Having screwed around with Yahoo Pipes and other RSS tools and found them never quite doing exactly what we needed, we’ve built a new tool to robustly combine and permutate feeds. If you’re interested in helping us test the tool, drop me a line.

Thanks to a pile of new code written in Budapest over the last 3 months, advertisers can now run multiple ad versions in a single day, assigning a weighting to each version. Advertisers can use this feature to keep ads fresh for readers or to test which version is most effective. (If you’re a current advertiser, click “versions” link on an already purchased ad and you can start juggling creative!)

We’ll be letting advertisers know about this and updating our Youtube overview of Blogads, but if you’re a blogger, feel free to post about this new feature to get the word out!

Ads make TV more pleasant: First:

In one experiment, Nelson, along with Tom Meyvis and Jeff Galak of New York University, had 87 undergraduates watch an episode of the sitcom “Taxi.” Half watched it as it was originally broadcast, with commercials for the Jewelry Factory Store and the law office of Michael Brownstein, among other ads. The other half watched the show straight through, without commercials.

After the show was over, the students rated how much they enjoyed it, using an 11-point scale and comparing it with the sitcom “Happy Days,” which they were all familiar with. Those who saw “Taxi” without commercials preferred “Happy Days”, but those who saw the original show, Jewelry Factory Store and all, preferred “Taxi” by a significant margin.

In similar experiments, using other video clips and a variety of interruptions, the results were the same: People rated their experiences as more enjoyable with commercials, no matter their content, or other disruptions. The effect wasn’t limited to watching TV; interrupting a massage also heightened people’s enjoyment, one experiment found.

The opposite was true for irritating experiences, like listening to vacuum cleaner noise: A break only made it seem worse, they found.

Second

Skittles.com redirects to its Facebook page. Though their Twitter experiment raised a few eyebrows, this one is fun for a day.

Michael Lewis weaves another wonderful narrative explaining another sordid, smelly corner of the meltdown:

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Keep climbing.

In the week ending Feb. 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 667,000, an increase of 36,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 631,000. The 4-week moving average was 639,000, an increase of 19,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 620,000.

Floyd Norris reports:

The government said this week that net purchases of [long term] securities fell to $412.5 billion in 2008, less than half the 2007 level and the lowest annual total since 1999, when the federal government was running a budget surplus.

Money did come in, but it was diverted into the safest investment around, albeit one with almost no expectation of profit, Treasury bills. Overseas investors increased their holdings of those securities by $456 billion, an unprecedented flow.

Relying on foreign investors to fund our deficit is not unlike running a Ponzi scheme. It’s fine as long as new money comes in, but when the money flow stops, we’re effed. As the chart below shows, we’re now addicted to foreigners’ short term financing.

Some of the best reporting in the NYT has been the micro-histories by life-style reporters. Today’s story about the upper East Side restaurant Sette Mezzo is another great snapshot. The restaurant, which serves $40 for pasta and $30 for salad and water, is the family canteen for the likes of Si and Donald Newhouse, Tom Tisch, Jonathan Tisch, William Lauder, Saul Steinberg, George Soros, Lily Safra, Leon Black, Michael Schulhof, Mike Nichols, Donald Marron. Cash only. (Or you can throw it on your monthly tab.)

Even here, though, the recession’s cool breeze is blowing.

starting in November, when fresh black truffles arrive, they can be added to any item at $50 for the first flurry of shavings (subsequent shavings are discounted). White truffles bring any entree price up to $200. “I always cover the top,” Mr. Mania said, adding that at a certain other Italian restaurant, “they give you three slices.”

Not that there have been many takers lately. “Nobody ordered truffles this year,” Mr. Esposito added. “It must be the economy.”

I was wrong to that the Times isn’t conversing. Here’s some chat-back from another NY institution, the 92nd Street Y Tribeca. (Thank you Ken!)