Though the thing was apparently fixed yesterday, one of our image servers seems to continue to be on the blink, which is having spill over effects on the other image servers. This should be fixed overnight.

To celebrate the fourth, we attended a parade run (twice) around a tiny lake in the hills of western North Carolina, then watched hula hoop/greasy pole-climbing/pigcalling contests. I won a dollar wagering on the winning hula-hooper but lost it backing the wrong pole-climber. After dinner, watched square dancers on a couple of abandoned tennis courts. Walking home, we squashed lightning bugs.

Last week’s events included canoeing on the New River (America’s oldest) with Wahoo, watching Horn in the West, lots of fiddling at BRAG and pottery at Montreat. The highlights: waving sparklers around a fiddler stoked camp-fire, singing Amazing Grace, hearing a young fiddler riff on Summertime. Despite occassional patches of sun, the week was soaked in fragrant green fog.

Meanwhile, Matt Welch compares the blog boom to the dotcom bubble and foresees tears: “Once the funny money was gone, so too were the celebrity journalists.”

And Steve Locke builds a pool pool as his neighbor relives a bike trip across America from 1995. 1995.

I’m on vacation through July 5, hopefully (yes, correct usage) practicing on a new trombone when not hiking near Blowing Rock NC. Give Anthony or Peter or Miklos a shout if you need anything.

Congratulations to the four Blogads sellers who made Time’s list of “top 50 coolest sites” this year! Want to buy four of Time’s coolest sites in four clicks? Here’s your first click.

And contratulations to Nick Denton for producing three blogs on Time’s list.

Hot damn, check out the gorgeous new design of DailyKos. Blogads are, literally, center-stage. I’ll wager a pitcher of beer this look becomes a template for lots of other blogs AND sites.

The amusements of redesign… Kos writes: “One quick note: people keep complaining about the orange links and white background. Umm, guys? That hasn’t changed from the last version.”

PhRMA’s new blogad functions as an ad-as-blog by linking to supporting arguments by Rudy Guiliani and www.Powerlineblog.com Check Technorati or Blogpulse and you’ll discover that PhRMA’s position has a number of vehement blog supporters. As with focus groups, smart advertisers can pre-screen their messages against what bloggers are already saying about their issue.

Update: via Jarvis, I just found this great article in today’s WSJ about exactly this blog-watching by corporations

Now, a growing number of marketers are using new technology to analyze blogs and other “consumer-generated media” — a category that includes chat groups, message boards and electronic forums — to hear what is being said online about new products, old ad campaigns and aging brands. Purveyors of the new methodology and their clients say blog-watching can be cheaper, faster and less biased than such staples of consumer research as focus groups and surveys. …

Blog-monitoring services typically charge big companies $30,000 to $100,000 a year. They say their technology goes beyond basic tools, such as keyword searches or counting links from one Web site to another, both features available at no charge from online services such as Technorati.com and Yahoo’s Buzz Index.

Jeff Jarvis is annoyed by Dell’s service, proclaims Dell sucks, Dell lies. Matt Galloway suggests tracking the relative impact of Jeff’s rant in Blogpulse.

I’ve bought seven Dell laptops through the years for myself and Blogads and required no service on any of them. Extrapolate from my experience and conclude that Dells are amazing. (Though I’m obviously unqualified to talk about Dell’s corrections department.)

Matt Welch interviews Derek Sivers, the guy who runs CDBaby:

Like right now, I meet lots of 30-something musicians, who maybe spent their teens and 20s wanting to be a rock star, and now are kind of starting to think, ‘Well, maybe I can make a good living just putting out my music directly and doing it on my own.’ But they kind of had to fall over to that way of thinking. What I think will be really interesting is, imagine being a 13-year-old musician right now, growing up surrounded by this mentality of ‘Fuck the label, the label sucks, indie is cool, go direct, never sign over your rights to somebody else’! Imagine growing up in that mentality, and what that’s going to look like in 10 years!

NYT

Very intense exercise, as little as 12 minutes total over a two-week period, can double endurance capacity, according to a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Sixteen physically active college students ages 21 to 27 took part in the study. Eight were tested two weeks apart with no training in between. The other eight performed “sprint interval training” – they did four to seven 30-second sprints on a stationary bicycle, resting four minutes between each sprint. A researcher encouraged them verbally to pedal as hard as possible. They performed six of these sessions over two weeks.

The results were surprising. The average improvement in cycle endurance, measured by time to fatigue, was about 100 percent (from 26 minutes at the beginning of training to 51 minutes at the end). The group that did not train showed no improvement.

This kind of training, at least in its most demanding form, may not be for everyone. “We’re not suggesting that totally sedentary people jump on a bicycle and start pedaling their hearts out,” said Martin J. Gibala, the senior author of the paper, “and we’re not suggesting that people do only six minutes of exercise per week. But interval training is not just for elite athletes. Studies have shown that the elderly, and even people with coronary artery disease, can benefit from a properly supervised interval training program.”

Dr. Gibala, who is a professor in the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, suggested that even people whose only exercise is walking might improve their endurance by simply walking a bit faster for alternating intervals of time. “The main message,” he said, “is that people can get away with less exercise time if they are willing to trade duration for intensity.”

Researchers are uncertain why the training has such a big effect, but it probably stimulates changes in muscle function and blood circulation that increase endurance by metabolizing oxygen more efficiently.

Here is Blogads’comment on proposed FEC regulation of bloggers.. I thought about it for two months and pulled it together in the last twelve hours, amid peddling ads. Please forgive any flagrant grammar or spelling errors.