The Ibolya Cafe, where Matt Welch, David Reilly, Miklos Gaspar,Susan Skiles, Ken Layne, Renee Cordes, Jim Lowney, Ben Sullivan and I used to hold the Budapest Business Journal’s editorial meetings, has gone the way of the dodo and print newspaper scoop. But Rick Bruner, visiting Budapest recently, finds the Ibolya’s unlit neon sign still hangs above a new cafe. Matt, who was also in Budapest over New Year’s, reports, “at current rates of development, the entire city of Pest (Buda is the hilly half across the Danube) will be one sprawling café/wine bar/bistro/restaurant by roughly 2007.” And anyone wondering why Matt

The Ibolya is 20 seconds walk from the Cafe Central, where the concept of six degrees of separation was birthed in 1929. Of course, while the Cafe is now nicely restored, when we were working in that neighborhood in the nineties, the place was a combination bagel store and video arcade.

Finally, anyone wondering why Matt recently wrote that “gulping down cheap & sweet champagne, even for a short while and mixed with better quality stuff, can lead to acute, projectile-style poisoning, for up to 20 hours,” should check out this photo to see Matt’s hangover in the making.

Watched W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick. Playing Egbert Souse — pronounced with a gleeful French twist as “Sue-zay” — Fields wanders into the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, his favorite bar.

“Um, was I in here last night and spend a twenty dollar bill?” asks Souse.

“Yeah,” says the bartender.

“Oh, boy,” he says, then grins like a baby given its bottle. “What a load that is off my mind.”

After falling out of bed laughing, all I could think was… unfunded US social security liability. Twenty years from now, a befuddled US retiree will stumble into a bar and mutter to the bartender — “Did I spend $2 trillion in here a couple of decades ago?”

Csaba Garay, one of the key guys coding Blogads, took December off to complete his master’s degree at Hungary’s brutally hard Budapesti Mûszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem. I haven’t talked to Csaba since before Christmas. Wow, it makes my spine tingle to remember taking those final exams.

Csab (11:50 AM) :
exams: 2 down one to go.
henry (11:51 AM) :
great. and the thesis bug got resolved?
Csab (11:51 AM) :
but the last one should be easier than these two…
Csab (11:51 AM) :
yupp. I allready turned it in..
henry (11:51 AM) :
great.
henry (11:52 AM) :
must feel darn good.
Csab (11:55 AM) :
yes, it’s a biiig relief…
henry (11:55 AM) :
must feel like a weight lifted from your shoulders.
Csab (11:55 AM) :
especially after this last exam i had today… I was up all night studying hard for a ‘C’ (3)
henry (11:56 AM) :
Wow. Sometimes the best grades are the 3s… which are much better than 1s, right?
Csab (11:56 AM) :
The teacher was kind of picky. giving me a hard time…
henry (11:56 AM) :
Ugg.
henry (11:57 AM) :
I’m glad to report that blogads is growing pleasantly as you study… at current rates, bloggers will be doing roughly 100 million impressions a month in November, so we’ll have to work hard to keep up. 🙂
Csab (11:57 AM) :
2 days ago i was told i was stupid to pick this subject as a final exam (i did not know about it…) and turned out to be true. There were only 2 other guys besides me, while on other courses there were like 20-30…
henry (11:58 AM) :
ouch.
Csab (11:58 AM) :
that IS great news about Blogads! I’m glad to hear that. You do a good job at marketing, and promoting!
henry (12:00 AM) :
your nice machine and a string of lucky synapses… leading from mattwelch to gregbeato to atrios to talkingpoints to daily kos and others… i hope the string keeps unrolling for us.
Csab (12:01 AM) :
i hope so too.
henry (12:01 AM) :
ok, won’t keep you. when are you back with us?
Csab (12:01 AM) :
tomorrow!!!!
henry (12:02 AM) :
wow. i better get my head organized.
Csab (12:02 AM) :
🙂
henry (12:02 AM) :
ok, i wish you a good night’s sleep and some relaxation.
Csab (12:03 AM) :
will have a little drink with friends tonight, then a long good night sleep, and back in the saddle..
Csab (12:03 AM) :
thank you!
Csab (12:03 AM) :
see you tomorrow then!
henry (12:03 AM) :
see you tomrrow.

Here’s a prior icq with Csaba via his mobile phone. Why do I blog this stuff? Because I’d like to remember it, and hope a couple of you who know us will enjoy the grist.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports:

Since November, Raymond Popovich has been battling his insurance company over a claim. His latest strike was a public one: a large red, white and blue sign in the front yard of his Meadowthorpe home. The sign, equipped with a flood light for night viewing, says: “Shelter Insurance Company Wouldn’t Pay My Claim! How About Yours?” Neighbors so far are OK with the new billboard. Well, most of the neighbors. Two doors down from Popovich lives the insurance agent who sold him the policy, Willie Lee Morrison Jr., who drives a truck emblazoned with his name and the name of his company.

(Via ObscureStore)

Looks like political weblogging is going into orbit. Judging from the ads being pulled from our server, daily traffic this week is up 30% versus good days in December. Glad we invested in that new Rackspace setup last fall.

Reading the history of any newspaper, you’ll find two engines driving step-changes in audience levels: the sustained narrative of a political race or lower prices.

Blogging has both.

With 170 million Americans online and only 3 million of them reading blogs, we’ve got a lot of upside.

