roughly 5000 visitors when monster-community publishing site Slashdot links to him, and says this is typical of other Manila and Radio sites.

Dave asked why Joel Spolsky, author of Joel on Software, gets 400,000 reads from a Slashdot link.

For comparison, I wrote my buddy Ben Sullivan, who publishes ScienceBlog. He says “For me, the Slashdot effect is spilt in two. Sometime they put a story from Science Blog exclusively inside on their science section. That generates, maybe, 2,000-3,000 reads over several weeks. But a front page posting for all the world to see brings in about 10,000, almost immediately (12-24 hour period).”

So I wrote Joel, noting that other other folks get up to 10,000 page views when Slashdotted. Joel replied: “we get about 30,000 page views on a normal day and about 120,000 page views on a Slashdot day. This includes every page, not just the one that slashdot linked to, and I’m not counting based on referrers because that only gets the first page. … I think my site is quite a bit stickier than average. (Every day I get a few emails of the form: ‘I found your site from a link and spent the whole afternoon reading everything…’).”

On his blog, Joel has added further context, noting that a) the number Dave originally quoted was for “hits,” which are approximately 400% higher than “page views” and b) the Slashdot links always come on days when he’s sent out his newsletter to 16,000 subscribers c) plenty of other bloggers link to him on that day.

For reference, a February 1999 article about the Slashdot effect’s impact on traffic at three web sites concluded that Slashdot could drive up to 4000 readers to a popular link. An addendum to that article noted that the original article got 17,000 visits after being Slashdotted itself.

NYTimes.com: “Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to index a person’s typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic…. Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid….By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.”

Stephanie Miles reports in the WSJ, “In April, readers of NYTimes.com, owned by New York Times Co. will start seeing half-page ads running down the right side of the page as they read online articles. The navigational links that typically appear on the far left side of the page will move to the top of the screen, making room for the text of the article to the left of the ad.”

Olivier Travers has some good advice for publishers who think their archives are gold: “They still need to create products that are unique to the web in order to trigger better response rates. Database sites such as Hoover’s or Imdb Pro can’t be done in paper. Community sites, from eBay to ClassMates to Match.com, hook people with one another, and that’s another unique value to the Internet. We need to see more of that, as opposed to premium rate archives of articles that aren’t that interesting to start with.”

I heard what my son calls a “Zuki” concert yesterday, including a teacher’s rendition of this cello piece. You can read a log of the Shuttle’s final two hours here. Now what will happen to these three? The Nytimes business section headlines “Shuttle’s Effect on Economy May Be Small”… why bother with the article?

The Internet has outstripped TV and newspapers as an information source, says a new survey. At the same time, people believe less of what they read online and therefore have to do more cross-cking of information.

There’s a glut of ad slots and ads, news and news peddlers. In fact, thanks to the likes of CraigsList and Slashdot and what Clay Shirky labels the “mass amateurization of publishing,” both could be virtually infinite.

Traditional ad-funded media may soon be swamped in the ever-expanding info universe sparked by the Internet Big Bang. But this spreading ad and info entropy will also challenge advertisers; traditional demographic-based advertising will soon be as effective as trying to heat the moon with a blow drier.

Against this backdrop, I’ve argued that “hubness” (like hipness, but more businessy) will be the thing that differentiates blogs from other media and gives hub bloggers premium CPMs. The best blog ads will be like the billboards on Times Square — more expensive in terms of eyeballs, but good value for signalling to customers, competitors and business partners that “we’re serious.”

These blogad buyers will be the types of buzz-seeking, network-aspiring companies — software vendors, media producers, fashion peddlers, auctioneers, artists, and service providers — who traditionally promote themselves through what economists refer to as “common knowledge events,” the socially intertwined spectacles, forums and media within which participants can look at each other and say “you know I know you are watching.”

Granted, bloggers will have to cultivate and then publicize any claim to hubdom in their respective niches. (And yes, at present, few bloggers even have defined a niche beyond “what interests me today.” That’s not a bad niche, but obviously won’t cut it commercially.)

Can the blog compete commercially in the age of media entropy? As commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit the new environment.

Two posts of interest for Blogads users this morning. In the Guardian, Jim McClellan surveys the prospects for commercial blogging and features Blogads. From the grassroots, Ken Layne blogs: “My BlogAds make me happy. Currently, this site is offering a gun T-shirt, an Arizona politics blog, corsets, trial subscriptions to the Los Angeles Examiner paper, and a link to an L.A. news-gossip site. It’s a strip mall run by maniacs.”

I was on a blogging panel Monday afternoon at DCdotcom, an event for DC ad execs. The day was well-run and kept the 220 attendees entertained/informed.

There was a lot of interest about blogging, but only 10% of the audience had ever read a blog and only 2% had actually blogged. Wake up ladies and gentlemen! Dave Barry has a blog. GWB reads blogs.

I had the pleasure of meeting Meg Hourihan in person, but am afraid I borrowed her stomach bug. Jennifer, did you fare any better?

Hmm… blogging seems to be something you can only catch in person too. Let’s see if more DC ad folks catch the blog flu.

A Washington Post ad VP gave us his spiel. He emphaized some good stats — the web is number 1 news source for business decision makers, number 1 media during work.

My favorite line was this classic pitch: “some of our clients don’t want us to tell people how well they are doing with their online advertising — they don’t want their competitors to find out.” I liked this line because a) it is funny to hear someone from the Post resort to this genre of aluminum-siding-sales-training-school “trust me” pitch. And b) although the pitch was dripping oil, it was a good point and probably true. The neat thing about the web is that your competition can be TOTALLY ignorant about how well you are doing. There are no parking lots to check, no shelves to watch.

Of course, this can also pose a problem because people like to deal with companies that are successful… and e-businesses are still working on ways to reflect “popular” or “busy” or “buzzing” online.