When I saw Hillary Clinton’s “pick my theme-song” vote, I thought it veered hokey. Too much u2, not enough Nirvana or Greatful Dead or Miles Davis. (But at least no Springsteen.) I voted for the Temptations.

Then I saw her video mashup of people’s responses. Genius. If Hillary can pull off another even-decent mashup in the next week or two, she’s on her way to owning YouTube.

Without some radical new ingredient, it will be tough for other candidates’ ads not to look derivative.

A lot has happened since the blogads logo contest in August 2005.

Remember when adding “dotcom” to anything made it funny? Here’s a flashback.

As companies move to reduce the number of suppliers they buy from, it’s clear that advertising industry is ripe for radical pruning. In this morning’s WSJ, Suzanne Vranica had a good story about corporate struggle against this fragmentation, includiing this quote: “‘We find many of our brands are working with lots of agencies who all have their own creative people, their own planners, their own account people, and it gets to be unmanageable,’ says Jim Stengel, P&G’s global marketing officer.” Anyone wondering about how much upside remains for e-advertising, check out this great graph and look at the relative amounts spent on TV and magazines versus the Internet:

We’re just hours (minutes?) away from hitting 100,000 reader responses to this year’s blog reader survey. (Amazing, considering we did 56,000 last year.)

If you’ve already posted a survey, thank you! You can see preliminary data by logging and clicking “account” and “view.” Click on icons on the front page to get a glimpse of other people’s data. If you want to round out your data, feel free to invite another round of participants.

If your blog isn’t involved yet, please DO get involved. Get set up here: http://www.blogreaderproject.com/signup

Put the resulting URL in a post (or three) pitching your fans on contributing their answers — 12 minutes max, unless you are a brand-maniac. If you want, warn readers that the survey is long, BUT they can bail anytime after the first page and their data will help. (Once they hit booze questions, they’re almost home and deserve a drink.)

Again, here’s the link for getting started.

The Blog Reader Project is progressing nicely, currently with 352 bloggers participating and 39,286 reader surveys completed. We’re starting to break the data out. If you visit the site and click on the icons in the right margin, you can see some partial results for various blogs. In the next day or two, bloggers will be able to access full results for their own blogs. If you haven’t done so yet, please join the fun.

If you are a blogads.com user, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve added a feature that suggests relevant FAQs on every page. Pretty darn cool work by Zsolt.

Who are you? Take this new blog reader survey and we’ll find out. (Don’t tell too many people yet, since this is just a soft launch.)

We’ve taken down the last server from Blogads 2.0… whew. We’ve written to everyone involved but here’s a public reminder: if you’ve got a javascript including proxy.blogads.com, your pages are now hanging. Just take down that proxy.blogads.com javascript and all will be well.

A bunch of people have asked why I posted the page from the Cyrano script. In short…

I saw the play 20 years ago in London and loved the passion Burgess put in those words. Cyrano is old and crippled and slumped in a chair on dark stage lit by a single candle, with a giant winter-bared tree silhouetted above him. A few leaves drift off the tree as the scene opens. Cyrano imagines a skull stalking him and, first whispering and then shouting, rises to fight one last time.

I went looking for the script because the scene came back to me as I was puzzling over Elizabeth and John Edwards decision to continue with his Presidential campaign. Why spend the last months of your life on airplanes? Why spend the last days of your family’s life together with strangers?

I still can’t imagine what path we’d choose in similar circumstances, but Cyrano’s words helped me better understand the Edwards’ decision.