NYPost: “A lawyer who saw his advertising rates in a Los Angeles alternative weekly newspaper double after its owner, Village Voice Media, eliminated the competing weekly in a controversial market swap, has sued, claiming antitrust violations.”

Good thing that hundreds of bloggers are offering alternatives to mediocre media monopolists.

We drove to Black Mountain Sunday night through thunderstorms. Slept until 11AM yesterday, a rare treat. Then a short hike through the fragrant woods, finding a brown ladybug and a red newt. While the sandwich generations played rook, last night my wife and I ate at Salsa in Asheville — more restaurants and tourists than ever — and then to see Tom Hanks in The Terminal. It’s a hard movie to peg — starts serious, then gets frantic, then shuffles into a mythic/magical realism mode. Perhaps because the lead character reminded me — in gate, visage, ethic and accent — of Dragan, my tennis buddy in Paris who has long been infatuated by the US, I really enjoyed the movie. Today, another hike and then back to the heat of eastern NC. Update: we found a turtle (now named “Bob”), a mouse and some Indian Pipes (a non chlorophylic flower) on Sunday’s hike.

Yale scholar Ernest Miller pens a scathing deconstruction of proposed legislation criminalizing p2p software to “protect children” (and the music companies that give generously to Senate sponsor Oren Hatch and his confreres.) (Via Boingboing.)

Michael Lewis:

To me the biggest corrupting influence in this country in the production of literature and journalism is the attempt to make it an academic subject’the creative writing classes, journalism schools. That’s the wrong approach. It’s an attempt to establish a career path for writers. And also to take the risk out of it and say if you do X, Y, and Z, then you get this plum. I think the best stuff is done by lone rangers.

Miklos’ sister Mona decided to go from Hungary to India by bus, train, camel and foot. She started blogging the journey and talked a women’s magazine in Hungary into paying her. Here’s her blog and a photo:

I asked Miklos for more details. He replied: “Mona is 28. 2 years ago she spent 4 months backpacking in Tibet, India and Nepal, including a one month of volunteering as an English teacher in a village she passed through during her hikes. She decided to go back to Asia again once she has saved up some money. She flew to Istanbul, and is planning to make it to Australia on the ground/sea. She has crossed Turkey, Iran and is almost out of Pakistan. (She is in Lahore.) Sometimes she travels alone, but she typically finds travelmates for various sections of the road on the Internet. Dress code: She wants to fit in somewhat, so she buys new clothes as she travels from one culture to the next. She is adopting the most liberal local style ‘ which typically means that her head is covered, but she does not need to wear a chador or a burka. However, in some places in Iran she had to wear a chador to go to religious sites. She borrowed one from the people she was staying with. A key accessory is a (fake) wedding ring. Despite this, every other day someone she speaks 3 sentences with asks her to marry him. She began doing a (password protected) blog on TravelPod from the get go. It is in Hungarian for her fan club back home. From Turkey she wrote every other day, from Iran, once a week, but from Pakistan she can get to an internet cafe only once in two weeks. Before Pakistan she had constant problems with keyboards. On the Turkish keyboard the ‘y’ replaces the ‘i’. So she kept wrytyng lyke thys. It is really too bad that her blog is in English, because both her stories and her style are excellent.”

Already under attack for sloppy news practices, the publishing industry is now getting chewed up for fraudulent circulation tallies. Glenn Reynolds notes that blog traffic figures are readily available from multiple sources.

The Internet has changed the climate; with more tools for accountability, expectations are rising.

BTW, a couple of recent articles mentioning blog advertising in English and French.

The first blog conference I went to was in New Haven in late 2002. I was fascinated to meet David Pinto, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, Jeff Jarvis, Mickey Kaus, Jack Balkin and many others. The next conference I attended was the first BloggerCon in Boston — I met Kerry’s CTO, Dean’s head blogger Mathew Gross, David Weinberger, Josh and I caught up. I had a fantastic time speaking (and listening) at Blogtalk in Vienna last year, where nearly all the presentations were original, newly-crafted and jury approved.

But recently, the fun is fraying. Conferences seem increasingly like watching the proverbial ten blind men debate the essense of an elephant. Lots of unmatched premises and anecdotes. This post sure sounded unsettlingly familiar.

NB: when is some conference organizer finally going to take Dan Gillmore seriously when he keeps repeating — as he’s done each of the five times I’ve heard him speak — “my readers are smarter than I am” and invite his readers to speak rather than him? (Correction: replace “smarter than I am” with “know more than I do…” see comments for context.)

So it is with great trepidation (and some hope of doing better) that I’ve accepted invitations to climb onto the stage at Blogon2004 and Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex. To keep things interesting — at least for myself — I’ve resolved to agree with nobody, perhaps not even myself. All wisdom is conventional and worthy of scorn, at least for the space of a thought experiment or three.

Since 90% of blog reading occurs at work, blog readers will likely be radically undercounted by the likes of comScore and Nielsen, we can infer from reading this article. The rub:

High-traffic Internet sites often employ outside survey firms, such as Nielsen/NetRatings or comScore Media Metrix, to measure site traffic. Both use huge “panels” (comScore claims to have 1 million panelists) of computer users who, in exchange for incentives, permit the companies to track which websites they visit.

But because many companies won’t allow their workplace computers to be used for such purposes, “these panels clearly undersample at-work users,” says Richard Gordon, a professor of online journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Seems that of the sweetest voices on the Internet is back for a while at least.

Imediaconnection looks at blog readers and Emarketer does too. Emarketer created some nice graphics that beat what we were able to pull together.