We’ve gotten the revised submissions. We’ve got a favorite and want to first hear what you have to say. See the top eleven here as well as the unrevised finalists further down that page. What do you think?

The total is in. Blogads donated by the Advertise Liberally network raised $181,548.73 for the Red Cross’s Katrina relief efforts. Hats off to Kari Chisholm who ground out the technical details to make it happen and Chris Bowers who mobilized the network to run the ads. Social-network geeks can add this effort to the chapter on speed of light grassroots mobilization. I should also mention that John Hawkins pulled his conservative network into donating ads for MercyCorp; unfortunately, no tally was kept for total contributions and the pitch did not specifically address conservatives.

The WSJ put Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, aka www.gofugyourself.com, front and center yesterday.

The pair decided to share their opinions with friends on a blog as a way to blow off steam from their day jobs at “Growing Up Gotti” and “America’s Next Top Model.” They registered for a free Internet account, lifted photos from a variety of Web sites and started posting reviews.

A few ground rules quickly evolved. Only famous people would be featured, and comments would be restricted to clothing and appearance. Bad language and graphic commentary on things like bras and underwear were fine. Most of all, the two women wanted to focus on what stars wore to events at which they knew they would be seen and photographed.

Shankar Gupta, reporting for MediaPost on a panal at OMMA East yesterday, listened closely and heard something shocking:

Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for Audi, titled “The Art of the Heist.” Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds–a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign’s landing page.

For folks who aren’t reading the ad trade press, that was a giant eight-figure campaign and much ballyhooed, so this is a particularly astonishing number. Brian said that this weird “hand-made” ad, shot with a Treo phone, worked particularly well and led to a re-alignment of the creative direction of the campaign.

Update I should note that the A3 campaign won a bunch of Mixx awards on Wednesday night. If you go to day 10 of this timeline, you’ll read that “The media cost for the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost of one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo. The blog ad appeared on sites such as metafilter, lockergnome and dailykos.” Tie it all together: thanks to some stunning creative and savvy choice of blogs, 29% of the campaign’s traffic was driven for the cost of a banner on Yahoo.

Parenting tip:

Children receive all response — shouting and hitting as well as kind words and hugs — as affirmation of the behavior that elicits it, so you can best shape the result you want not primarily with negative interventions like punishing misconduct but by using praise and other rewards to reinforce behavior that replaces it.

I’m at OMMA East, in a gloriously sparkling September sun. I heard Steve Rubel, of Cooper Katz PR, say “I don’t read Ad Age anymore, I read Steve Hall’s Adrants.” And I heard Wenda Harris Millard Chief Sales Officer of Yahoo say:

If you look at the rise of the blogs, at first it sounded like a horror movie then it turns out to be a really phenomenal expression of self. It is a phenomena that marketers really need to understand and wrestle with.”

And floating randomly in the crowd, someone said in all seriousness, “I invented the community space, you know Friendster, Myspace, that stuff.”

Karl Marx may have been a lousy futurist, but he’d be a decent new media analyst…

The various stages of development in the division of labor are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labor determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labor…. As soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic….

Sorry to shift back and forth, but to consolidate comments and thinking on one page, I’ve put the final piece of news over on the logo manifesto page. If you are interested in the logo collaboration, go there.

OK, a stage we didn’t anticipate, a list of finalists. Just too many interesting ideas and executions to grapple with. But also the realization that the comments contain many vital insights. (I for one loved Carm Hodzic’s Typewriter until I realized that it did strongly echo those tiny RSS tags.)

So I’ve published nine logos for us to focus on. Each seems minutely improvable in its own way, either in colors or emphasis or readability. If the creators would like to submit an amendment or two, this would be welcome. Write me and I’ll send you the appropriate URL.

As you can see, my colleagues and I selected logos that are predominantly simple and rough-hewn. Viktor’s “see logo live” functionality pushed us hard in this direction. And, to make biases clear, we’ve leaned unlitteral, avoiding illustrations of writing, typing and speaking. Some of the finalists invoke those acts, but none portray them.

The comments so far provide good insights about how logos might improve. In this go round, the only comments we’ll publish will be focused on “how to improve this logo.” I hope creative criticism will push us to perfection.

I am very grateful to all the people who created a logo that is not in this list. There’s a treasure trove of creativity here. It will make a fascinating dig for some design archeologist in 100 years. I hope you like what you see and will continue to contribute ideas and support our collaboration.

As a newspaper reader, I’m saddened, but as a prognosticator, I have to ask: why has it taken this long? From the WSJ:

Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine says Federated Department Stores Inc., a big newspaper advertiser, has started to shift spending from newspapers to direct mail and electronic media, such as television. Two early forecasts predict a small increase in holiday retail sales this year, as spending could be hurt by high gasoline prices, lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina and a lackluster job market.

Movie studios, long a mainstay advertiser, have been cutting back, as well. Through July, motion-picture advertising in the top 60 newspaper markets was down 9.3%, compared with the same period a year ago, according to TNS Media Intelligence, an ad-tracking service.

Ad revenue accounts for about three-fourths of total revenue for newspaper publishers. As a result, even small changes in ad revenue can produce big changes to the bottom line.

The twin blows to retail and movie ads are sapping third-quarter results for newspapers across the industry. “I keep referring to it as carnage,” Ms. Fine said. “All we’ve done for the last week and a half is lower [earnings] estimates.”

And she doesn’t mention the soon-to-vanish real-estate ads or the impact of the coming recession. At 50,000 bloggers need to become self-sufficient fast to fill the hole left when the newspaper industry spontaneously combusts.

Some prior thoughts on the financial viability of the newspaper industry.