Joyful and brash, my old Budapest bud Rick Bruner still keeps me giggling daily with his blog.

Music critic Kate Sullivan, sister of my buddy Ben, writes:

i don’t know how to explain it exactly, but i think the process of having to critique music all day for money fucks with the way you hear it. because critiquing music becomes tied to your income, and your sense of who you are in the world, you can easily lose track of the real reason people listen to and make music in the first place. music becomes a platform on which to prove your intellectual superiority, a tool for the construction of your ascendancy–you have to become superior to the music. i understand this because i am a critic, too, and a writer, and i do understand the necessity of “mastering” your subject before you sit down to write. when you sit down to write, you have to feel that you can “kill” your subject–you have to become its master, or you’re sunk. or so the logic goes.

the problem is that you start to build a kind of resentment toward your subject–and why not? it’s your adversary. you’re the gay vegas guy in a codpiece and it’s the white tiger. you gain all your glamour and mystique through the wild beauty of the animal you have tamed. you think those guys would be rich fuckers if they were working with carp? critics secretly know that their whole gig is based on someone else’s glamour and power and freedom. and so they get a little baby chip on their shoulders, that just grows and grows–especially since most of them have musical yearnings of their own.

(Via Matt Welch and Amy Langfield.)

Jeff Jarvis, one of the wisest scribes I know and boss of media giant Advance Publications’ Internet arm, sums up perfectly: “bloggers are influencers talking to influencers.”

Italian journalist Robin Good writes a clueful overview of Blogads: “Blogads are addressing the great potential made available by those independent publishers, reviewers, columnists and commentators who, on a frequent periodical basis, communicate and address relevant issues with wit and intelligence and which specialize in some very clearly identifiable theme.”

He mentions Blogads’ Cluetrain-ness, as Seyed did earlier this week. This makes me really happy, since the Cluetrain Manefesto is what sparked my own first blog entry in August 2001. (One of my joys attending Bloggercon was that I met two more of the authors of Cluetrain — Chris Locke Doc Searls. I’d broken bread with the good Dr. Weinberger previously.)

Cluetrain begins with the thesis that “Markets are conversations” and hammers corporate robots and robotic corporations for forgetting to converse humanely. The idea is profound and companies have gone only 0.01% of the way to incorporating its lessons.

But hey, is it too early to consider the next step? Drunk on caffeine and words at Bloggercon and playing a game of antimetabole, I started musing about the idea that “conversations are markets,” particularly conversations conducted through weblogs. We speak of “getting” or “winning” links for our own good thoughts… and we also commonly “give” or “reward” links to the good work of others. We “pay” attention to others and “earn” attention ourselves. Seyed Razavi has distilled several dimensions of this whole “conversation as market” metaphor with his great simulation Blogshares.

Blogads also tries to close the circle on the “markets are conversations are markets” idea. We help authors who earned conversational “riches” — respect and links and eyeballs — to arbitrage some of that intellectual capital back into the stuff you buy groceries with.

Of course, publishers do the same thing, but they take 80% of the juice, versus the 20% we charge.

Neil Postman died Sunday at the age of 72. I read Postman’s indictment of television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in 1987. The argumentation was brilliant and the conclusion unescapable. I unplugged my television and haven’t watched anything on it since but videos. I’m deeply in Postman’s debt –so far, the TV-hours he liberated add up to roughly three years of conversation, reading and musing… life.

As California’s new governor likes to say, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” The dollar has dropped more than 5% in recent days for no apparent reason. In fact, the economic reports have hinted at US strength and European weakness — both are usually good for the dollar.

So what gives? Although rumors that Russia is considering pricing oil in euros rather than dollars have now been denied, it is worth reflecting on the double-whammy that could be cast by our spiralling budget deficit and the de-dollarization of the world’s reserves.

But hey, Europe’s problems — geriatric populations, sclerotic businesses, paralytic bureaucracies — are even worse than ours. Perhaps the rupee or yuan shoud be the next reserve currency?

