Looks like our order form is screwy. We’ve been reinforcing the counting mechanisms, which seems to have thrown off the catalog of blogs. Two steps forward, one step back. We’re doing a veritable jig these days. Should be fixed Monday morning.

As safe outlets for Serpico‘s whistleblowing evaporate, his buddy Bob Blair says, “we could even talk to a guy I know at the New York Times.” Today, Serpico would undoubtedly turn to a blogger as his advocate of last resort. (I’d love to see more alternate histories woven with blogs.)

Last night watched a talent show rehearsal. We spent the afternoon playing basketball outside, girls against boys.

This morning, I enjoyed my buddy Steve’s latest post about crafting a table. This is part nine!

Atrios explores the link between Congressional elections and blog advertising. He’s right that few candidates will match Chandler’s 50-fold return on blog advertising. He writes: “I do think that there are a lot of campaigns out there who will be able to make Blogs work for them, but it’s going to take a bit more than simply placing ads. If everyone jumps on the ad-placing bandwagon, and then they sit back and wait for the money to roll in, then I’ll get a nice fat check from Blogads but it won’t necessarily do much for the campaigns.” He observers: “The key thing blogs provide is a way to personalize your campaign. Aside from getting the attention of the bloggers themselves, I think ads get a positive reaction from blog readers because they perceive that the campaigns take this seriously. And, then, when they click through the website they want to see something more than just a standard impersonal campaign website which is rarely updated. Nobody thinks that twenty bucks buys them face time with a candidate, but people donate because they think their twenty bucks is being bundled with a hundred other peoples’, and suddenly that makes them part of an interest group which, collectively, wants to feel it’s being heard.”

It’s worth remembering that when Chandler’s campaign manager, Mark Nickolas, originally talked to me about Blogads, he hoped to break even. I secretly thought he could do more than that, but didn’t want to overpromise. The big test for campaigns will be in their willingness to tweak both their ads and their landing pages. Too often, in the bustle of the campaign, ads become frozen in time. Making a new pitch can hit a whole new slice of a blog’s readership.

BTW, a colleague in Budapest sent a translated version of the Wire News article about Chandler’s blogads that had shown up in the newsletter of the Hungarian Információs Társadalom- és Trendkutató Központ. .

Ben Chandler, blog advertiser and Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, won his special election today in Kentucky. Josh Marshall notes that this was also a victory for Internet fundraising:

As you’ll notice there on the left, the Chandler campaign has been advertising for about the last two weeks on this and a number of other blogs. The campaign budgeted about two grand for blog advertising. And my understanding is that by today they had raised close to $100,000 from contributors who linked through from those blogs on which the campaign was advertising.

In other words, they got roughly a 50-fold turnaround on their investment in the final two weeks of the campaign. And in case you’re wondering one hundred grand is a lot of money in a House race.

Now, obviously that’s exciting news for proprietors of blogs looking to open up revenue streams from advertisers. But the bigger story here is about the Democrats and the Internet, and the way this technology seems to click, shall we say, for the Democratic demographic.

Update: Tongue in cheek, Prof. Reynolds writes that Chandler’s win is “entirely because of the blogads!”

Mike Haines is running in the Democratic primary in Georgia’s 12th district. His campaign staff have bought some blogads to appeal to a national audience for funding. Clicking on a blogad on DailyKos, members of the massive and activist DailyKos community (aka Kossites) have arrived at the Haines blog to critique the ad, offer support and ask for the candidate’s positions on a slew of issues. He’s just responded. Haines’ opponent in the race, John Barrow, has also bought a number of ads on blogs.

Not your grandma’s media, is it?

Welcome to Dean uber blogger Mathew Gross as he returns to private life with his own blog. Matt’s blog will be a magnet for Internet activists, and his blogads are good value. Matt makes an interesting point:

And the amazing thing — the thing I still have yet to see a single pundit get — was that only 600,000 people in a nation of 300 million did that. 600,000 people shook the very foundation of political power in this country. It was an earthquake felt by both parties, the media, and the special interests. That feeling scared the hell out of a lot of people in Washington D.C. But you know what it felt like to the rest of us? It felt like hope.

I’m flying from LA to Chapel Hill today. Look forward to answering a bunch of e-mail and voice-mail tomorrow AM!

Taegan Goddard writes “Blogads are amazing. An update from Chandler’s campaign says they’ve raised more than $40,000 from their ad buy 10 days ago! The Chandler ad is in the left sidebar.”

I’ll be staying with Matt and Emmanuelle Saturday night in LA and then driving down to San Diego for the O’reilly e-democracy confab. This is late notice… but if you are a blogger in LA and want to come around for lunch Sunday, please drop me a line. Don’t be shy, people.

We’ve had two ten-minute glitches in the last 24 hours with disappearing ad images. These outages have occured on both image servers we run at Interland, so it appears these outages are upstream from our servers.

Our serving strategy has been revised significantly in the last month. Now the ad management and javascript serving is handled by two servers at the most expensive host around, Rackspace, with the images being served from Interland, where bandwidth is cheaper.

This means that if outages occur, the adstrip framework and text will still load and the actual loading of all blog pages will not be degraded.

If anyone is interested in eliminating the risk of brief image outages, we’ll gladly forward a CGI to cache ads on your server. It is simple to install and the cache updates only once a day
or when new ads are added. I know that as numbers grow, a number of bigger bloggers are reconsidering their hosting options, so if you have any tips please pass them along.