Tony Perkins has apologized here for his reaction to my roasting of his new group business blog Always On.

Tony adds: “i want to be a part of [blogging], becuuse frankly it is the most fun i have ever had in my professional life.”

Apology accepted Tony. My critique of your strategy stands but I hope you will continue to improve. Every drum beat for blogging is helpful.

Joi Ito, pundit VC, suggests that its “better to try to learn how to blog before evangelizing.” Not wanting to use Always On to pursue a personal debate, you’ve been restricted to using my comments section and Elizabeth Spiers’. Take Joi’s advice and create your own blog. We’ll have some fun.

Google seems to be having trouble scaling its fabled advertising technology in war time. (Via Soundbitten.)

Just four days after launch, group war news blog Command Post is on its way to 40,000 visits today.

Nearly 70 bloggers contribute breaking war news and links to the “warblog collective.”

Web traffic is usually 50-90% lower on weekends — most people surf from the office — so it will be interesting to see what kind of traffic the site gets Monday.

To put the site’s explosive traffic in perspective, the site’s third day (yesterday) saw nearly half as much traffic as super blog Instapundit, which had 80,000 visits yesterday.

Update Monday 7.30AM: More than 60 bloggers posted roughly 300 links to breaking war news Sunday on Command Post. The site had 55,000 visits and 72,000 page views.

The event-tied collective news log is a simple mutation of the communal posting format pioneered by sites like Slashdot, Fark, Metafilter and Kuro5hin. Will each important future event have its own collective log?

Is this the fastest grass-roots media launch in history? Fark had 50,000 page views in 1999, 100,000 in 2000, 30,000,000 in 2001 and is now doing 19 million a month. Wonder what Command Post’s traffic will look like a month from now?

Baghdad taxi driver to self-styled human shield:“Really, how much did Saddam pay you to come?”

Ben Sullivan is a keen observer of office sociology. He e-mails: “Have you noticed, the nomenclature of Gulf War 2 is starting to emerge. Where GW1 had ‘Mother of all,’ and ‘sorties,’ in GW2 ‘Shock and awe,’ and ‘Coalition of the Willing’ are early favorites. As in, ‘I’m putting together a Coalition of the Willing for lunch today’ or ‘Mike’s Powerpoint presentation left us in Shock & Awe.'”

Equipped with big screen CNN, laptop and Wifi, Glenn Reyonds indulges in some barstool punditry.

Andrew Odlyzko: “Back in 1850, spending on telecommunications (primarily the postal service, with a pinch of the electric telegraph thrown in) in the U. S. was about 0.2 percent of the gross domestic product. By 2000, that had grown to perhaps 4 percent (including the traditional voice telephony, Internet, cellular, and parts of the postal system). Thus over the last 150 years, telecom spending has been growing about 2 percent per year faster than the economy as a whole. That is a nice growth rate, but it is too moderate for the New Economy expectations.”

And anti-war friend in London reads his Rabbi’s earnest plea for peace and e-mails that it “raised in me the frequent suspicion I… and almost everybody else I like and spend my life with, are taking a sort of humanitarian free ride ‘ playing the folk songs and feeling moved at the modern art exhibitions, and secretly glad that the Donald Rumsfelds out there are willing (eager?) to take the responsibility on themselves and kill whoever needs to be killed for our safety and everyday luxuries.”

Jeff Chan: “Unlike Amazon, eBay is not an innovative company. Amazon has constantly improved the shopping experience by introducing useful features like collaborative filtering, personalization, book browsing, and web services. eBay, on the other hand, appears to be coasting on its monopoly position, and not too smoothly either. The reputation system is not robust. There is no scaling of ratings by dollar amount of transactions nor any use of network flow algorithms, or even a two-level system that Amazon uses to rate reviews.”

Rick Bruner offers a cogent summation of the reasons Bush is right on Iraq.