William Beutler is covering politician blogads for the National Journal’s Hotline. See halfway down this page for an overview of ads bought for Louise Slaughter, and comments on the Robert Byrd ad here.

To keep better track of these pages, I’ve started a “recent candidates” section on our site here.

Fish stew.

And this story of a lost Hungarian-speaking parrot reminds me of a story Kati, my wife’s mother, tells. The family gets a parrot. Raised by a teenage boy, the parrot becomes known for its profanity. One day, the parrot flies away. Fliers are put on telephone polls. Grocers (the cisco routers of village life) are consulted. Kati sleeps on the porch, hoping the parrot will return. Finally, word comes that someone two villages over has found a parrot. Kati puts the parrot’s cage on the back of her bike and rides to the village. “How will I know it is your parrot?” asks the savior.

While the rest of us read Revenews, WSJ, Gawker and Adrants, what are the kids reading? Well, eight-year-olds are playing Runescape. And, when they are not buried in Xanga or AIM, the kidz slightly older are enjoying flash animations like these, at least according to Steve Locke, who wrote this morning from Amherst. Check out in particular: piehole, nader, doodoocaca, apple, avacado.

Lots of ideas in there for advertisers. Roughcut, profane, nihilist, unPC… how will corporate media/advertisers compete? Is there any media magazine (or blog) that focuses on kidz media consumption? What other stuff do you guys see going on?

Saturday’s activities included learning to play “9” and “golf,” hiking to the top of the east ridge of Montreat, picking blueberries by Rattlesnake Rock, watching Taco pant furiously, eating at Salsa and listening some some folks jamming under the trees at the Bele Chere festival.

So far this summer, I’ve seen Willie Wonka (3/10), WarofWorlds (8), Batman (7), Herbie (5). I fell asleep during Wonka, and might have given it a 2 if I’d seen the whole rotten thing.

I was in a junk store in Black Mountain, NC this weekend and stumbled on a stack of old Life magazine ads, circa World War II. Many of the ads used a patriotic theme and often weren’t peddling a specific product or service.

An ad for Greyhound buses noted how a Greyhound movie travelogue was touring the world and entertaining GIs and Russian privates and Eskimos.

Royal Crown Cola’s ad headline was “How to get your second wind for 5 cents” and included photos with these captions: “If you are a Sub Machine Gunner” … “If you are a Parachute Maker”… “If you are a Airraid Warden” … “If you are Jeep Driver”…”

There was an ad for Western Electric, showing a submariner talking on a headset. “Every branch of the Armed Servcies uses the Telephone.”

And there was a Chrysler ad with a brutish cartoon of a bespectacled Japanese naval officer grimmacing in a flood of light. “It was dark, it was black as Tojo’s heart”… the searchlight came on and “we could see those Japs plain as day scurrying around like rats in a ship.” As it turns out, the spotlight mirror was polished by the same machinery used to make Chrysler engines.

Danny Glover gives a great overview of the revolution in advocacy advertising spawned by blogs in the National Journal. The lede says it all: “Advocacy is a staple of the blogosphere, and advocacy advertising on blogs is quickly becoming a popular tool for groups hoping to mobilize the online masses.”

I should also mention that Farah Miller, who has bought a number of blogads for books including Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint and Camille Paglia’s Break Blow Burn, was the star of an article in Friday’s WSJ about new ideas in book marketing.

Book publishers generally stick to their tried-and-true formula for promoting a new novel: send the writer on tour, slip review copies to critics and negotiate strategic displays in bookstores. The Internet has been used to create barebones Web sites tied to new books, and the occasional advertising campaign on popular online destinations, but little more. Now, publishers like Knopf are hoping to supplement their traditional campaigns by wooing bloggers, giving away free copies online, and other initiatives.

You can see the full article here.

Warren Buffett owns 20% of the Washington Post, currently valued at $1.7 billion dollars. It’s interesting to review Buffett’s steadily declining attitude towards the publishing industry and wonder: at what point does Buffett bail on WPO? Obviously, selling even 10% of WPO would be tough in the open market and destroy confidence in WPO’s business model. So what is a billionaire to do?

