Jim Romenesko, one of the inventors of the blogging idiom with his www.obscurestore.com, recently started blogging about Starbucks. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and sit back and enjoy the opinion roller-coaster ride he launches with this post about tipping.

Buy ads from bloggers inside the R-convention here.

Buy ads from bloggers in the streets outside the R-convention here.

I know I’m missing people — drop me a line and let me know who.

BTW, having won my bet that bloggers would underperform orbital expectations in Boston, my bet is that we’re going to get some extraordinary, perhaps even fantastic, blogger reports from the trenches this time, particularly from the bloggers outside the convention. Bloggers do better outside the box, seeing angles and shadows those inside the glareful fishbowl can’t. Watch for Jerome Armstrong to get drunk with a Georgia delegate at the Old Towne Bar or for Karl Rove to trade barbs with Taegan Goddard and Jeralyn Merritt on the subway.

BTW, here’s Russell Shaw’s round up of D-convention blog advertising and R-convention blog adveritising.

Finally, note there’s a whole phalanx of blogads set to launch this weekend… ten, I think, spread across different packages of blogs. Although I see the prestige value to advertising during the convention, I’d be advertising next week — traffic post D-convention was higher than during, and September, given recent trends and the traditional post-August traffic bump, should be huuuuge.

Taco now sits on command and loves to have his stomach scratched, but is too rambunctious to heel.

Mark your calendars for the North Carolina blogger gabfest Ed Cone has organized in Greensboro this Saturday.

Mike Madden of Gannett looked at politico Blogads and found another success story: “We made back our investment within the first hour of putting them up,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a strategist for Daschle’s campaign.

In Mediapost, Kate Kaye does a great excavation into the nitty-gritty of the Blogad campaign for Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik.

And as Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the visionary book on grassroots journalism called “We the Media,” writes a column about Google’s potential problems, he mentions Microsoft, Yahoo and, gulp, “a small company called Blogads” as examples of threats to Google’s share price (today $110.) Thank you Dan… or maybe not, since I sense the cruel gods of fate and finance frowning (and squinting) in our direction even now.

This morning, Random House ordered a brace of blogads for Nicholson Baker’s controversial new assassination fictionette Checkpoint.

Putting aside the book’s literary or political implications for a second, I’ll highlight two things.

First, we’ve now seen just about every major publisher in America advertise on blogs… and more book blogads are on the way. Second, Checkpoint’s protagonist, Jay, is (like Baker himself apparently) a fanatical reader of DailyKos.com, Talkingpointsmemo, and the Agonist.

For those of you who like to keep your cultural chronometers synchronized, blogads for a blog-reading author’s book about a blog reader seems a nicely post-modern hypertextual circuit-closing. Symbolizing… something… big or small, I don’t know.

What about the book? Although Baker’s nonfiction Doublefold is one of my favorite books and I loved his Room Temperature, I don’t like Checkpoint. Parts of the book seem deliberately absurd and/or theoretically humerous — the aspiring assassin is vehemently pro-life/ he stashes some bullets near a Bush photo so they’ll better find their mark — but Checkpoint tasted bad.

Have you submitted your nominees yet to the Washington Post’s political blog contest?

Although the contest isn’t clearly marked as non-editorial, it appears to be a ploy by the Post’s marketing department to piggyback the blog juggernaut and grab news junkie (aka blog reader) registrations.

The only lame category is the last, “most likely to outlive the election,” which gets things backwards. Better instead to survey “most likely to triple traffic by December 1, 2004” or something similarly blog-bullish.

The Post’s misread of blogging’s popularity trajectory suggests wishful thinking. Post business execs no doubt dream that bloggers will somehow crawl under a rock once the election is over.

You think bloggers are going to put away their soap boxes on November 3? Publishers had the same fantasy about Matt Drudge after Clinton left office… today Drudge is bigger than 99% of American publishers.

For historical perspective, here’s a post I wrote two years ago when Instapundit’s traffic surpassed, for the first time, 100,000 impressions in a single day. At that point, many pundit-watchers were calling a top in blog traffic, believing blog readers would go back to their CNN and local newspaper once the conflict in Afghanistan plateaued. Then came Iraq. Then came the primaries. Then the presidential campaigns.

Now Instapundit does 200,000+ impressions every weekday. Here’s a graph of his last twelve months traffic. (Note that August is a partial month.)

So will traffic on DailyKos, RealClearPolitics, Talkingpointsmemo, Instapundit, Atrios, Wonkette, LittleGreenFootballs, PoliticalAnimal PoliticalWire, or Rightwingnews collapse on November 3?

Sure we’ll have quite weeks, sometimes months. And sure, if Kerry wins, liberal blog traffic will go down 20%, but from levels twice today’s. And a Kerry win will double conservative bloggers’ traffic again by inauguration day. Likewise, if Bush wins, conservative blog traffic will slip 20% (from double today’s levels) and Dem blog traffic will grow 50% by January 20, 2005.

Bottom line: whatever the political season, people (formerly known as readers) love sharing news and opinion with intelligent no-BS real people (aka bloggers) rather than least-common-denominator, bias-muffling corporate news factories.

The umbrella has turned inside out, and the spoke tips are now the hub.

Where else but on a blog can you find flame-throwing spitefulness like this? As the New York Times editorial writers put it a few weeks ago — Mencken’s ghost stalks the blogosphere.

As the Washington Post and Newsday try to profile John Kerry’s reclusive step-son, Political Wire comes up with a telling scooplette.

Three-month-old Taco (or Pierre?) joins us from the Chatham pound. He seems both gentle and bold and already has a favorite relief spot in the front yard.