Seyed Razavi, the [url=]Blogshares[/url] guru, writes a long and thoughtful review of Blogads and Google Adsense. Seyed says some nice things about Blogads, but also notes some places we need to keep improving. His conclusion: “in terms of appropriateness, usability, quality of service and cluetrain-ness I would recommend BlogAds to bloggers. Google is something to consider and exploit (as they exploit you) but not something to build a lasting partnership with.”

Mark Redetzke: “Plenty of traditional shops talk about media strategy and include the Web. More than you might think don’t ever talk about it (or if they do, they bring up interactive as window dressing only, then quickly move on). They’ve never done anything online. Why? It’s a self-perpetuating stalemate. They don’t have enough Web business to justify hiring experts. So they stick to what they know and don’t create strategies or campaigns that include meaningful Web components. Obviously, they never get enough web business to justify hiring subject matter experts. And the world passes them by. I blame this on the laziness that pervades most media departments. They work seasonally. Most don’t challenge themselves to learn more about a medium that currently penetrates nearly 70 percent of households. Shameful.”

Bloggercon was a stimulating as a thermos full of espresso.

A big part of the fun was renewing conversations with Hylton Jolliffe, Jeff Jarvis, Liz Spiers, Josh Marshall, Pressflex/Blogads investor Esther Dyson, Biz Stone (moving to Google!), Glenn Reynolds, Shannon Okey, Phil Wolff and Scott Johnson.

I met Matt Gross, Eric Folley, Oliver Willis, Ed Cone , Doc Searls, Chris Locke, Halley Suitt, Sooz, Scott Rosenberg , Scott Heiferman, Sanford Dickert and Joi Ito.

The intellectual ferment of the weekend is too much for me to try to recall here with all the other work I’ve got to do. Three random anecdotes:

Len Apcar, a editor in chief at NYT.com, told me he’d come to Bloggercon skeptical about whether blogging had a place inside the newspaper… but had become convinced blogging does fit in. Apcar said he’d gotten a chuckle out of my answer on the Bloggercon website to the question, “what’s the first thing NYTimes.com’s blogger in chief should do?” (My answer: short NYT shares. Click “comments.”)

Liz Spiers told me her parents, fundamentalist Southern Baptists, had only very recently learned of her big city blogging exploits at Gawker. Her local newspaper paper published an article on blogging and did a side bar on her. Her mother was shocked and her childhood pastor wrote to say how sad he was that Liz had strayed so far from her moral upbringing. (Update: my mom, herself a child of the South, writes to say “I didn’t realize blogging is immoral!”)

At dinner Saturday night, I brought up Swartzennegger, asking Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Jarvis to help me understand their nonchallance about his verbal and manual assaults on women. Glenn and Jeff, along with Liz Spiers, each said they’d rather have a competent scumbag in office than an incompetent angel. I proffered the “what if this was your daughter/wife/mother/sister?” debating line, to which Glenn responded: there’d be nothing left of Arnie if he tangled with Instawife. I asked if this is because Glenn knows his way around a handgun. “No, it’s my wife who would rip Arnold apart. I’d show up with a broom afterwards to clean up.” Only Hylton seconded my unhappiness with Swartzenegger. He said later that he knows a number of people in Telluride who say AS is notorious there for accosting women during the annual film festival.

Cooking tonight, I pulled out an odd little cook book we acquired in a pile of used books in Paris a few years back: Snob in the Kitchen, published in 1967.

It’s written by one Simonetta, “one of the world’s top fashion designers;” she’s memorialized in a photograph on the back cover in a leopard-skin coat talking on a huge telephone holding her cigarette at a rakish angle. The book was illustrated by her cousin, HRH Giovanni de Boubon, Prince des Deux Siciles, and as luck would have it, our copy is inscribed by Giovanni to his aunt Isa, “the only one in the family who was kind enough to buy the book.”

I’m making spaghetti capri, which is basically anchovies, tuna, bruised garlic, basil, parsley and pepper. Zowee!