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.

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.

I had some fun bashing the idea of “consumer generated media,” the current catch-all for blogs, podcasts and forums — in this MediaPost column today.

Taegan Goddard launches a traffic drive.

Alexander Graham Bell’s original patent for the telephone was titled an Improvement in Telegraphy, which brings to mind Mark 2:21: ‘No-one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and so are the skins.’

Matt Welch listens to the world’s greatest deliberative body… mumble, stutter and drool.

Rereading Cluetrain yesterday, I noticed for the first time thesis #15: “In just a few more years, the current homogenized ‘voice’ of business’the sound of mission statements and brochures’will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.” The corporate “we” is dead. Long live you and me.

Bill meets Napoleon.

To help us focus, we’ve narrowed the list of potential logos down to 30. We’re very grateful for all the submissions. There were lots of other fantastic ideas, some arguably better than what you see here. This is just the list of logos that we think might fit (with some shrinking or streching) our format and philosophy. Don’t wait until we’ve picked one to say, “Gee that looks just like XYZ’s logo.” Tell us now, please!

In this morning’s MediaPost, Shankar Gupta does a great round up of the surge in TV blogads.

Lauren Prestileo, the national publicist for PBS’s “American Experience” series–which has featured biographies of RFK, Castro, and Kinsey–said BlogAds offered a cheap way to target ads to politically-minded consumers for public broadcasting.

For example, BlogAds displayed 12 million impressions for the PBS Boston affiliate’s documentary about Kinsey, which aired in February. “That’s amazing exposure right there,” she said. “To get 12 million impressions with print would be very, very expensive, and it would be a much less targeted audience.”

“We don’t have a ton of resources, obviously,” she added. “There aren’t a lot of places where you can spend $1,500–or up to $5,000–and get that much exposure and to such a targeted audience. Online advertising in some regards can be prohibitively expensive, at least when you’re dealing with public programming and non-profits.” …

Richard Turner, the senior vice president of interactive marketing at TBS, said that the high return on investment, and the ability to reach the coveted “influencers,” is what attracted Turner to the proposition of advertising on blogs. “They tend to be an efficient media buy,” he said. “They are effective at reaching opinion leaders, or at least opinionated people.” TBS generally combined promotion on blogs with rich media ads and search marketing, Turner said.

Jessica Smith, a publicist for interactive media at PBS’ “Frontline/World,” agreed that the appeal of blog advertising for her show was the audience that it allowed her to target–people who already show an enthusiasm for the type of program she was hawking. “Blog readers are the kind of people who are interested in current events and news, but they’re also interested in people,” she said. “That’s what we do with Frontline/World–it’s personal stories from around the world.”

Another datapoint in this trend is AVP, whose initial trickle of ads turned into a gusher as the volleyball season progressed.

How many of you heard Senator John Cornyn (R TX) quoting the Volokh Conspiracy in questioning John Roberts?

Well, I happened to be looking at my computer last night, and one of the blogs, and it’s always frightening to see ‘ to put your name in a search and look at the ways it’s mentioned. I suggest you don’t do that, if you haven’t, until this hearing is over, because this hearing is a subject of a lot of activity and interest in the blogosphere.

One of these blogs said that your comparison of a judge to a baseball umpire reminded him of an old story…

That was Cornyn’s first question. Want your message to be seen by at least one Senator? Start here.

I heard Garrison Keilor recommending catsup’s “natural soothing agents” this weekend to sooth bloggers’ frayed nerves, then read about this spat he’s having with a blogger.

Funnily enough if you search Google for “Google Blog Search” you won’t find its new service unless you look in the ads on the right.

All our meters are back up at full-throttle, so it looks like the ride is over. Thank you to those of you who were patient… and thank you to those of you who weren’t patient. We’ll be making good two days tomorrow for advertisers.