I just had an interesting chat with a substantial advertiser who is considering buying a big package of blogads. Turns out he’s fed up with advertising on sites like MSN.com. “I bought 29 million page impressions and made 29 sales — there’s gotta be a better way,” he said.

For those of you who have asked for a horizontal adstrip, we’re working on something. Take a look at this horizontal strip of blog advertising and drop me a line or leave a comment.

Safire channels Nixon (via cellphone from purgatory): “Kerry can’t smile and Lieberman smiles too much. Gephardt has no eyebrows and Edwards comes across as tricky. Dean would be a godsend for us, blowing his cool in debate. Joe Biden would give Bush the most trouble, but he’s waiting too long. Gotta run to Keynes’s class. Where’s the damn button to turn this thing off?”

The normal view “is that once a leader decides on war, he should stand aside and let the generals fight it without political interference. This view is analogous to the terror of micromanaging that is a standard feature of the advice in business books in recent years. The idea is that a chief executive is supposed to think big thoughts, set direction and then let people do their jobs without interference. Indeed, nowadays the chief executive is supposed to be a coach and a cheerleader more than anything else. In wartime, according to Mr. Cohen, that is nonsense. In four fascinating case studies, the author demonstrates that Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion continually challenged and questioned their generals, mastered immense quantities of detail and, in important instances, overruled their advice. In all four cases, Mr. Cohen shows that these habits played a crucial role in achieving victory.” (Link)

“ACCORDING to research compiled by David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, multitaskers actually hinder their productivity by trying to accomplish two things at once. Mr. Meyer has found that people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other.”

I’m sometimes guilty of this and agree that it is bad. My rationalization: I don’t want to be the bottleneck in partner or colleague projects; I’m sacrificing my efficiency for theirs. Umm… usually.

The NYTimes introduces a bunch of tech characters who claim to be more successful, more vibrant, more competitive because they are multitasking. These guys usually sound like self-deceiving boobs, particularly the guy who uses his wireless-enabled laptop, BlackBerry and mobile phone while having imaginary dogfights with his five-year-old son.

“Both love the game, and it has an added benefit for Dad: he can play with one hand while using the other to talk on the phone or check e-mail. The multitasking maneuver occasionally requires a trick: although Mr. Mehlman usually lets his son win the Lego air battles, he sometimes allows himself to win, which forces his son to spend a few minutes putting his plane back together. ‘While he rebuilds his plane, I check my e-mail on the BlackBerry,’ Mr. Mehlman explained.” (He’s got two other kids too.)

“Advertising is the ultimate performance art,” says copywriter John Kuraoka in a permalinkless June 19 post. (Via Scott Knowles.)

The fireworks finale last night sent a rain of ash down on us. L recovered a scrap of paper fireworks casing from our blanket and hauled it home. “I like the smell.” We sat with families Locke Locke and Srmecs. Spent all day yesterday in the neighborhood pool.

While running through a swamp this morning, I wondered why we didn’t get munched by mosquitoes last night. Could it be that mosquitoes are drawn upward by the flash and roar and carbon dioxide… and then obliterated by the next round of flashes?

To celebrate, I bought Hugh Macleod’s beautiful rendition of the American flag. I’ve always loved Jasper Johns’ flags, and have been eyeing Hugh’s flag for a couple of weeks. The original is in the mail, but I do have the digital version to hoist here today. Ck it out: Hugh has shaken up his pricing — beauty comes in many prices.

Feel free to hoist this flag on your site; please give credit to Hugh Macleod …

A study by Public Administration for Traffic Safety of Spain and the Complutense University in Madrid finds that “intent listening had almost no effect on how closely the drivers paid attention to the road and the dashboard. But when the drivers were asked to talk about what they had heard, their ability to pay attention dropped by as much as a third. Even relatively simple production tasks, like relating where they were and what they were doing, had about as big an effect as requests that the researchers considered more complicated. The study found that the distraction levels were equally high when the driver was talking to a passenger or into a hands-free cellphone.”

I always love it when people gripe about advertising, particularly when Blogads gets slammed in the process. So here’s a nice anti blog ad screed from one Steve Hooker, a UK government employee:

Though I have a degree in graphics and advertising I’ve always been against advertising. Just my socialist background finds them distasteful. It’s whoever can spend enough money fooling people that their can of beans is best, not that that can is best for the person. Trickery, slight of hand, bending the truth, that’s what ads are for… If ads start to plague [link to Blogads] blogs, the near-utopian world we have right now may disappear.

Yes, Steve, God forbid that writers should get 80% of what advertisers pay, rather than the 5-10% usually passed along by traditional publishers.

I guess Steve, a guy who has the luxury of working as an “intranet builder for Government Office of West Midlands,” probably rarely faces the challenge of selling anything to anyone other than his boss or wife… so has his fingers firmly on the pulse of economic reason. It’s easy for him to think that the rest of us should do as he does.

[Update: whoops, Steve’s an entrepreneur and a nice guy. See his comment below. So much for pre-breakfast snarkiness.]

I assume Steve gets to work on a bike he built himself — Marx forbids he buy one that some lying corporation “convinced” him to drive — or better yet, walks barefoot. He drinks only tap water, since it’s the only beverage not contaminated by the slime of advertising.

Fact is, most of the products that make modernity comfortable for folks other than the elite are objects and experiences we didn’t know we’d need, things no central planner could have imagined people would ever want or afford. Each product started out as a twinkle in the eye of some deranged entrepreneur, then got tested on the entrepreneur’s friends and family and finally got popularized through — cover your ears Steve — advertising.

This dialectic of invention and advertising, product creation and demand stimulation, was good… unless you think products like refrigerators, pocket cameras, automobiles, air travel and personal computers should be used only by rich folk AND designed only by government employees. Yes, here’s a souvenir of the pre-mass-market-advertising utopio:

In fact, Steve’s post isn’t all idiocy. (In fact, he seems to be a cheerful guy and good father when you read the rest of his blog.) I agree with Steve’s final point: “The point of blogging is not to make money from eye-balls, not IMO. It maybe to make money from thought and intellect or reputation sure, nothing wrong with making money. But CPMs are eye-ball traffic, lowest common denominator.” If blogs are going to achieve their rightful advertising premiums, we’re going to have to demonstrate that they do more than provide cheap eye-balls or high clickthrus… MSN will always have more eyeballs and Drudge can always undercut our CPM. Bloggers who strive to will make money because they provide, amid the clutter and cacaphony of online life, a uniquely intimate and consistent context for entrepreneurs who need to popularize innovative ideas and intangibles.