David Ranii distills blogads in the Raleigh News and Observer.

Tamas just pulled a pile of papers off a shelf above his desk. Ten chunks of paper patched together with staples and tape, the paper prototype we used to map out the clickthru for the “blogadz” network code on April 11, 2002. Here’s the prototype for the adstrip, conceived for www.kenlayne.com. On top, an ad for “Joe’s Bar,” including a photo. There’s an ad for Ken’s book Dot.con, with the tag line “click to read extract.” Another: “I give the best massages in the Bay Area. Your life will change.” An ad for a band, “clicktolistentothemjamclickclickclick.” An ad, “I disagree,” taken out by a reader to dispute a (fictional) Layne post in praise of inebriated driving. At the bottom: “Buy a blogad for as little as $4!”

Stephen Bach, creator of the Dude where’s my weapons? tee shirts, recounts his experience buying blogads on Talkingpointsmemo. Among other things, Steve writes:

The ad went live at the end of March, and within a few hours, not only were we getting hits, we were receiving actual on-line orders! The entire ad was a direct link to our site. Simply by clicking anywhere on the image or copy, the reader is immediately directed to http://www.dudewheres.com By logging into blogads.com, we are able to track the number of page views, AND the number of ‘clicks’ (the number of readers who click on the link to our site.) In one week, over 650,000 people saw our add, and over 6,600 visited the site (about a 1% ‘click-through’). Out of that 6,600, we sold to 2% in one week, all for a $300 investment.

I’m going to spend the next week in our Budapest office brainstorming and having fun. At night, we’ll be eating lots of pig crackling, radishes, goose liver, and stuffed cabbage. Maybe some pictures here if we’re lucky.

If all goes well, we’ll soon have a US number phone for Blogads East, which I’ll post here. I’ll be in the air for the next 24 hours, so in the event of an emergency, please be sure to write info at blogads.com. For the flight, I’m taking along six Simenon detective stories checked out from the library. Here’s the Budapest weather.

Update: The number here, thanks to Vonage, 646 827 9320… which is a local call for New Yorkers, I believe.

At the airport, I bought Clayton Christensen’s latest tome: The innovator’s solution. Lots of case studies, lots of pithy insights.

— “three quarters of the money spent in product deefvelopment invemtnts results in products that do not succeed commercially.”

— “the general rule is that companies will prosper when they are integrated across interfaces in the value chain where performance, however it is defined at that point, is not good enough relative to what customers require at the next stage of value addition.”

— “a los cost strategy works only as long as there are higher-cost competitors left in the market.”

— “a company that finds itself in a more-than-good-enough circumstance simply can’t win: either disruption will steal its markets, or commoditization will steal its profits.”

— “when modularity and commoditization cause attractive profits to disappear at once stage in the value chain, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

— ” as companies upgrade their products and services to capture more attractive customers in premium tiers of their markets, they often dadd overhead cost. As a result, gross margins that at one point were quite attractive will seem unattractive at a later point.”

— “disruptive innovation creates a whole new value network. The new cunsumers typically purchase the product through new channels and use the product in new venues.”

We tried to get into the Indian restaurant on Dob utca last night, but it was packed. Good for them, on a Tuesday night, but bad for us. So we walked up the street to the Feszek Klub — an old club for artists. The two hundred dishes menu, filled with prices like Ft 942 and Ft 1177, is gone. Now just 20 dishes, all rounded to the nearest Ft 100. I had the excellent pig’s knuckle.

I’m going to be offline for the next 36 hours camping out with the family. If you need anything urgently, be sure to cc info at blogads.com …

With another 25% jump in traffic this week, we seem to have hit another bottleneck in serving capacity. If you’d like to look at caching ads on your server — helping yourself and us — check out the options detailed on this page.

Has Google hired a first grade text book designer to create its new icons?

Michael Lewis, the Zola, Marx and Proust of our age, hits another home run, writing about his high school baseball coach.

Arianna Huffington writes: “The blogosphere is now the most vital news source in our country. I’ve toiled in the world of books and syndicated column writing, but more liberating is the blogosphere, where the random thought is honored, and where passion reigns. While paid journalists often just follow a candidate around or sit in the White House press room and rehash a schedule, blogs break through the din of our 500 channel universe and the narrow conventional wisdom. For that the blogosphere has my undying gratitude.”

Charles Kuffner has some answers from campaign staffers.

Meanwhile, the pilot fish of political blogads — the t-shirt seller — is still thriving. I got this message the other day from Stephen Bach, who is selling piles of Dude, where’s my weapons? T-shirts thanks to his blogad on Talkingpointsmemo: “The response has been incredible! P.S. I Googled ‘Dude Where’s My Weapons’ and found my t-shirt picture on two other political blogs, WITH a link to my site. Viral marketing is a wonderful thing!”

BTW, for all you folks who think that bigger is better in web-design — the simple landing page for Stephen’s ad (the page you see after you click) is a great example of how to do things right:

— we get punched in the face with Stephen’s offer: 90% of the visual communication is about his product.

— an unadorned design keeps the visitor focused on doing just one thing: acting. Think of the landing page as a bull’s eye that has just one logical outcome, not as a supermarket that promotes 57 distractions.

— the page should look neat and professional, but not too nice. An occassional rough edge emphasizes the human beings behind the HTML and lets customers know that their money is being spent on better products and not cutting edge web design.

A bullseye landing page can make the difference between just recouping your ad spend and making a five or ten-fold return.

Dealing with various blog advertiers, I’ve seen that these lessons apply whether you are selling t-shirts, fund raising for candidates or enlisting partisans for a cause.

Of course, some very fancy designs can work well too, but the risk/reward definitely suggests that money spent on design frills won’t increase your returns.

To put it another way, if you’ve got $4000 to spend on “blog advertising,” you should spend $500 on designing five good ad images, $600 writing good copy for the landing page, $100 designing a landing page and $2700 on ad space on blogs. (You can save on the landing page copy by cannibalizing some of your direct mail copy.)

Update: Later in the day, I called up Bach. Turns out he’s been doing marketing for 20 years. Rather than beginner’s luck, his brutally simple landing page is a tested and refined customer catcher.

Strange things happen when people are the media.

Amy Langfield stands in line on Times Square for theater tix and makes a weird weird electronic connection with a college friend in LA. Imagine what happens when you combine Orkut with GPS.