Welcome to 123CCTV, which ordered ads on 18 blogs yesterday and 57 blogs today. This makes 123CCTV the biggest advertiser yet in the blogosphere. Go on over and buy something and tell ’em bloggers sent you.

Happiness: Friday night after a hard week listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue while playing six minute speed chess and nearly getting beaten by a third grader.

Joy: later, getting beaten.

Also, I got beat at “pig” playing basketball Saturday by a first grader. I choked on the clutch shots, he didn’t.

Try not crying when you see this ad.

The Internet has the potential to up-end America’s political pyramid. I hope it gets here in time.

(Actually, our unfunded liabilities are more like $47 trillion.)

Washington Post: “Political candidates trying to use the Internet to win support from young, Web-wise voters should avoid pop-up and banner ads and instead use interactive media like Internet chats and ‘blogs,’ according to a study released today.” (Thank you Hylton!)

You know blogging has hit some kind of cultural extreme when our local TV station, NBC17, does a story on the local angle on blogging. I hope they post the video, because it’s very funny to see the anchor raise his eyebrows when he first mentions the blog, “a kind of online diary,” and then segues to two 40-ish males raving about the idea. Yes, I got my 15 seconds of fame. The other guy in the spot is Todd Melet, who I introduced to blogging just a few months ago.

The reporter did a credible job of explaining blogs in 90 seconds. The blog I was scrolling through showing ads on was Atrios, although NBC didn’t show the URL. Funnily enough, the spot also did not mention the Blogads URL. Is is possible that our lead — “You need to woo the early adopters that traditional media can’t reach. You need to impress 100,000 opinion makers with a colorful pitch, not pester 100,000,000 nobodies with a soulless textad or banner” — hit a nerve?

Update Here’s the actual TV spot in a popup window.

NPR’s ombudsman eats crow after dissing blogs.

E&P reports on TPM blogger of the year award.

SF Chronicle says political insiders watch blogs like DailyKos. Here’s one enthusiastic insider/blog reader:

“I’m a reader. I think Markos has done an incredible job,” said the president of the New Democrat Network, Simon Rosenberg, a centrist who worked in Bill Clinton’s famous “war room” during the 1992 campaign and continued working for Clinton throughout his presidency. “Kos is one of the places I go for full-time information every day,” Rosenberg said. “If people like me do that, you know it’s having an impact.”

Tallahassee Democrat says:

“Blogs are the biggest communication innovation for the 2004 election,” wrote Alexis Rice, author of a recent blog study at Johns Hopkins University. “Blogs are transforming campaign communication and will become not only an important tool in the presidential election, but in future state and local elections.”

Before receiving his award yesterday, Josh Marshall reports, Josh tried to explain blogs to Arthur Schlesinger, one of Josh’s heros. He wanders over to the great historian and his wife and starts babbling.

To be polite Schlesinger’s wife asked me to explain to them just what a blog is. And though I get this question pretty often, it turns out to be a rather challenging one if the people you’re trying to explain it to don’t necessarily have a lot of clear web reference points to make sense of what you’re saying. I ended up telling them that it was something like political commentary structured like a personal journal with occasional reporting mixed in. Now, as I was explaining and watching the looks on everyone’s faces it was incrementally becoming clear to me that this was playing rather like saying that something was like a washing machine structured like a rhinoceros with the occasional sandwich thrown in. And, as Schlesinger himself had said rather little through all this, it was also dawning on me that being one of the four guests of honor at this little event was providing no guarantee against making a bit of a fool of myself.

The Week Magazine convened a whole herd of big-wigs in New York today to celebrate opinion journalism.

Josh Marshall was honored as “Blogger of the Year,” reports Jeff Jarvis, who was there and helped, along with Glenn Reynolds and Daniel Radosh, to select the winning blogger.

The crowd included Tina Brown, Abe Rosenthal, Mario Cuomo, Jim Hoge, Elizabeth Spiers, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, Edward Epstein, Harry Evans, Vartan Gregorian… and if I understand correctly, Susan Cheever, Robert Caro, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lani Guinier, Edward Rollins, Wendy Wasserstein, Steven Ratner, Walter Isaacson, Alex Jones, Lauren Hutton…

Here’s the citation for Marshall:

Joshua Micah Marshall, author of TalkingPointsMemo.com, represents the best of the Internet’s new medium of opinion, the weblog.

