Though moderator Matt Bai said the presidential candidate seating on stage at the YKos convention was random, it seemed anything but. It went like this: Gravel, Richardson, Dodd, MCJoan (Kos frontpager), Matt Bai (journalist), Edwards, Clinton, Obama, Kucinich.

This meant Edwards, Clinton and Obama just just feet from each other, chairs angled inward, with each person’s sighs, stiffenings and gesticulations radiated into the other’s space. Nicole, Bryan and I squeezed into the front row on the right, just yards from the power-triad.

The contenders’ physical proximity and the energized crowd put this debate a notch ahead of choreographed TV debates. The air reverberated with psychic concussions — it felt like we were ringside at a boxing match.

Clinton offered a poised performance, keeping her cool and sounding well-studied and Presidential. Though the lobbiest contribution questions that have dominated press coverage were thrown with knockout force, Clinton somehow rope-a-doped away from them.

Obama was poorly primed on camera management; he delivered 90% of his answers to Bai rather than the audience and camera, which meant that the projections on the two big screens flanking the stage were from just behind his left ear. He sounded wooden and off-kilter on some answers, I thought.

I was blown away by Edwards’ raw passion, which often verged on outright anger.
I haven’t seen any press or bloggers mention this. He sat on the edge of his seat, his face often tensed as he listened to questions and answers. Sometimes his foot jiggled, several times he slapped his leg while listening to another candidate’s answer. He nodded and applauded other candidate’s statements on several occasions. He jabbed his hands and thrust his shoulders when talking.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer and its impact on Edwards and their family; I wonder whether mortality’s head-butt, coming 11 years after their son died, hasn’t awakened some animal instinct to fight, as though Elizabeth’s life depends on it. Edwards energy and anger were almost desperate yesterday. Having decided to invest their remaining life together in this race, he does not want to look back in five years and regret having pulled any punches.

Here’s some footage:

The presidential debates seem to have convinced journalists that the netroots have arrived. Here’s journalist Ron Fournier‘s wrap:

Gone are the days when candidates and political parties could talk to passive voters through mass media, largely controlling what messages were distributed, how the messages went out and who heard them. The Internet has helped create millions of media outlets and given anyone the power to express an opinion or disseminate information in a global forum, and connect with others who have similar interests.

Gina said there were only seven sponsors last year versus this years’ 40 — I’m proud that Blogads was there last year.

Yesterday, we did a brainstorming session with bloggers and advertisers and, when possible, will be implementing their suggestions in coming weeks. Will send out a summary note tomorrow.

David Weinberger has instructions on how we should honor Doc as he turns 60.

The New York Times has a tortured history with blogs. I’m not talking about NYT’s love hate relationship with blogs as media, but about the paper’s difficulty settling on a standard word for what one early Times article called “something called a blog.” Times’ stand-ins range from “weblog” to “Internet web log.” Is there no AP or Times style-guide yet for blog?

Mireya Navarro got it right with “blog” in her profile of Perez yesterday.

“Blog” shows up in 2029 articles in an archive search of Times stories, with half of those usages occurring since last June.

Here’s a chronology Times’ usage of “blog.”
2001: 1 article, a short mention in “business briefs.”
2002: 13 articles.
2003: 65 articles.
2004: 136 articles.
2005: 257 articles.
2006: 734 articles.
2007: 568 articles.

That’s a pretty steep curve and shows no sign of abating. Though at some point it will have to flatten out since “blog” can’t replace every verb and noun in the Times.

Sadly, other terminology crops up from time to time.

The conceptually redundant “Internet blog” has made several appearances this year, most recently in a July 15 Josh Barbanel story mentioning the blog Brownstoner.

The alphabetically redundant “Web blog” has appeared seven times, most recently on April 7 in a Liz Robbins story.

The acceptable “weblog” shows up in 91 articles, most recently June 11.

The Times likes the de-portmaneaued “web log,” which pops up 295 in a search of the Times’ archives, including five usages in ’07.

The good news: it’s been a couple of years since the Times rolled it all together into “Internet web log.”

Here’s the blog distribution among Times’ sections as of July 29, 2007.

Some other words to watch for in the Times. “Social media” has appeared in 16 articles. “Search engine marketing,” the burgeoning industry that’s transforming marketing, has been used in only 20 articles.

While “Google” has appeared in 3392 articles, the two engines of its huge financial success have gotten much less coverage: “Adwords” (22) and “Adsense” (27).

Two long and balanced profiles of bloggers this weekend in the press.

Mireya Navarro writes in the Perez Hilton “has become a hard-to-ignore Hollywood player.”

And in the FT, Sam Apple took an exhaustive look exhaustive look at Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo and concluded “Marshall has been at the forefront of a series of important stories.”

Just got ruined. We used to vacation here in the summers. There’s no prettier, calmer place than Lake Bohinj. Now, it turns out one of the cabins we walked by each morning on our way to the lake has been bought by McCartney-ex Heather Mills. We’ve talked every summer about going back. Don’t delay doing the things you love.

