Jonathan Glater gave legal bloggers a nice write up today in the New York Times, including a mention of Blogads.com.

Also, Farah Miller, auteur of Random House’s many blogads, last night wrote me that she was going to “blogad” something. She apologized for being tired and using blogad as a verb… but I’m amused by the usage.

Finally a note for Blogads geeks: we’re (finally!) now tallying clicks on intext links like in this this ad. Link, link, link…

I got a chuckle out of Nick Denton’s analysis of Jason Calcanis’s rumored sale of WeblogInc to AOL.

The whole point about blogs is that they’re not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It’s way too early. Like a decade too early.

Yesterday, in fact, I asked Jason what makes his company not just another publisher that happens to use blog software. His reply: “no editors!”

Did Al Gore just say “digital brownshirts”? Something like “they dispatch a team of digital brownshirts to harrass members of the press who dare to disagree with them.”

I’m sitting here at the American Press Institute. Al was funny and engaged the audience for the first five minutes, but now is lecturing.

To narrow down our choices, we’ve focused on submissions in which the word “blogads” is prominent yet spacially compact, legible if not crisp.

We’ll be choosing one of the following three logos. Please speak now or forever hold your peace. Which would look best on our site? (Click the “see in blogads” link to get an impression.) Which would be punchy on a bumpersticker or t-shirt?

1) Carm Hodzic’s Botox. A punchy image loved by many, though perhaps a little nicked.

2) The orange oval created by Kent Smith, a Blogads customer and t-shirt peddler.

3) Scriptive by Karl Frankowski is a staff favorite, though I personally don’t love the colors.

Thank you to the other finalists, particularly those who’ve been so generous with their advice and suggestions. I’m astonished by the level of participation and engagement among logo designers. Just as a record-setter’s pace depends on fast times run by competitors, the strength of the communal effort has made a substantial difference. We aren’t where we thought we’d be, but I’m very happy with the result, both in terms of the logo and the process of building it.

I spent Friday in Atlanta doing my last AMA blog thing. The highlight of the day was hanging out with two of our smartest customers.

I went to lunch with Richard Turner, auteur of Turner’s Vote Carrie and “Pie fight” blogads. Chowing at The Varsity — I downed a chocolate shake and diabolical onion rings — we mused about the buzz-making joys of buying ads on both sides of the ideological fence and the minute difference between hitting a solid double and a bases-loaded home run.

At 5PM, I caught up with Seth Miller, who designed those ads. We powered through two sweetwaters and a whirlpool of ideas, which Seth documents. Seth (another platypus) recently created a CafePress shirt after clicking on a blogad on Buzzmachine. Made me realize that CafePress needs to feature new, up to the minute, blogger-created T-shirts in its own blogads. Don’t tell people to create cool/newsie shirts, make them envy shirts being created in real time.

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.