Weblogs ‘ personal journals with links and commentary ‘ have quickly moved from the fringes of political discourse into the mainstream. On his well-red, well-regarded political blog, the Washington-based Marshall (also a writer for Washington Monthly and a Ph.D in American history) is best known for tenaciously dogging the story of then-Majority Leader Trent Lott’s racial indiscretion at Strom Thurmond’s retirement — a story the big media outlets had largely ignored. Marshall, a liberal in a medium better known for its conservative and libertarian voices, has also aggressively covered the Bush administration’s strategy.

Marshall calls himself an opinion journalist, but he is also an accomplished reporter. He snared one of the first exclusive interviews with Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark, for instance. Marshall recently asked his online readers whether he should report from the New Hampshire primary; in less than a day, the audience pledged enough to pay for his trip, and Marshall decided to report for them, rather than for print. ‘I’m much more invested in my Web site than in any of those other things that pay me,’ he said recently.

But Marshall is also making his Web site pay. He has received advertising from one presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, and from a gun-control advocacy group. Why are they advertising? Because Weblogs ‘ and Marshall’s weblog in particular ‘ are where the influential reach the influential. They matter.

Josh, ever the mensch, said “I’d like to thank you not so much for choosing me but for choosing bloggers.”

If you want to beat Tina Brown to ordering a Blogad to start influencing influercers, here’s Josh Marshall’s ad order form.

The Media Audit finds: “Even as Internet usage has surged, the quality (for an advertiser) hasn’t gone down. “More than 60% of Internet heavy users have household incomes of $50,000 or more and 50.4% have one or more college degrees…. For newpapers, 45% have household incomes of $50,000 ore more and 38.9% have one ore more college degrees.” Heavy user is defined, for both groups, as spending more than an hour a day with the media in question. (PDF via Jeff Jarvis.)

This is a bad album. Bad for anyone who likes voices smooth as a baby’s bottom. Bad for those who don’t dream. Bad for anyone who doesn’t love the Stone’s Some Girls, the idea for which Jagger stole from Layne in an LA bar in 1992. Bad for those who are satisfied. Bad for those who hate music that tells stories… “did you know i slept in her bed, you were off in dublin, i’m an honest man, i did nothing you weren’t with her in the morning she was perfect, same girl you ignore, you came home mad about something, you don’t matter anymore.” Bad for folks who don’t mix their drinks or music… whiskey, country, beer, rock& redneck, gin & roll, oak-barrel-aged grunge. Bad for folks who don’t want to hear The Who sing Mel Tillis. Bad for people who don’t like a good time. Because, as the first song says, “you’re in for a good time, drop on by now, don’t be crying, the people are friendly, just wait and see all your drinks are free, you’re in for a good time…” Bad bad bad.

(I’ve given the album five stars in Amazon and submitted this review. Now we’ll see if Amazon has a sense of irony and lets the thing through their filters. If you are a bad person, click here to order your copy today. For those of you who don’t know me or the Corvids, you should know that we know each other. Yes, I’m biased. Look closely and you’ll find two Corvids in this 1992 article.)

When we were living in Amherst, I met Michael Giles, a clever and friendly coder who had just moved to town from CA. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve been watching Mike gestate a cool tool called Furl. Beside being a nice play on URL, “to furl” means to roll up and store, which is exactly what Mike’s tool does.

At first glance, Furl seems a subset or offshoot of blogging… you use it to save URLs and comment on them on your own web page.

But once you’ve used Furl a little, you see that the tool set Mike has assembled has its own life and may hit a much broader audience — the folks who don’t have the time or ability to blog, but who do want to quickly save and share information. And Mike adds some neat features; once you’ve bookmarked an article, Furl’s server automatically stores a copy so that even months from now when that NYTimes archive page is long-locked, you can refer to the article; you can easily categorize pages and rank them; Furl also makes it easy for colleagues or peers to pool information; after downloading one nugget of code, you can Furl from your browser with a single click. You can also use a javascript to import your links somewhere else… like this:

Before you write in to tell me that Radio or Blogger or Bill Gates or Tim Berners Lee or Piltdown Man or UrMama did something like this years ago… sure, all these features are available in different forms in lots of other tools. But by putting them together in one integrated package, Mike’s done something really simple and handy.

I’m using Furl to brain-dump pages that I’d love to blog, but don’t have time to do right. Still fiddling with his marketing angle, Mike calls Furl “your online filing cabinet,” which I think does a good job of summing up the benefits of the tool for the 90% of Internet users who still think “blog” is a plumber’s term for a type of wrench.

Go help Mike beta test Furl.net.