Memorable moments: “connections and food” in the big tent; hanging with Welch and Flynn at the Casa Reason; talking Pumas with Tribbett, markets with Goddard, baseball with Kos, newspapers with SusanG; watching Michelle Obama rivet “see” into key transitions in her speech, despite the teleprompter’s script; hearing a yahoo standing on the corner shouting “Obama’s too inexperienced to be President” … this from a dude who sounded like he struggled to get out of 8th grade; buying “Born 2 Win” t-shirts and seeing the 70ish woman beside me hold the hand of the the young woman selling the t-shirts and say, “honey, your generation can do so much.”

I regret not being in Denver tonight but hope to watch it on TV.

Blogads admin pages will be unavailable Aug. 30-Sept 1 as we perform significant upgrades to our servers and software.

Active ads will serve throughout, but no ad purchases will occur, currently running ads won’t expire or be editable, and adstrips won’t be modifiable. Ads already to scheduled to start during the period will go live Saturday and be extended over the originally purchased period.

We apologize for the downtime.

I’m in Denver plugging into the house generously shared by Matt Welch and the team from Reason. In a couple of minutes, I’m headed over to see how big The Big Tent is.

Congrations to Brian Russell, who has signed the lease for his coworking space in Carrboro just down the street from us.

The four week moving average for initial unemployment claims rose again this week, notching up from 438,500 in the August 9 week to 445,750 last week.

The headlines say this week’s claims fell 13,000 versus to 432,000, but that’s just because last weeks number was revised up to 445,000.

This time a year ago, 326,000 people filed for unemployment.

CuteOverload got lots of coverage today in a number-packed article by Dan Mitchell in the New York Times, with a guest appearance by blog advertising network Blogads.com. Kudos to Mitchell for packing so much into the article and cleaving so strongly to the numbers.

Wow, I hadn’t realized how much Obama was rocking Twitter. John Accarrino has the numbers.

Politico.com is a huge success, writes Lindsey McPherson in the American Journalism Review. “In May, it had 3.5 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Editor & Publisher ranked Politico the 10th-most-visited newspaper site that month.”

The site IS highly regarded and highly trafficked. But read another way, Politico is a raging bonfire of greenbacks, a financial failure. Turns out, Politico.com piggybacks a tiny print publication — 27,000 copies published just three days a week — that happens to generate 150% more revenue than the site. As Ezra Klein sums up the situation:

Were they actually web only, they’d be losing catastrophic amounts of money. If The Politico was an experiment to see if people would read more stuff about politics, it was a success. But insofar as it sought a new business model that would bring economic viability to online reportage, it’s as adrift as everyone else.

A whole raft of aspiring publishing moguls are lined up expecting to get rich on politics this year — it’s gonna be interesting to see how many players are left come January 15, 2009 when they’ve made moderate profits (a few) or (mostly) abysmal losses and face an 18 month drought into the next election cycle.

Did anyone notice that the revisions in initial unemployment insurance claims today pushed the four week moving average up to 440,500, up 19,500 from last week.

Anything above 400k is regarded as recession territory. We just transitioned from teetering on the edge of a recession to plummeting.

Here’s my post in February on the topic, when claims were at 375,000.

Here’s an interesting dissection of the absence of a blogging bubble in the UK.