Balint styles Blogads in Rome.

From today’s WSJ:

“Twelve years ago, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sent a vice president to California to check out First Alliance Mortgage Co. Lehman was thinking about tapping into First Alliance’s lucrative business of making “subprime” home loans to consumers with sketchy credit.

The vice president, Eric Hibbert, wrote a memo describing First Alliance as a financial “sweat shop” specializing in “high pressure sales for people who are in a weak state.” At First Alliance, he said, employees leave their “ethics at the door.”

The big Wall Street investment bank decided First Alliance wasn’t breaking any laws. Lehman went on to lend the mortgage company roughly $500 million and helped sell more than $700 million in bonds backed by First Alliance customers’ loans. But First Alliance later collapsed.”

Amy Schatz gives blog advertising the lede on A6.

Have you watched David Pogue’s NYT tech videos? 60 products. Noise cancelling headphones. And Pogue responds to a blogger’s bitterness about his humor.

Travel — in space and ideas — is fun. I’ve reconnected with Dan Gillmor, who made a great comment about the abuse of “member” by folks like Amex. And he introduced me to a new bodytracking site he’s involved with, Dopplr, which allows you to see where in the world friends will be and perhaps connect with them.

Jason Rosenberg, friend, customer and roaming bon vivant EchoDitto.

works in politics or government.

Want more data-candy? Here’s the set of graphs Political Wire has published from its slice of the Blog Reader Project.

Last week AdAge reported that Google’s purchase of Feedburner as a done deal and would be announced this week “according to a person familiar with the negotiations.” Well, this week is half over… come on boys, announce.

As of today, you can link directly to a particular survey result for your blog. (Or someone else’s, if they’ve closed their survey and published their results.) For example, the graph for the readers of this very Blogads weblog are here. And here’s the education pie chart.

We’re already seeing some good results from using these graphs in proposals to advertisers, so if you’re sell blogads and have NOT created a survey yet… do it now.

Here are some of the results for this blog’s readers. I’m not surprised that 65% are over 35. I AM surprised that 63% never attend church, 55% have a Mac at home and 76% leave comments in blogs. Godless, Mac-toting, comment-happy. Hmm.

If you want to publish your survey data:
* end your survey
* select which graphics you’d like to display
* save
* then link to the URL

Per graphic URLs coming tomorrow, and more data peeled out in coming days.