Back from a week in Greenville NC. Hot and sunny 12X7.

When not listening to music or tossing a baseball, I was reading. John Le Carre’s Absolute Friends, Robert Harris’ Pompeii and Greg Bear’s Eon.

I enjoyed all. The first two are recent, the latter written in 1985, with the USSR a belligerent player. Each deals with failing empires, although I didn’t pick them for this theme; in fact Eon was basically random, the only tolerable book I could find at the Greenville Target, when I ran out of books midweek. Any tips on summer novels to read?

We’ll be on vacation in Greenville, NC this week. Miklos will be covering my e-mail and phone.

Enjoy your July 4th! And treasure your good luck being American.

Read the article in this week’s New Yorker (flags on the cover) about outsourcing Wall Street jobs to India. Astonishing, tectonic stuff portrayed up close and personal. Shame it is not online.

“Almost tweny percent of the jobs on Wall STreet have disappeared in the last three years. Office Tiger [the firm profiled] recently doubled its staff, to sixteen hundred and fifty workers, and will nearly double in size again by year’s end, on the strength of ‘judgement-dependent services’: equity analysts, legal research, and acccounting jobs that pay an annual salary of up to a hundred thousands dollars in the US and between ten and twenty percent of that in Chennai.”

“Salomon Brother in its heyday received five hundred job applications a month. Offic Tiger sometimes receives fifteen hundred applicants a dady, many of them accompanied by parents who pray as their sons and daughters take one test after another…”

The region’s “per capita incomes equates to thirty-six U.S. dollars a month.”

People ask: what’s an effective blogad look like? It’s hard to say. Kinda like asking, “what’s an effective pickup line?” It depends (folks say) on the situation, depends on the audience, depends on the product on sale, and often depends on luck.

Having said that, a sense of humor and a geniune sense of the blog audience makes a big difference. My bet is that this ad, which adopts a meme that ran on Atrios a couple of months back, is doing well:

As Glenn Reynolds told Farhad Manjoo in Salon a couple of weeks ago: “Now, anyone can be Jesse Helms. In the old days, you could take somebody like Jesse Helms or maybe Ted Kennedy and you could demonize them in order to raise money. With the Internet, you can hit any candidate and raise money by turning him into Jesse Helms for a small demographic.” Yep, that is one strategy.

Although I talked at length with Farhad, there was no mention of Blogads.com in Salon’s article, which dealt exclusively with ads bought through the site. I wonder.

This coffee and free wireless stuff is going to migrate upward, dragged by entrepreneurs, and take out corporate offices. Come back in ten years and confirm my prescience in the comments, please.

Candidate Kerry raised $3 million online Wednesday. Hey, this innernut thing is getting serious, innit?

Offline and on, “almost 350 people have now raised at least $50,000 each for the campaign; almost half have raised $100,000 or more.” Note that Atrios ($250,000) and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga are part of that elite $100,000+ crowd.

Taegan Goddard has recruited an young Yalie reporter to help run the highly regarded Political Wire. Taegan very kindly gives Blogads some of the credit for helping him expand.

It used to be news when bloggers got hired by traditional publishers. Watch bloggers build their own teams. Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall and now Taegan Goddard have deputies. Three is a trend.

Bloggers Ron Gunzberger and John Gorenfeld seem to be getting under the skin of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

Check out the press release attacking them, and you’ll find some backhanded praise for Ron and John’s reporting.

(Hey, wait a minute, I thought the first amendment said only corporations could do journalism?)

Click here to run an ad on their blogs if you’d like to win some smart new customers and/or support their journalism.

NYPost: “A lawyer who saw his advertising rates in a Los Angeles alternative weekly newspaper double after its owner, Village Voice Media, eliminated the competing weekly in a controversial market swap, has sued, claiming antitrust violations.”

Good thing that hundreds of bloggers are offering alternatives to mediocre media monopolists.

We drove to Black Mountain Sunday night through thunderstorms. Slept until 11AM yesterday, a rare treat. Then a short hike through the fragrant woods, finding a brown ladybug and a red newt. While the sandwich generations played rook, last night my wife and I ate at Salsa in Asheville — more restaurants and tourists than ever — and then to see Tom Hanks in The Terminal. It’s a hard movie to peg — starts serious, then gets frantic, then shuffles into a mythic/magical realism mode. Perhaps because the lead character reminded me — in gate, visage, ethic and accent — of Dragan, my tennis buddy in Paris who has long been infatuated by the US, I really enjoyed the movie. Today, another hike and then back to the heat of eastern NC. Update: we found a turtle (now named “Bob”), a mouse and some Indian Pipes (a non chlorophylic flower) on Sunday’s hike.