Some work for a big publishing client and a necessary but arduous software/hardware upgrade put us into hibernation for the last six weeks. Now we’re back! We’ve just created a CSS adstrip, which simplifies design customization from the blogger’s side. Today, we’ve also revived optional comments on ads, something we experimented with a few month ago. Comments are working well on sites like Fark and Kuro5hin and should exponentiate clickthrus on ads for artistic works. (Although some artists won’t like everything that gets said about their work!) You can see the CSS adstrip at right and use the comments feature on the Blogcritics ad.

Also, we’ve just reorganized the order page to a) give priority to bigger sites and b) make it easier for advertisers to comparison shop. (The page view estimate come from the number of times each adstrip is served from our server.) If you want to support great bloggers, please feel free to link into the page. Here’s that URL again — http://www.blogads.com/order_html — so you can copy/paste right now.

One marketing-savvy blogger, Olivier Travers at Scifan, now nets an incredible average of $20 per CPM on his Blogads. This blows even leading publishers like the WSJ.com out of the water, especially since Olivier doesn’t have to underwrite the ad salespeople, Oracle DBAs, Vignette licenses, copy editors and lackeys who bleed “real” new media operations. How much does Olivier sweat to sell ads? He mentions the ads to every author and PR person who contacts him. The rest of the time he focuses on dominating his niche.

Doing some free consulting for one-time high-flying Internet magazine Salon, Ken Layne suggests cutting the staff of 50 to 8. “Get out of that ritzy office space — two floors? — and take 1,500 square feet above a bar in Chinatown. Hold meetings at the bar.” I remember visiting Ken in the dingy offices of his protoblog Tabloid back in… 1998 was it? Salon would be rolling in dough (and Dow?) if it had copied that strategy.

My daughter and her friends are abuzz with news that the owner of a spiffy local diner has vanished. They are doing Google searches and hypothesizing about his possible whereabouts. The owner didn’t tell anyone he was shutting down, changed his cell-phone number, stopped ordering food and then didn’t return from one week being “closed for repairs.” The whole thing is right out of Nancy Drew.

E&P reports: “David Keyes was just about to turn in his 2003 annual budget last week for the Bonner County Daily Bee, a 4,701-daily-circulation newspaper in Sandpoint, Idaho, when his secretary slipped him a message that made him blanch: Sandpoint’s Kmart was among the 326 stores chosen to close as part of the retailer’s plan to exit bankruptcy. Since it opened in 1990, the Sandpoint store has come to be the Daily Bee’s fifth-largest advertiser, accounting for about 8% of the Hagadone Corp. paper’s ad revenue.” As the tides shift, so shift the sands we build on.

Nick Denton notes that gadget blog Gizmodo is now pulling 50,000+ page views a week, just five months after launch. Marketing consisted of “an email to a few webloggers and reporters.” In addition to NY-gossip blog Gawker, Nick is looking to launch an “erotic blog.” With New York, tech and sex covered, has Nick exhausted the genre? Naw, I think 10,000 angles can dance from this pixel.

(That was my attempt to play off the phrase “angels dancing on the head of a pin”… I didn’t succeed, did I?)

I escorted my son to Diego’s bowling birthday party yesterday. The ten kids loved it. I haven’t been in a bowling alley since 1991. In a stroke a genius, the bowling industry has added kid-friendly gutter guards that steer the ball out of the gutter and into the pins. In this gutterless world, velocity wins: the high scorers (avg 72) threw a little harder than the laggards (avg 65) and also finished earlier.

I also finished Ken Layne’s Dot.con this weekend. Layne has concocted a unique cocktail of Ian Fleming’s suave and bruised hero, John Kennedy Toole‘s conspiring idiots and Evelyn Waugh’s disgust for mediocre sycophantic journalists. The roast of San Fran culture also excels.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait to read the book in e-book format, since Ken is all sold out and US publishers haven’t bitten. As I said the other day — why hasn’t this been made into a movie? Yes, the book probably is mistaken as “another dot.com bubble” book. Too few publishers understand that Jesus Ramirez is the future of journalism and not a confused millennial blip. It also may be that Ken’s book will get “rediscovered” in ten years. Books like The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby that were published ten years after the era they chronicle a) look like the result of lots of hard work and b) benefit from mild nostalgia.

Speaking of secret agents, now the LA newpaper plot is public!

Steve Carlson has posted an interview with yours truly on his new Digital Entrepreneur site. My favorite question was about post-expat bloggers. I argue: “So perhaps the meta characteristic for great bloggers is ‘outsiderness.’ Because they don’t have big career or conceptual investments in the status quo, outsiders can better imagine trajectories in blogging. And because they are outsiders, they’ve got a grudge and are more motivated to put blogging’s unique features to revolutionary use.”

Having read the Harry Potter books three times now (once myself, once to each of our kids), I’m glad to hear that the Order of the Pheonix will finally be out in June. Some coverage, incredibly, doesn’t include this excerpt: “Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. ‘It is time,’ he said, ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.'”

Massachuessetts, like a lot of states, is running a nasty budget deficit as tax revenues decline from the roaring nineties. The projected shortfall for next year is $3 billion. In November, voters nearly passed a resolution killing the state’s 5.8% income tax, so raising taxes doesn’t appear to be an option.

Unfortunately, state and local officials don’t make a very compelling case for their services as they argue against budget cuts. They talk vaguely about “horrible scenarios,” but we get very little concrete argument. An article in yesterday’s local paper, the Hampshire Gazette, offers a case in point.

“Area officials said they believe the general public does not realize the full implications of the cuts to come, and that some people would not be so opposed to a tax increase if they did. ‘It’s hard for me to understand why we can’t make an argument to support a moderate increase in the income tax, because the alternative is your neighbor gets laid off,’ said Robin Crosbie, administrator for Hadley.” Ahh, so that’s why we pay taxes.

Core prices for businesses fell 0.4% last year, with a particular sag in the fourth quarter, reports CNN. “Excluding volatile food and energy prices, ‘core’ PPI fell 0.3 percent [in December] after falling a revised 0.3 percent in November.”

To beat my old drum: Pop historians usually start a new decade a few years after the calendar. If The Sixties started in 1963 with the Beatles and the Pill, will the 00s open in 2003 with closed wallets and free 64 MB memory cards? If the nineties roared like the twenties, will the 00s now sink, tumble, flounder, flush and drizzle like the thirties? If so, nothing but cash will be worth more tomorrow.