How many of you heard Senator John Cornyn (R TX) quoting the Volokh Conspiracy in questioning John Roberts?

Well, I happened to be looking at my computer last night, and one of the blogs, and it’s always frightening to see ‘ to put your name in a search and look at the ways it’s mentioned. I suggest you don’t do that, if you haven’t, until this hearing is over, because this hearing is a subject of a lot of activity and interest in the blogosphere.

One of these blogs said that your comparison of a judge to a baseball umpire reminded him of an old story…

That was Cornyn’s first question. Want your message to be seen by at least one Senator? Start here.

I heard Garrison Keilor recommending catsup’s “natural soothing agents” this weekend to sooth bloggers’ frayed nerves, then read about this spat he’s having with a blogger.

Funnily enough if you search Google for “Google Blog Search” you won’t find its new service unless you look in the ads on the right.

All our meters are back up at full-throttle, so it looks like the ride is over. Thank you to those of you who were patient… and thank you to those of you who weren’t patient. We’ll be making good two days tomorrow for advertisers.

It’s been 48 hours since we screwed up DNS and, bingo, our metering is taking a big pop, up 20% in the last hour. I’ll try to grab an image of it a little later.

Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together. The correct DNS is slowly disseminating through the many tiers/branches of domain registries stacked around the globe. In some cases, the servers update every 2 hours, in some cases every 48 hours, and in some cases longer (a week?) We’ve tried a bunch of tricks and tactics to speed things up yesterday and are continuing today. As far as we can tell, 85% of blog readers can now see the adstrips/ads and Blogads.com. That’s up from 60% at the low. (One datapoint is that ad purchases have not slacked off, though I still can’t see Blogads.com from my home computer.) In theory, we should see another improvement today (assuming there are more servers out there with 48-hour caches than we’d originally anticipated). But, theory doesn’t buy lunch, so we’re continuing to look for ways to manually speed the process along. If you have suggestions, we’d love to hear them. I’m very frustrated and apologize. We’ll be issuing make-goods to all advertisers.

In part, this error and a couple of other recent stumbles may be a sign that our Budapest team is overstretched. As a company we tend to try to have more balls in the air than hands. That’s great and keeps you motivated and driving, but when you slip up, it’s ugly. Driving to normalize slightly, we added an additional programmer a month ago and he’s pulled into the swing very quickly. Now we’ve moving towards hiring another strong coder.

For numbers geeks, I don’t know if you can make sense of this graph of one of our server’s bandwidth consumption, but if you compare like time periods, we’re doing roughly 15% better today than yesterday.

I’ve just published the logos that came in during the initial “private submission” phase of our logo collaboration. There are some interesting logos that should not be overlooked. Head over and leave your comments if they catch your eye. Here’s one by Greg Stobb. And a bunch by Stephanie Kloss, particularly this one. Finally, there’s this bunch by Mikel Browning, including this and this.

Since we ended up with more logos than we anticipated and a wider variety of comments, we’re considering creating a shortlist and inviting public comment on that list. OK idea?

We screwed up our domain name registry entry yesterday afternoon, which means we made our servers’ addresses invisible to much of the Internet. A stupid human error which should not have occured. I went home last night thinking everything would be ok in 30 minutes, and didn’t blog about the problem because I was unable to access the blog server myself. The error propagated very quickly, but the correction has taken longer to spread. (As my colleague noted, bad news travels faster than good news. ) We are seeing the correct DNS slowly propagate (judging from our bandwidth metering and spot checks) and know that a growing number of people can view blogads. We’re guessing that by noon 90% of the Internet will be able to see blogads. I apologize for the problem and will pass along more information if I learn anything new.

I’d hoped for perhaps 100 logos. So far, we’ve had a total of 281 logos submitted, 150 of which are now here.

We’re hugely pleased with the quality of contributions. A friendly designer had suggested that we’d only get 1 great submission for every 50 (something about the second standard deviation), but I think that roughly one in five are fantastic. I’m also happy about the level and quality of public involvement. We’ve had roughly 120 comments so far; in a number of cases, designers have taken advantage of feedback and tweaked their designs; some generous designers are offering each other tips.

Submissions close on September 9. You can wait until everything is public, or head over now to comment while designers still have time to incorporate your suggestions.

Some staff favorites: Oneshape, talking logo, Tangerine Garage, Chalkboard Garage, hodgepodge, Rip Torn (not the actor). Beyond these, there are a number of brilliant designs… the trick is trying to picture how the design would fit on our site AND on t-shirts and bumperstickers. There are a number of other great logos in the “unpublished” category — these will be uncovered once submissions close.

We spent the weekend hiking in Western NC. The weather was perfect — 75 and low humidity. And the wildflowers were… wild. We waded through what seemed like hundreds of different species. Beneath rocks in the torrent way up near Pot Cove Gap we found a few giant salamanders and cray fish. How do they manage to get that high?

Jeff Jarvis asks his readers whether he should accept a blogad for a t-shirt bashing FEMA. So far, his readers say no, 9 to 0.

Chug Roberts, who has Blogads running in many corners of the blogosphere for his publications, suggests that advertisers donate space to relief efforts. He’s been replacing his own ads with appeals for the Salvation Army.

Rogers Cadenhead is catching some flak for mooting the idea that liberals and conservatives stage a friendly competition to raise money for Katrina relief. FWIW, I’ve heard this suggestion from people on both sides of the aisle and thought it was a good idea, though the various efforts have diverged at this point and a horse race would be difficult. Having said that, I’m waiting to hear from the folks who work with MercyCorps to talk about separate landing pages for various networks, including John Hawkin’s conservative network, who are already running MercyCorps ads.

At this point, the liberal network has raised $157,000 for Katrina relief.

We’re having trouble right now with the servers at Voxel.net that host our images. We’re trying to get things straightened out. I apologize for the problems. If you are an advertiser, we’ll be crediting you a day. If you are a blogger, the easiest approach is defering your currently running ads until this freak storm passes. Again, I’m very sorry for the problem.

Update 5.15 I called Voxel 30 minutes ago and heard that I’d be getting an answer shortly. I guess shortly might be longly. The good news, at least until Tuesday morning, is that as folks go home for the long weekend, bandwidth consumption is dropping off so our load balancing is doing a more adequate job. At this point, though Voxel’s problems continue, everyone’s adstrips should be working Ok. If not, please drop us a line.

Update 6.30 Tracked down someone Voxel and he was super helpful. We’ll have the problem solved tomorrow morning.