WashingtonPost.com: “These suit-coat-wearing men and high-heeled women gracefully sipped chardonnay while figuring out how blogs could increase their business revenue.”

Not everyone can dance or be hip, and not everyone can blog. For many, it will be more cost-effective to Blogad, underwriting some of the bloggers who’ve already mastered the form?

Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, explains how he monitors technology news. “I don’t look that much to journalists, not directly. I tend to look at bloggers,” says Anderson. (Via Paidcontent.org.)

Doug Arellanes (who led the Czech team that programmed my first newspaper portal site) has a bunch of links to old TV ads from communist Czechoslovakia. As Doug paraphrases Vaclav Havel in another post : you can learn a lot about a person from his aesthetics. And you can learn a lot about a culture from its ads.

“For some why” (rather than “for some reason”) and “just a second” (useful anytime.)

“The boys and the girls don’t sit together not because they don’t want to but because everyone has a best friend and everybody’s best friend has a friend and usually those people are all boys or all girls, so you end up with a table of all girls and a table of all boys.”

Google turns five today, or at least that’s what I think their birthday-caked logo suggests.

For those who ever had any doubts, Google.com proves the vast vitality and potent potential of web computing. Why use some silly Encyclopedia-on-a-CD when you can tap into the Google resources: 3.1 billion online documents sorted by 10,000 servers and 200 million linking minds?

Five years ago, Sun and Microsoft spent a lot of time debating the primacy of the network versus the PC. Quietly, without anyone making a big deal of it, it has become clear that the network is winning.

Yep, I’m one of those folks who believe that soon ALL interesting computing will be done by “the Internet” and not by local computers. I live this belief. My “to do” list sits on a server in Budapest. Junk e-mail aimed at my head is deflected by the spam filters at Messagefire’s server. My company sits on servers in Austin and caters to clients sitting in Mantes, Manhattan, Paris, Haddington, Vienna, Eu, Oban, Cleveland, Geneva, London, LA, Lisbon… and, if need be, the moon. My phone calls are answered by a computer in … I don’t even know where.

The Internet gives businesses incredible economies of scale AND unprecedented opportunities to create new connections among ideas, people, goods and services. The best is yet to come… and come and come.

Blogs get more praise for being hives of influence in this article by Joseph Jaffe. (Via MarketingWonk.)

“Blogs have become virtual community centers where connectors construct web-like beacons outwards and reach out to interested parties who in turn perpetuate and strengthen the momentum generating from the organic and ever-evolving message board.”

When you target your message, why not aim for the bull’s eye?

Some notes on recent activities:

After tossing the baseball and basketball, we spent the morning weeding/mulching the school’s garden. Saw a toad, an egg-laden spider, hundreds of crickets, monarch caterpillars.

I went to a PTA meeting last week. Didn’t realize Dads don’t do PTA… I was the only male among 30 people in attendance.

I traded in my Road Runner Cable modem, which had been turning off unbiden… the lady at the counter exclaimed “something definitely ain’t right here”… turns out her modem had done the same thing and she sees lots of these trade-ins.

My old comrade Matt Welch blasts alternative weeklies in the Columbia Journalism Review… and goes on to offer a meticulous argument that blogs are the future of journalism. Even for those of us who’ve read and written these things many times, Matt’s rendition is sweet.

Plus there’s some great egg-tossing. Standing at the bar during an Altweekly convention in San Fransisco, Matt reports, “I started a discussion about what specific attributes qualified these papers, and the forty-seven-year-old publishing genre that spawned them, to continue meriting the adjective ‘alternative.’ Alternative to what? To the straight-laced ‘objectivity’ and pyramid-style writing of daily newspapers? New Journalists and other narrative storytellers crashed those gates long ago. Alternative to society’s oppressive intolerance toward deviant behavior? Tell it to the Osbournes, as they watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Something to do with corporate ownership? Not unless ‘alternative’ no longer applies to Village Voice Media (owned in part by Goldman Sachs) or the New Times chain (which has been involved in some brutal acquisition and liquidation deals). Someone at the table lamely offered up ‘a sense of community,’ but Fox News could easily clear that particular bar.”

A new Bain study looks at what makes brands grow. As this blog sums up: “Quick, pick the best indicator a brand will grow faster than its category: Brand size? Newness? Leadership within a category? Such is conventional wisdom, but a recent Bain study of 524 brands across 100 categories found none of the above. The study “winners”-defined as any brand that beat its category’s growth each year from 1997-2001-invested differentially in just two components of the marketing mix: product innovation and advertising.”

Budgeting fails in many big companies, say some Harvard Business School profs. “In some instances, the budget process consumes up to six months and 20 percent of management’s time.” (ViaFastCompany’s new blog.)

I don’t know. Budgeting has always taken what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time for our small company — gee, we should be out selling or programming… or drinking beer — but in the end we always learn interesting new things about ourselves and our vision. Interesting, invaluable things we couldn’t have learned through “normal” liberal arts brainstorming. We don’t get overwrought about holding to the budget — sh*t happens — but it’s good to try to periodically corral your dreams behind a fence of numbers.