NYTimes.com: “Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to index a person’s typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic…. Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid….By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.”

Stephanie Miles reports in the WSJ, “In April, readers of NYTimes.com, owned by New York Times Co. will start seeing half-page ads running down the right side of the page as they read online articles. The navigational links that typically appear on the far left side of the page will move to the top of the screen, making room for the text of the article to the left of the ad.”

Olivier Travers has some good advice for publishers who think their archives are gold: “They still need to create products that are unique to the web in order to trigger better response rates. Database sites such as Hoover’s or Imdb Pro can’t be done in paper. Community sites, from eBay to ClassMates to Match.com, hook people with one another, and that’s another unique value to the Internet. We need to see more of that, as opposed to premium rate archives of articles that aren’t that interesting to start with.”

I heard what my son calls a “Zuki” concert yesterday, including a teacher’s rendition of this cello piece. You can read a log of the Shuttle’s final two hours here. Now what will happen to these three? The Nytimes business section headlines “Shuttle’s Effect on Economy May Be Small”… why bother with the article?

The Internet has outstripped TV and newspapers as an information source, says a new survey. At the same time, people believe less of what they read online and therefore have to do more cross-cking of information.

There’s a glut of ad slots and ads, news and news peddlers. In fact, thanks to the likes of CraigsList and Slashdot and what Clay Shirky labels the “mass amateurization of publishing,” both could be virtually infinite.

Traditional ad-funded media may soon be swamped in the ever-expanding info universe sparked by the Internet Big Bang. But this spreading ad and info entropy will also challenge advertisers; traditional demographic-based advertising will soon be as effective as trying to heat the moon with a blow drier.

Against this backdrop, I’ve argued that “hubness” (like hipness, but more businessy) will be the thing that differentiates blogs from other media and gives hub bloggers premium CPMs. The best blog ads will be like the billboards on Times Square — more expensive in terms of eyeballs, but good value for signalling to customers, competitors and business partners that “we’re serious.”

These blogad buyers will be the types of buzz-seeking, network-aspiring companies — software vendors, media producers, fashion peddlers, auctioneers, artists, and service providers — who traditionally promote themselves through what economists refer to as “common knowledge events,” the socially intertwined spectacles, forums and media within which participants can look at each other and say “you know I know you are watching.”

Granted, bloggers will have to cultivate and then publicize any claim to hubdom in their respective niches. (And yes, at present, few bloggers even have defined a niche beyond “what interests me today.” That’s not a bad niche, but obviously won’t cut it commercially.)

Can the blog compete commercially in the age of media entropy? As commercial organisms, blogs have short life-cycles, small metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit the new environment.

Two posts of interest for Blogads users this morning. In the Guardian, Jim McClellan surveys the prospects for commercial blogging and features Blogads. From the grassroots, Ken Layne blogs: “My BlogAds make me happy. Currently, this site is offering a gun T-shirt, an Arizona politics blog, corsets, trial subscriptions to the Los Angeles Examiner paper, and a link to an L.A. news-gossip site. It’s a strip mall run by maniacs.”

I was on a blogging panel Monday afternoon at DCdotcom, an event for DC ad execs. The day was well-run and kept the 220 attendees entertained/informed.

There was a lot of interest about blogging, but only 10% of the audience had ever read a blog and only 2% had actually blogged. Wake up ladies and gentlemen! Dave Barry has a blog. GWB reads blogs.

I had the pleasure of meeting Meg Hourihan in person, but am afraid I borrowed her stomach bug. Jennifer, did you fare any better?

Hmm… blogging seems to be something you can only catch in person too. Let’s see if more DC ad folks catch the blog flu.

A Washington Post ad VP gave us his spiel. He emphaized some good stats — the web is number 1 news source for business decision makers, number 1 media during work.

My favorite line was this classic pitch: “some of our clients don’t want us to tell people how well they are doing with their online advertising — they don’t want their competitors to find out.” I liked this line because a) it is funny to hear someone from the Post resort to this genre of aluminum-siding-sales-training-school “trust me” pitch. And b) although the pitch was dripping oil, it was a good point and probably true. The neat thing about the web is that your competition can be TOTALLY ignorant about how well you are doing. There are no parking lots to check, no shelves to watch.

Of course, this can also pose a problem because people like to deal with companies that are successful… and e-businesses are still working on ways to reflect “popular” or “busy” or “buzzing” online.

You know I like to beat the claxon about deflation. For some good anecdotes about the phenomena, see David Leonhard’s story; among other things, he notes that the price of Burger King’s Whopper has declined by a third in the last twenty years. And if you want to look under deflation’s hood, don’t miss Megan McArdle’s explanation of the pernicious economics of deflation. In short, “the mechanism for generating money starts to break down.”

The NYTimes profiles CraigsList, the famed free classifieds site started in San Fransisco in 1995. The only revenues come from job listings for SF, but now suffice to cover costs including 14 staffers.

CraigsList is doing 200 million page impressions a month in SF alone, according to the article. What the article doesn’t highlight is that this traffic (in what some New Yorkers would consider a backwater media market) is not far below that of America’s top news site — yes, NYTimes.com — which is running around 300 million page views a month. Ahh, context.

Wonder what the CraigsList’s monthly page views look like across its dozen markets? Here’s a graph of the growth of NY apartment listings. Looks exponential to me.

As CraigsList chews the belly out of newspapers’ core market, where does Blogads fit into the new media ecosystem? I’d say that “hubness” (like hipness, but more business) will be the thing that differentiates blogs from other media and gives hub bloggers premium CPMs. These blogs will be key venues for those advertisers who not only want clicks or branding, but who want to be seen to be “at the center.” So good blog ads will be like the billboards on Times Square — more expensive in terms of eyeballs, but good value for telling competitors, business partners and customers “we’re serious.”

Fading industrial powerhouse GE won’t run any of its newly bought 500 million Imagination ad impressions on blogs, but the entrepreneurs who are tomorrow’s megabusinesses — e-book publishers, software programmers, gadget vendors, eBay traders, e-commerce gurus — will understand the unique value of advertising where ideas happen, rather than where they get reported.

Why is the UK press so much spicier than the American? Former FT scribe and new New York news monger Nick Denton offers a good guess.