A mystery solved in Prague. (Via M. Welch.)

We drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway Sunday and enjoyed hiking the Graveyard Fields trail. (Here are some someone else’s pictures of the area.) Taco (now 37 pounds) got the longest walk of his short life. In the falls at the top of the valley, we found a orange and brown salamander, speckled exactly like the small granite basin he lives in. Wedged among the rocks at the bottom of the falls, a boy spotted a dead fawn, probably swept over the falls in a recent downpour. Finally, we saw a tiny ring necked snake. The moist trail, warmed by the day’s steady sunlight, smelled like a perfume shop. I hope we can go back and see what it looks like mid-winter, assuming the parkway isn’t snowed shut. (Here’s another hike two miles up the road we should consider.)

Blog maven and CBS Marketwatch columnist Frank Barnako picked up on the Sex and the City blogad order.

BTW, blogger and radio commentator Hugh Hewitt, having run that blogad for a few hours, decided to put principles over money and take the ad down, after hearing from readers arguing that Sex and the City doesn’t necessarily square with his Christian conservative worldview.

Some people worry that bloggers are more susceptible than publishers — who’ve taken lots of ethics classes in journalism school or school — to being bent by advertising. I’ve always felt that the contrary holds. In contrast to traditional corporate publishers, each blog has a single decision maker, perfect transparency and point-blank accountability. In short, everybody knows where the buck stops.

Andrew Sullivan declares: “I CANNOT SUPPORT HIM IN NOVEMBER.“

Three engineers go for a joy ride.

Just sent out an avalanche of blogads, our biggest single order yet, for Sex and the City. Something I really wouldn’t have expected a year ago.

Stuart Elliott in the NYT on the proliferation of political motifs in ad campaigns: “Rather than waiting until fall, as they usually do, to introduce advertising with election themes, agencies are already infusing commercials, Web sites, promotions and print ads with images of voting booths, campaign buttons, flags, debates and conventions. These trappings of democracy are being augmented with copious references to compassionate conservatism, hanging chads and states colored red and blue.”

Watch this space today and you may see a new sexy blogad that typifies this trend.

Google.com circa 1997. (Via NewYorkish.) Amazing how consistent and simple Google.com has been.

Check out how badly New Yorkers and GOP delegates misperceive NY’s demographics. New Yorkers think 35% of their fellow citizens are on welfare. GOPers think its 24%. The reality is 6%. Similarly, New Yorkers think 20% of their peers are millionaires. GOPers think that 13% of Gothamists are Seven-figured. The reality? Less than 1%.

In general, do survey respondents usually assume the curve’s tails are much fatter?

And a blog has apparently outed Ed Schrock, from the closet and Congress.

Update: The Hill credits investigative blogger Mike Rogers for the scoop.

John Podhoretz of the NYPost appears to credit blogs for keeping the Swiftboat arguments alive. Is that accurate?

The last two years in particular have seen the explosion of a new medium ‘ the personal Internet newspaper, or blog ‘ that has already and will forever change the way people get their information.

This is a thrilling development ‘ unless you are a mainstream-media Big Fish.

The success of the Swift-boat vets’ ads is the tale of the triumph of the nation’s alternative media. The mainstreamers didn’t want to touch the story with a 10-foot pole, and they didn’t. But the alternative media did. Amateur reporters and fact-gatherers offered independent substantiation for some of the charges. It turned out the criticisms of the Swifties weren’t quite so easily dismissed.

Nearly two years ago, Podhoretz was one of the first print columnists to credit bloggers with toppling Trent Lott.

Speaking of media coverage of blogs, here is Donna Howell’s new blog-centric overview of overview of online politics in Investor’s Business Daily.

(Thank you Jeff for the insta-copy-editing… faster even than my Mom!)

Update: WSJ publishes Glenn Reynold’s commentary onthe blogosphere’s roll in disputing Kerry’s memories of fighting in Cambodia: “the new media were enough to neutralize the media advantage that Kerry’s strategy was built around. And that’s quite a feat: Unlike the blogosphere’s role in toppling Trent Lott, the Cambodia revelations happened not in the face of big media laziness, but in the face of active big-media opposition.”