Josh Marshall worries we will win the war but lose the peace.

I missed this excellent series of by my friends [url=http://www.amylangfield.com]Amy Langfield and Jim Lowney.

Some good evidence that “France” isn’t rooting for Saddam, despite claims to the contrary. I put France in quotation marks because, in my experience, “France” doesn’t really exist, except as a blob on a map and a cloud of concepts… and therefore couldn’t be antagonistic towards US interests anyway.

In my experience, most French people love both the idea of America (open, pragmatic and flexible) and Americans (individualistic, idealistic and ambitious.)

NYTimes.com did 30.7 million page views on Monday, March 24, a new record for the site, according to Steve Outing’s post. The site did 29.2 million page views on September 13, 2001. The site, as I recall, averages around 10 million page views a day. Interesting to note that many blogs saw traffic rise 5 to 10-fold after the war started.

The WSJ reports: “The Web site of Major League Baseball saw record traffic on Opening Day, generating 35,000 subscriptions to its multimedia products. MLB.com said it had over 10 million visitors on Monday, the first day with a full slate of games in the 2003 season. Opening Day last year brought two million visitors to the three-year-old site, the lead venture of MLB Advanced Media, which is owned jointly by all 30 Major League Baseball teams. The site’s previous record was 3.6 million visitors, for the last day of online balloting for the 2002 All-Star Game.”

This profile of Gawker does an excellent job of highlighting what makes blogs so powerful — personality — and so tough for corporate media to match.

A magazine can spend years and countless feedback sessions trying to cultivate a personality. People get a personality at around 3 months of age without any extra effort.

I enjoyed trading views about Salon with Robert Loch after this Marketing Fix post. My favorite riposte: “Give me profitability over premium-priced CPMs any day.” (What fun is writing if you can’t giggle at your own stuff?)