Narnia: resurrected by witch, faun, Lucy.

IMAX 3D Polar Express: astonishing scifi and gold-plated kitsch.

(Christian-motifs notwithstanding, I have trouble seeing how Narnia’s rampant animism/paganism fills churches, though.)

Just moved in last week. Feeling agoraphobic, we’ve set up in the “back” office, but will expand into the bigger space when tables (formerly in a local Chinese restaurant) get situated.

Closer view of the back office, which we’ll stuff with an old green couch and lunch table.

Looking forward from the entrance.

An advertiser on DailyKos accelerates into traditional retailing.

Ryan lives in the boonies outside Kansas City, a member of the Osage tribe. He worked as a carpenter, helped his tribe’s language department record their dying language, and built his t-shirt business on the side. Eventually, he saved enough money to buy a dKos ad (they’re not cheap). Sales took off.

Now, Ryan’s T-shirts may be picked up by Urban Outfitters.

And Audi’s audacious campaign for the A3, promoted by a sophisticated layering of BlogAds, got ink in Business Week as one of six 2005 Online Marketing Pacesetters. As you’ll recall, with less than .5% of the campaign’s total budget, BlogAds generated 29% of total results. Call Brian Clark if you want to buy some of the secret sauce.

I apologize for the admin server’s slowness today.

The bad news (and good news) is that we’ve had an unprecedented number of large orders today (surpassing our weekly average over the last six months) and the admin hamsters are gasping. More ads to come tomorrow apparently.

The undiluted good news is that Blogads 3.0 is finally in preliminary testing stages. Not sure what that means vis a vis deployment, but after more than a year of gestation, it is great to finally feel some contractions. In addition to making the admin server far swifter and robust, the new code will enable a bunch of features advertisers have begged for for AND allow for faster extensions.

A surprising number of friends emailed that they’d heard me in Robert Smith’s NPR radio piece about “the new blog networks” on Thursday.

Smith focused on Pajamas Media, but gave Blogads a short mention. As a former journalist, I chuckled listening as Smith, who has to boil things down for a mass audience, couldn’t dig into the unique stuff — PJ’s mauling by the very blogosphere it seeks to tame (see Dennis, Ann, HogonIce, and this guy) — and settled for the “news” that someone hired 70 bloggers and hopes to sell ads to Volvo. (Selling blogads since August ’02, Blogads collaborates with 900-odd blogs; Gawker owns two dozen; WeblogsInc employs 70 31; and brands like Audi, Sony, Turner, Volvo, Chrysler, Citrix, Nokia, WSJ, Road Runner, Random House, Budget Renta Car, Apple, Levis have been advertising on blogs for nearly two years.)

As for Smith’s framing metaphor, that “blog networks” resemble early TV and radio networks, I’m wagering the outcome is lots more social, fluid AND effective. Anyway, such is mass-market journalism.

As he dons his padjamas, Glenn Reynolds posted some kind words about Blogads, “a great boon to bloggers.” With competitors like this, who needs friends? Ahum. We do! So thank you especially to bloggers who are hewing to our weird and sometimes wonderful experiment in commercial collaboration. Lots more weirdness to come in ’06.

Speaking of which, we had a small party in our new office last night and should be moving in next week. Once settled in January, we’ll be hiring another one or two ad shepherds, with a new programmer on the way too. Maybe some pictures here next week.