John Hiler has done a heroic job of rounding up reviews of his own new review-heavy site for NY listings.

I guffawed reading the recent NYTimes article analyzing blogdom’s apparent domination by men.

Among the culprits named: a) “the mainstream media, which has focused its attention on a predominantly male group of bloggers who write about terrorism and Iraq and have come to be known as the warbloggers,” b) Instapundit’s blogroll is “heavily weighted toward men,” c) all but one of the links on Scott Rosenberg’s blogroll is a man, and d) “female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives.”

Gee, that’s fun speculation. But the author ignores the (male) gorilla looking over her shoulder. While she admits that the apparent maleness of blogdom might be “a holdover from the world of print, where men continue to dominate the opinion pages,” she does not bother noting that 80% of the articles on the average front page of the New York Times are written by men and that 8 of 11 editors on the paper’s masthead are men.

In this context, is blogging’s skew (produced by the individual choices of swarms of men and women rather than one institution’s biases and/or policies) worth an article? I guess mentioning the Times’ own sex-skew would have made the article (or the Times) look silly.

Rebecca Blood, who was interviewed for the article, complains that “what I’ve learned about the press in the past few years is that each reporter has a story he or she wants to tell, and this process of interviewing people is largely an attempt to find others who will say what they already think is true. if you reflect back to them their pre-existing opinion, you’ll be quoted. If you do not, you won’t be.”

I recall Mickey Kaus’ comment at the recent Yale blogfest that an “editor at the NY Times keeps wanting me to write an article trashing blogger triumphalism.” I guess we can expect more of such “journalism” about blogs from the Times.

The hypocrisy of the Times’ riff on blogdom’s possible sexism provides an interesting side-bar to the same paper’s preachments against Augusta’s sexism… without itself boycotting coverage of the event.

Jeff Jarvis compiled a Christmas list of blog inspired gifts. Thank you for mentioning Blogads, Jeff!

Yes, give your favorite blogger a holiday boost by buying an Blogad promoting his/her blog on Megan McArdle (aka JaneGalt and Asymmetrical Information)’s new adstrip!

BTW, thanks to Jeff’s list, I’ve just rediscovered Instapundit’s band Mobius Dick. Jittery, full of text snippets… it’s music to blog by. I’m listening to it right now.

A key Google metric, number of searches per day, has not budged in a year.

On December 4, 2001, an article in the Boston Herald said Google processed 150 million searches a day. That represented a 250% jump in six months.

A year later, Google still gives prominent play to the benchmark, closing the first paragraph of its online company overview with the words, “Today, Google responds to more than 150 million search queries per day.”

Although true in a literal sense, the “today” is misleadingly newsy, since the same thing was true yesterday and for at least the 362 days before that. Nonetheless, the figure has become a refrain in press coverage of Google, including an article last week in the NYTimes.

Over the same period, eBay grew more than 45% in all its key metrics, and monthly page views on NYTimes.com jumped more than 50%. Even at obscure newspapers like French weekly Courrier de Mantes, site traffic has grown 400% over the last year.

As Internet traffic races ahead, why is Google’s odometer stuck? Rather than invoke the tattered figure so faithfully, shouldn’t journalists probe for an update?

Reached by phone, Google spokesman Nathan Tyler wouldn’t tell me much more than “that’s just the number we are using right now.” He would not speculate about what’s behind the number, but did stress that there are “more” than 150 million searches a day.

In the absence of something more concrete, here are some hypotheses about why Google hasn’t updated the number:

a) Google no longer watches this metric. This seems unlikely, since the “more than 150 million search queries per day” boast remains prominent on Google’s scrupulously maintained site. Moreover, this metric was updated regularly while it was growing.

b) The number of daily queries has not changed or has underperformed other top-tier Internet service providers. It is (barely) possible that Google, focused on generating revenues, views the raw volume of searches as a distraction and an expense. More searches mean more servers, not necessarily more revenues. Having honed its search technology, Google’s engineers spent the last year on projects like Adwords and enterprise search solutions. (If the raw search count is no longer a core metric for Google management, this is bad news for users; it means management no longer focuses on improving our experience and growing usage.)

c) Daily searches have grown (or even exploded), but Google does not publicize the new tally either because it would tip off the competition or because Google is saving news of a big spike for use in the build-up to its long-expected IPO.

My money is on (c). First, Google is persistently focused on improving user experience so usage has probably grown in line with that seen at other top-quality sites. Second, my company’s newspaper and magazine clients saw 50%+ growth in the number of visitors refered by Google over the last year.

Sure the 150 million a day figure is impressive. I quote it nearly every day in conversations with publishers. But isn’t it time to update the figure?

(Postscript: Here’s a brief time-line of the “150 million searches” factoid. When I looked at the same Google page back in April for this story looking at the raw data behind Google Zeitgeist, the number was… “more than 150 million.” This USA Today article written in January 2001 (found courtesy of Google, of course) uses 150 million also. And here’s the cache of a Boston Herald article from last December cites 150 million daily searches. I can’t find earlier examples of the number.)

Neil Budde, the recently unplugged publisher of WSJ.com, says, “In 2002, advertising was up about 25%. We’re not back to 2000 levels, but we were being more attentive to more appropriate advertising formats and placement of advertising. We’ve attracted a lot of advertisers back in. I still see a lot of upside. Back in 2000, the split between advertising and circulation revenues was about 60%-40%. Then [those percentages] reversed last year. Now it’s a bit more tilted toward subscriptions, but advertising is creeping back. As you continue to grow the subscriber base, that’s great, but the real opportunity is still to make this a more viable advertising medium and bring in more dollars.”

Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry write in the (PWprotected) WSJ: “Taking the Net’s pulse as we use it in our daily lives, though, is much more difficult. We don’t keep diaries or system logs, so the days all blur together, and all of a sudden it’s hard to remember what searching was like before the Google toolbar, or before all the CDs got ripped into MP3s, or what surfing was like before the cable modem arrived. It takes a substantial break in one’s routine to be able to take stock of what’s changed and what hasn’t.”

John Hiler launches the NewYorkCityBlog. The site and e-newsletter focus (initially) on event listings for cinema, book readings and talks.

Looking at a listing in The New Yorker, John writes “It’s informative and useful, like most listings… but where’s the personality?! Here at Cityblogs, we get a little more fired up about good movies. Our dedicated cinema blogger (that would be me) would DEMAND that the reader race to the Sunshine to see Brooklynite Tony Manero win over Stephanie Mangano on the disco dance floor. I mean, how often do you get the chance to catch Saturday Night Fever in Dolby Stereo and on the big screen?”

John and I’ve talked at length about CityBlog’s new angle on blog advertising, but I’ll save my two cents until he’s announced his angle. In the meantime, I’ve bookmarked the site and signed up for the newsletter.

We spent most of Thursday cooking yams, turkey, stuffing etc and an apple and pumpkin pie… and consumed it all in 45 minutes. The next day, we made turkey sandwiches and hiked with friends for an hour in the snow-crusted woods north of town.