We spent last week on the outer banks. I read about the D-convention every day in the Times, Post and WSJ and enjoyed the blogger articles.

Submersion in the elemental rhythms — tides, waves, day/night — wiped clean my mental clock. We bobbed and tumbled in the warm waves, tossed the baseball, dribbled sand spires, fished for blue crabs with chicken legs — I was shocked by how hard those things bite, watched heat-lightning and ruby-shot sunsets, put-putted beneath an osprey nest, erected sand-arches and domes, retrieved three horse-shoe crab tails and numerous jellyfish, found a dead skate and wandered through Kitty Hawk. Nieces Lauren and Caroline gave us a charming rendition of “he’s got the whole world in his hands.” Jogging on morning two, we found a dead sea turtle. Later that day it was bloated and bleaching, but people wandering by were still asking “is it alive?” and shrieking when a wave moved a flipper. The next day, the turtle had doubled in size and was graffitied.

In today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution, Marlon Manuel writes a thoughtful and well-reported piece on the shifting border between political blogging and journalism, talking to Wonkette, RealClearPolitics, DailyKos, Politics1.

Manuel gets off a fun line. Responding to my comment that bloggers have an advantage over traditional journalists who can’t relax, curse and be themselves, he retorts: “Well, #@$%, there goes the neighborhood.”

The only problem with the story is that it is password protected.

Boarding the kids with my parents, we spent three great days this week in Berkeley and San Francisco. Peter and Jess Molnar put us up in their Rozsadomb-like bungalow, keeping us full of red wine and cold chicken. Wednesday, after meeting with an ad agency in the morning, we napped on the lawn in Yerba Buena park and walked around San Francisco all day, stumbling through Chinatown and then 3 miles west on California street. That night we tried to sneak into Chez Panisse without a reservation but settled very happily for some excellent Thai just up the road. Thursday we bought some salami and cheese and had a picnic on the back porch and then drove over to walk through the Muir Woods. The crowds were horrible… until we’d walked half a mile and suddenly had the place to ourselves. Way prettier than pictures. Back for drinks with the Molnar parents and dinner with Arpad and Maya Molnar. Yesterday I evangelized for Blogads at Blogon and we then flew back to Chapel Hill. We’ll be at the beach next week, totally offline.

Mark Glaser sums up political internet advertising and blog advertising features prominently. He coins the phrase “blogging widow” which my wife will enjoy. And he gets a prime statistic from former Kerry CTO Sanford Dickert: the Kerry campaign made a three-fold return on its online buys.

Have any of your noticed The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal advertising on blogs? It is flattering to bloggers to have two of America’s premiere publications courting their readers.

(A tangent: I’d love to see these guys use the technique that worked so well for — the latest cover with some headlines. Blog readers are news junkies and the best way to get them excited is to remind them just how cutting edge your product is. And the best way to do that, in the classic advice of writing teachers and editors, is to “don’t tell with adjectives, show with examples.”)

Finally, [url=http://cbs.marketwatch.com/tvradio/default.asp?siteid=mktw&dist=ltvrtab]CBS Marketwatch’s Frank Barnako, an early and astute political blog maven, just mentioned to me that CNN will be pushing viewers to blogs during the convention. Damn, that could be great. Or not? Will blogs live up to the hype? Bloggers excel when they cast their flashlights into murky corners where flood-lights won’t fit — this convention will likely be fairly over-lit and shadowless.

Astute blogad observers today will have noticed blogads just about everywhere for Paramount’s Manchurian Candidate movie. Linking to a movie trailer, this is the first major blogad buy by a movie studio.

Comparing this package of convention-going bloggers with the total list, looks like nearly half of the bloggers there will be running blogads.

This is the first fully blogged and televised battle of the uncorporate (but not uncommercial!) media against the corporates. Who will deliver the most scoops of lard or lust or laughs?

BTW, we’ve seen some BIG media companies buying blogads… will tell you more in the next few days.

Chicago Tribune: “Many people don’t take into account how influential bloggers are,” said Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. “Blogs are getting an increasing readership. People who are going to those blogs are real political junkies who can then reach everybody else.”

But Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, sees only bad news in blogging: “bloggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.”

Funnily enough, Jones doesn’t do any reporting or offer any evidence in his own little bout of “scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.”

Et tu, Mr. Jones?

Test for your Magyar expats: where did these statues originally stand?

Mushroom picking, slicing range balls with son, cooking chicken, selling the jalopy, slicing golf balls with Dad…

Nice comprehensive coverage of Blogads last week in the Chicago Tribune and ClickZ.

The Trib’s Maureen Ryan has been watching blogs closely for a while, so it was particulary fun to get her perspective and her then-and-now quotes. Tessa Wigert at ClickZ likes our easy-to-use order form and conducted the most efficient e-mail interview I’ve yet encountered.