Charlie Munger, Buffett’s partner, said in 1986:

‘Newspapers are a marvelous business. It’s one of the few businesses that tend toward a natural, limited monopoly. Obviously, it competes with other advertising forms, but not with anything exactly like itself. Show me another business like that ‘ there isn’t one.’

Asked about selling shares, Warren Buffett in 2002:

“It’s not our natural inclination to sell. We’ve never sold a share of the Washington Post, Berkshire Hathaway (since we began acquiring it in 1962), Coke or Gillette.”

“We would sell if we needed the money for something else, but that hasn’t been a problem in the past 10-15 years. Earlier in my career, I had more ideas than money, but now it’s the reverse.”

“Now, we typically sell when we reevaluate the economic characteristics of a business; when we had one view of the long-term competitive advantage, but are modifying it. That’s not to say it’s become a bad business — just that the competitive advantages are not as strong as
we initially thought.”

“A classic case is the newspaper business. Decades ago [when Berkshire bought The Buffalo News and The Washington Post], it was impregnable. We still think it’s quite a business, but it’s not the same as in the 1970s. There are so many other sources of information now. Incidentally, the same thing has been happening to network television.”

And in 2004:

Buffett and Munger were surprisingly bearish on newspapers, a major investment for Berkshire through its large stake in the Washington Post Co. and its outright ownership of the Buffalo News.

After saying that he and Munger are “newspaper addicts” and that “it’s still an unusually good business,” Buffett struck a somber note.

“The economics of newspapers are very, very close to certain to deteriorate over the next 10-20 years,” he warned. “I see nothing that will turn around the erosion from both the circulation and advertising standpoints.”

Here’s a 15 year perspective on WPO.

Tony Pierce, one of my favorite bloggers, finally started selling Blogads about a month ago. Yesterday, he wrote:

i have been using blogads since the day i was laid off and last month, full disclosure, i made $420. its not a lot but it was exactly how much the dentist charged me yesterday to do some serious work on me. and to rewind a little in the story, whats funny is nearly the second that blogads paypalled me the moola (so smart that they use paypal) the dentist office called me to see if i wanted to get my teeth worked on.

the beauty of having a paypal debit card is tuesday i was paypalled the cash from blog ads and wednesday i paid the dentist with the paypal debit card. my real bank stash was never touched and career builder and those indie movies basically paid for my dental work. the perfect circle.

Damn, DC humidity is about 101% and my glasses fogged up walking through the door. I’m participating at a panel today sponsored by IDI and Rightclick at the American Chamber of Commerce.

On the first panel, Cheryl Contee gave a strong overview of blog phenomena — Rathergate, London bombing. Then some interesting stuff from Peter Hirshberg , a VP at Technorati.com. He shows a slide with the total number of bloggers, now 12 million. But how many of those are active? We get a hint in the next slide, charting the number of blog posts per day. Apparently this peaked last week during the London bombings at 1.1 million per day. So, assuming that some bloggers make dozens of posts a day, the media guy makes 3 and many make zero… do we have 200,000 active bloggers… ie people who post at least seven times a week?

A month ago, when I asked Technorati’s Dave Sifry when they were going to commercialize their blog tracking service, the answer wasn’t clear. Listening to Hirshberg, it seems they are a lot closer. I heard a bunch of things from Pete Blackshaw yesterday suggesting that his Blogpulse is going to take a big leap ahead in this dimension also in coming weeks.

Mike Cornfield or Pew Internet and American life project: bloggers are “gatekeepers for the gatekeepers.” But you’ve to go manage your boss’s expectations. “Everything interconnects. When you are online, you are one click away from e-mail, one click away from an institutional web site, one click away from gather money, mobalizing people, one click away from organizing people. Because interconnectivity is so easy, it is very easy to think you can go viral…. Things don’t go viral as part of anyone’s strategic command. We are riding the waves just like everyone else. Don’t go chasing after the big viral thing that is going to change the world because your boss will know you are full of it… Btu you don’t need to go viral to create action. Even if we only sign up 100 people or get four journalists to go to our website, we’ve succeeded.”

Tony Pierce: “mind over chatter.”

Alex Macris’ new gaming magazine offers a very usable update on the landscape display, something like what we saw previously with Seth Godin (in PDF) and the IHT.

Gawk-stalking.