What would happen if blogs selling ads grow 30% each month through November? Without adding new blogs, Blogads will be serving 96 million impressions monthly. Ahh, the joys of compounding.

I’ll try to post something tomorrow graphing current traffic growth. To try to better reflect this momentum, we’ve changed the way we forecast monthly impressions on our order page. We used to tally the prior 30 days, but now count the last seven days impressions and multiply by four.

(Footnote from New York Times history: October 10, 1898: “In a gamble, [Adolph S.] Ochs lowers the price of the [New York Times] to 1 cent [from 3 cents.] Circulation triples within a year, to 76,000 from 26,000, and advertising revenues soar.”)

Update: Here’s the graphic I promised. Most recent data is at the left.

BTW, another thing to notice… blogs are read during the work week, during the day. Ergo: most political blog readers are people with jobs, people with jobs with computers, people who are actually taking time away from their jobs to look at blogs. These are the “knowledge crafters” who advertisers crave to meet. Put it all together and you could argue (I sure do!) that these readers are 10-fold more engaged than the folks wandering by the average television at 9PM on a Tuesday night… the folks most political advertising is currently wasted on. Here’s the day graphic. The leftmost edge is 8.40AM EST. Over the next four hours traffic will rocket as people in across the country roll into work.

Looking more at old ads in the Duke archives, these excerpts give me a sense of advertising’s winding path of invention:

1841 – Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 – Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1856 – Mathew Brady advertises his services of “photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes” in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1861 – The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 – There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1864 – William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1869 – George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1870 – 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1879 – John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s – $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham’s Pink Pills.
1885 – New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1889 – James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1890s – Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.

BTW, I saw Cold Mountain last night. As fine as the book. Renee Zellweger excelled.

I had lunch last week with Ed Cone last week in Greensboro. Ed took the first and most exhaustive look at Dean’s Internet Strategy, and lots of journalists have since followed in his path.

We debated whether Howard Dean’s Internet tactics might work in local campaigns this year, specifically for the NC campaign of Chester Erskine Bowles for Senate.

I think Ed is right that blogs + Meetup could make a big difference in the NC contest, particularly in a tight race. I agree that a little effort could catalyze dozens of ‘Bowles blogs’ by June. But I’ll stick to my guns on my third argument: well-established institutions and inside players are too often willfully blind to new tactics and technology, particularly when the technology upends the power structure they’ve built their lives and bank accounts around.

So, no Bowles blogs this year in NC unless someone outside the Democratic aparat pushes them.

Wandering around the Duke University Ad archives, I found this 1928 Chicago Tribune advertisement for a Zenith radio titled “At the conventions, you’ll always get the whispered ‘asides’ with a Zenith Radio.”

Not only the speeches and the voting — but the speaker’s whispered ‘aside’ — the fascinating by-play will be yours if you have a Zenith receiver — just as if you were at the Chairman’s right hand.

1928 was the first year radio played a roll in national politics. After conventions held in June, the election pitted Republican Herbert Hoover against Democrat Alfred E. Smith.

Funny how easily the word ‘blog’ could stand in today for that 1928 radio. The Zenith ad testifies that news technology and politics have always been entwined, and reminds us how eloquently ads describe the interplay of culture and material life.

A friend and his son play the (old): Game of Life: “I take a chance at becoming a Millionare Tycoon and put all my money on 6. I spin. Unbelievable – 6! I win! Alex does not take it well – goes off to his room and makes an angry sketch of me and puts it on his wall.”

Hugh MacLeod writes: “All products are information. The molecules are secondary.”

Shhh! Don’t tell Ken, but he’s sliding back to regular blogging. Just a sip a day.

Today in Jeff Jarvis’ comments, I coined “adparatchik,” meaning an ad industry functionary beholden to the reigning command-and-control mythos and high-margin apparat of TV and print advertising. (Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic for Budapest?) Anyway, Google says there are no prior instances of adparatchik. It gave me a good chuckle, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for the word to get used again.

Finally, an interesting article arguing cow’s milk is linked to diabetes and cancer.

“Twenty, thirty, at the outside forty years from now, we will look back on the print media the way we look back on travel by horse and carriage, or by wind-powered ship,” Dan Okrent, then Editor at Large for Time, Inc. told a bunch of journalism folks at Columbia University three years ago. Today Okrent is helping shake-up the New York Times’ inbred culture as its Public Editor.

Argument number 1, said Okrent: cheap digital substitutes like tablets are coming. Number 2: “last year, Time Inc., spent $1 billion dollars on paper and postage. End of argument. Or, if you’d like, let me put it this way: you may prefer to ride across town in horse-and-carriage, or across a lake in a wind-powered yacht, but no one makes that carriage or that yacht for you anymore, at least not at a reasonable price.”

Finally, “But the real power of the [printless] business model resides in the potential of digital advertising. Except for direct mail, until the Internet came along no advertising medium existed in which the advertiser could be sure his message was received by his targeted audience. We go to the bathroom during commercials, we flip the pages past magazine and newspaper ads, radio and billboards are white noise. But with a truly interactive medium ‘ with say, a question about the advertisement asked next to the button that gives you your thirty cent credit against the cost of reading your Wall Street Journal ‘ the effectiveness of media advertising changes radically. And if you don’t think advertisers influence the direction of American mass media, you ought to talk to Tom Goldstein about the curriculum here at the J-school.”

I like Okrent.