We took a 6am flight, then spent Saturday afternoon watching the Cubs v Diamondbacks. Great game, but the Cubs lost 3-2. Then walked south a couple of miles. Then to Shaw’s Crab House, then back to hotel to read Harry Potter. Sunday to the Museum of Science and Industry. We flew in the jet simulator, did the mediocre CSI exhibit, enjoyed the gears exhibit. Then to Millennium Park to watch the mirrored blog and the glass-cube waterfall. Because of track repairs, we had to sprint through the airport but missed our flight by two minutes. Scored Hilton room for $100 via Priceline.

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Gawker rounds them up and down .

Gossip & media blog pioneer Gawker has posted a long and winding exclamation about PerezHilton‘s “seemingly astronomical traffic numbers.” (Here’s the post.)

While there’s lots of bated-breath innuendo, Gawker’s analysis boils down to:
a) gee, 100 million impressions a month sounds like a lot. (At least ten times Gawker.com’s traffic, apparently.)
b) web analysis firms Nielsen/Netratings and Comscore guestimates of Perez’s US-only page impressions are lower.
c) gee, 100 million impressions a month sounds like a lot.
d) extrapolating from Comscore’s tally for unique visitors (US and abroad?), you’d need fully 26 visits a month to justify the 100 million impressions.
e) the only source for Perez’s traffic is Blogads.com.

Some Gawker commenters were bemused: “i feel like you just tried to explain wikipedia to my mom. why is this here?” Sensing simmering jealousy, another offered a hug: “Gawker, you are SO hotter than Perez. He may get more page views, but you’re way better looking. And a better cuddler, too.” Another sympathised, “This is some real inside baseball. My blog gets 200 visitors and 300 page views a day. My head hurts imagining all those other zeroes.” One fingered Gawker’s owner, Nick Denton, as the author, rather than the bylined “Doree.” (I couldn’t find Doree among Gawker’s Facebook peeps.)

The bottom line is that Perez’s page impressions are real. He’s now doing 5 million impressions on good days. That’s what our servers, which tally each time we serve a ad-filled javascript to a human who visits his pages, show.

Gawker writes: “…just how does Perez manage to rack up even that many page views anyway? By the ComScore numbers, each visitor would have to be looking at about 26 pages…”

Gasp. Think 26 visits per reader per month is unbelievable? Sadly for America’s employers, it’s likely many Perez readers refresh 26 times a week. Perez is addictive and his readers are insanely loyal. Ask your Perez-reading colleagues how many times they check the blog. Per hour.

So, what’s up with Comscore and Nielsen? As Gawker notes, their estimates are only for US traffic. Extrapolating from the lowest estimate, Gawker comes up with 55 million global impressions. (Gawker neglects to extrapolate from the higher estimate, Comscore’s, which would yield 80 million global impressions monthly.)

Why give credence to two services who have a nearly 50% variance between their estimates — Nielsen/Netrating’s 33 million US impressions versus Comscore 48 million? As opposed to Blogads servers’ methodical bean-counting, their traffic estimates are based on extrapolations of extrapolations. Why extrapolate from a sample only or 30,000 or 2 million people, when you can instead count the real thing?

We know that Comscore and Nielsen’s numbers are overweighted by at-home audiences, since that’s where they find folks willing to take their surveys and/or tolerate their traffic-tracking software installations on their computers. This at-home skew leads to lots of problems because, as our server logs show, the vast majority of blog reading gets done during the workday. (Like you, right now, right?)

Further discrediting their numbers, both Comscore and Nielsen think more than 50% of Perez’s readers are men, which is ridiculous. Do a quick survey in your office and you’ll find that 90% of his readers are women. And very likely 26 years old, plus or minus three years. And that’s exactly what our recent survey of Perez’s readers found.

Trying to deflate Perez, Gawker also hawls out Technorati’s “top 100” list, noting that Perez at #22 is lower than some smaller blogs. Technorati rates blogs on inbound links. How can you keep a straight face quoting Technorati, which lists one Beppe Grillo‘s blog as #16? (Ahead of Gawker itself at #30!)

Gawker’s final evidence that Perez’s popularity can’t be trusted is that Blogads is the “only one whose statistics seem to align with Perez’s.”

Ahh, that unseemly “seem.” This “seem” is easily fixed. Gawker Media relies on SiteMeter for its own stats, so I assume it thinks these are reliable. (They are here.)

If any Gawker staffer wants to put his/her money where her/his snark is, I’ll bet dinner in the Soho restaurant of her choice that Sitemeter validates Blogads monthly impressions rather than Comscore’s or Nielsen’s. Or, if you prefer, that in coming weeks Perez can match a month of Gawker.com traffic in three days or less.

A footnote for insider blogball fans: years ago in Budapest, Nick and I covered the same business beat as journalists, he for the FT, I for pubs like the Herald Tribune and Euromoney. Nick later introduced me to blogs, in the form of ObscureStore which has remained my favorite. And I met my wife through Nick. So I’m amply amused to be tilting with Gawker about business numbers.

Update: Andrew Krucoff does some digging with a Gawker staffer and declares “The entire crux of their argument which seems to be ‘Blogads numbers are bullshit’ falls apart on a painless no-ringing, low-vibrating note.“

YouTube is still struggling to find an ad unit that works well for corporates. Check out this video for Chevy, linked from a video block on the front page.

We spent a great week in western North Carolina. Highlights included fiddling at Blowing Rock, fly fishing on the Davidson and rafting on the Nantahala. My interview about presidential online advertising on NPR was coherent, though most of the quotes were pretty mundane.