In August, lots more political advertising online than previously estimated.

And with Hollywood scheming to forbid us do anything with pixels and bytes but pay for them, IPaction, a new PAC, seems like a great idea.

Bloggers are “are to journalism what ticks are to elephants.” And “a lot of the attack against the mainstream media is coming from bloggers, which is like astronomers being assaulted by people who swear that aliens force them to have sex with Martians.” And “Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.”

Just when it seems like everyone loves blogs, it is great to see some people haven’t yet drunk the cool-aid — still some market-share left to win!

Visit this beta version of our new order page. Takes a few seconds to load, but basically lets you do lots of tricky blog selection in your browser without recourse to our admin server. To see what I mean, first select a bunch of blogs. Then click “view only selected blogs.” Zing! Then, if you want, choose a sorting mechanism, for example, sports, and keep selecting blogs. Click “View only selected blogs” again and, zing!, you can see the total list you’ve selected so far.

Still trying to figure out how to make it obvious for users, but once you get the hang of it, this is a joy to use. Still to come — advanced searching with lots of categories in play. Your feedback welcome to info(at)blogads.com.

You may have noticed blogads for georgesoros.com, which promises some blogging by the man himself later this week. Wonder how many other magnates have been smart enough to secure their own URLs? Check out billclinton.com, jerryford.com, jimmycarter.com, billgates.com and punchsulzberger.com. Only one of those guys controls his own URL… guess which one? (Don’t even try DonaldTrump.com, leads to a hijack screen.)

As Soros’ fellow Hungarian expat andygrove.com said, “only the paranoid survive.”

Earthquakes at Mount Saint Helens. (This is the kind of great link Drudge coughs up in tweny seconds that takes corp-media hours to link.)

Great to see Matthew Klam’s profile of bloggers Markos Moulitsas, Josh Marshall, Ana Marie Cox, Duncan Black and Jerome Armstrong in the NYTimes magazine today.

Some Kossites’ cavil at Klam’s carping, but (as a former magazine writer) I think the profiles are not unkind and the free publicity fantastic. The first rule of magazine writing is “kill your subject or see your story killed,” so Klam had to highlight sex appeal and blogger foibles to get the story past his editors. Second, the NYTimes is profiling people who it must, finally and fully, recognize as competitors, so unadulterated praise was unlikely.

Update: a couple of friends have asked: why wasn’t Blogads.com mentioned? As portrayed in the mag, money seems to flow magically into blogger pockets — “The blog ad money had fallen from the sky, and it had saved him.” … or…”Since February, with the explosion of blog traffic and the invention of blog ads as a revenue source, a few elite bloggers have found themselves on the receiving end of a Howitzer of money, as much as $10,000 a month.”

It’s some kind of virgin birth, no mechanism described or even imagined. I had a good chat with Klam, so the omission wasn’t due to ignorance. I’ve also heard, from Amy Langfield, that Klam mentioned Blogads and me on CNN. My guess is that digging into the mechanics of the easy-as-blogging advertising revolution would have been too complex for this personality-driven article. Still, it’s a shame the simple URL www.blogads.com wasn’t included, since the URL is the funnel for the magical cash Klam exclaims over.

Bloggers, collaborating to pool advertisers just as they pool news and readers, are driving a commercial revolution as well as an information revolt. Rather than depending on publishers to earn their cash, bloggers can set their own rates and play their own game. Rather than watching publishers funnel off 90% of their cash, bloggers can grab the lion’s share for themselves. Writing about reporters getting end-run to the news by bloggers is well enough, but perhaps the commercial end-run not a story the NYTimes magazine wants to stress with readers?

Think bloggers are still commercial small fry? Bloggers selling blogads are on track to do 75 million impressions in September. (That’s up from 5 million last December.) To put that number in perspective, that is 1/6 NYTimes.com’s total monthly impressions and 1/3 of monthly traffic for WashingtonPost.com.

Update II: thank you to bloggers Steve Gilliard, Duncan Black and Markos Moulitsas for writing so generously about my role in the blogging revolution.

In today’s Mediapost, Kate Kaye does a nice profile of Blogads code guru Tamas Decsi, capturing his humor, serenity and appreciation of life’s surprises.

Fun to see the paper I used to write for in the 90s cover Rathergate and blogging.

Here’s a good snapshot of the latest iteration of Hungary’s political ambiguities by Nick Thorpe.

Congratulations to Roland Piquepaille for getting written up in the Times of London.

The Slashdot swarm discusses political blogs. (Thank you Csaba!)

Martin Hitz covers blogs and blogads in Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Finally, be sure to look for Matt Klam’s article about political bloggers in this Sunday’s NYTimes magazine.

Spent Monday-Wednesday meeting with bloggers and advertisers, then wandering the sun-girded grid of New York City. Perfect fall weather. Flew at 5.40 AM Monday and returned at 8.30PM yesterday, so got in three full days for the price of two. My aging feet were beaten at the end of each day. Great bibimbab at Hanbat at 35 W 35th Street. We stood in line twenty minutes at TKTS for half-priced tickets to “I am my own wife,” one actor doing a dozen roles, exploring the paradoxes of reporting (on subjects or friends), collaboration (with regimes or friends) and collecting (anecdotes, furniture or grips on reality.) I was appalled by Wooster and Greene Streets, which were filled with galleries a decade ago but now look like our local mall, all J. Crewe and Occitane. Fanelli’s bar is a lonely rowboat of authentic grime amid flotillas of chrome clothes racks and suede sofas.

(BTW, congratulations to Mike Giles, who has just sold his project Furl.net to LookSmart. Usually, I’m a late adopter — although I had a laptop in 1991, still no PDA or digital camera or Ipod — but I was one of Furl’s first beta users/reviewers.

Back from Camp Kanata, where we canoed (7 times!), played street hockey, shot pellet guns, shot arrows, put-putted and caught two turtles, a Katydid and a tree frog. Now, to pack my bags for three days of meetings in NY with advertisers and breakfast Wednesday with Alan Brody. I’m hoping to sneak into a museum or two in the late afternoons.

In passing, I got a chuckle out of Glenn Reynold’s new FAQ on Insta-blogads.

Taco has gained 10 pounds since he joined us in August.

French cafes, down to 60,000 from 150,000 fifteen years ago, plan to create an institute to address the problem. The institute will seek to “improve service, comfort levels, products and hygiene.” (Isn’t TV the issue, as in America?)

If we don’t get flooded, we’re headed to Camp Kanata this weekend.

A new blog for history buffs: www.historywire.com.

Amazing.