I just got around to finishing my notes on our summer trip to Utah and southern Colorado. We spent a couple of great days hiking in Gunnison, cruised through Telluride, rafted on the San Juan river, then hiked all around Moab. Our favorite morning there was a tough ride up Klondike Bluffs. (If you need help, Solfun is a fantastic bet for guided mountain biking in Moab.)

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I just finished Look Homeward Angel. I originally picked up the book because several people had mentioned that it features a crazed itinerant real estate speculator. I loved its passion, rambling poetry, panoramas of Asheville and Chapel Hill, street scenes from 1910-1920, train-rides and lungers, and, most of all, for its many characters.

With its diet of quotidian family life-scenes, cameos of town characters, and recurrent musings about the passage of life and time, the book recalls Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; the connection grows undeniable when you hit the closing scene and find the main character conversing with his beloved, recently deceased brother, and then walking into the graveyard overlooking town to reflect on the difference between the living and dead.

I went to bed wondering, who borrowed from whom? Turns out Wilder wrote his book in the thirties after Wolfe’s book dominated the literary scene.

Read the rules here and then do it on Youtube.

The folks at PETA have been advertising on blogs since 2003, when most folks on Madison Avenue thought a blog was a rare gardening tool. Their most recent twist is a contest among their members to design the best blogads, which PETA will then run on select blogs. See and vote on the top ten PETA blog ad entries. As PETA puts it, “some that made us laugh, some that made us cry, and some that made us ponder why we’d never thought of that ourselves.”

Funnily enough, while many past PETA campaigns pictured scantily clad women, men are frontal and center in these ads.

From here out, I’m unsubscribing anyone who pumps their RSS feed into twitter. It’s like using a megaphone in a whisper chamber.

Bara Vaida wrote a great “state of K street and blogs” article in yesterday’s National Journal. Seeking to simplify for folks there, she summed up the incredible value blogs represent relative to traditional media.

When it comes to advertising, blogs are cheap in comparison with mainstream media. The cost of placing a prominently displayed ad on all 133 of the most popular liberal blogs for four weeks runs about $100,000, says Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, a company specializing in Web-site advertising. In comparison, The New York Times charges $142,083 for a one-day, full-page, black-and-white print ad. The Internet also provides the potential to track how many people react to an ad, known as the ‘click-through’ rate. The number of people who see broadcast or print ads is harder to measure.

Yesterday I participated in the release of IPDI’s giant survey of political influentials. (The subset of politically active folks and influentials.) Blogads sponsored the study, along with Yahoo, MSHC and others. Beside being a 45 megabyte brick of data encompassing hot button issues, magazine subscriptions, shampoo preferences, friendship patterns, favorite sports and everything else in massive appended datasets. We’ll be excavating the blog-specific questions in coming days.

At Jim’s wedding.

Jeff Jarvis, the greatest student and teacher of post-media journalism, has returned to Blogads. Huzzah.

I’ve spent today in NYC, gently lobbying one of the biggest (and smartest) PR firms and its influential guests for more ad spending on blogs. I made sure everyone here read John Aravosis’ post about the pernicious impact of blogger relations by PR firms.

Liberal non-profits, political operations, and companies interested in reaching either a progressive audience or an inside-the-beltway crowd wouldn’t think twice about spending $60,000 on a Washington Post ad, spending a good chunk of change on an ad in The Hill or Roll Call, or paying a PR firm a $20,000+ a month retainer to get their news on the blogs, among other venues (NOTE: the very best way to get me NOT to cover a story is to have a PR firm contact me). But the notion of spending $800 (or hopefully, several thousand dollars) on a blog ad gives them serious pause. Then they turn around and expect favors.