BL Ochman, who orchestrated a super blogad campaign for Budget Renta Car last year, is doing a “best story” contest for Simon and Schuster. She’s running ads reflecting the entries. Go check out the latest/weirdest… latest/weirdest.

Seeing The Queen a week ago made me sentimental for London, where I spent a life-changing 84-85. It was the coldest winter in England’s long economic stumble. Arthur Scargill’s miners were in their last face-off with Maggie and the pound could be bought for a dollar a some pennies.

Anyway, a friend wrote Friday and mentioned he’s in London and asked for some tips. I was thrilled to advise. I’ll put them here before they disappear beneath the strata of my outbox…

Check out a pub called The Old Dr. Butler’s Head in The City. You can either have a pint and sandwich in the bar or go upstairs for more formal stuff. Also good to eat at Simpsons on the Strand. May be a tourist trap now, but fun for roastbeef and port. Try The Grapes, somewhere down by the Thames. May have gone upmarket versus 20 years ago with the Docklands. Also fun to drink (in better weather) on one of the bars with a terrace at one end of the top of the Covent Garden buildiing. Try to buy last minute tickets at a theatre — a lot cheaper than NY and often amazing. Finally, go to Portabello road on Saturday AM for antiques and a good pint in the pub about halfway down the road on the right. And if your budget is unlimited and you want to get truly electrified by bottles of ice-encased vodka, Nikita’s is the place.

(BTW, Miklos and Tamas are visiting for the next two weeks… we’ll try to post pictures.)

Jason Calacanis makes me smile.

A breathless CNN article notes that Superbowl ad prices have quadrupled over the last
20 years.

Other than computers, cars, and the minimum wage what hasn’t quadrupled in price in the last 20 years?

We’ve worked out remaining bugs in the live-linking blogads (see the top ad at left for PoliticalWire.com) and are ready for more beta users.

(Update: see top left ad on DailyPuppy.)

The text in these blogads updates automatically every fifteen minutes. Each headline is linked. The pipeline for this is the advertiser’s RSS feed.

To pull headlines into your next blogad text, put the letters “@RSS:http://etc…etc” in your text field for a standard ad and the rest is automatic.

What to call this new ad unit? Obviously, the word RSS is too obscure for most advertisers. So we’ll probably go with something like “live-linking” blogads or “headline feeds” or “auto-update blogads” or ??

If you are first to suggest the name we end up using, we’ll send you one of our new t-shirts. Speaking of which, please head over to Flickr and tell us which color combo you love or hate. (We’re going to print up more of last year’s popular brown/orange too.)

Update: Joseph Hughes experiments with the new ad.

John Aravosis does a brilliant write-up about the livelink ads. He tells advertisers, “this ad can be updated a practically infinite number of times throughout the day. You literally have your own mini-Web site incorporated in our Web site.”

Taegan Goddard directs his readers to the new unit.

More thoughts from Richard C and Pam Spaulding.

Amused by my Slacklining, Rick Bruner points to his own imbalancing on a unicycle.

Bill Beutler, formerly of the Blogometer at Hotline and now at New Media Strategies, does some very indepth sleuthing on the Hillary Clinton blogad order.

Bill highlights some questions about where/why the ads are running. My response to folks who have asked about the candidate buys: 21 months is a looooong time and there’s going to be lots of experimentation and learning along the way. The key point is that candidates — particularly Edwards and Clinton — have chosen to make significant investments in blog advertising far earlier than in advertising on other media.

Smart candidates know there’s a “blog primary.” Blogs offer a unique opportunity to connect with the insiders and activists who are the fulcrum of American political opinion and action. To illustrate this point… Bill picks up a telling detail I had missed: the HRC ads are running on Edwards’ advisor Matt Gross’s blog. This is truly advertising inside the blog beltway. (Blogway?)

Matt Gross writes:

With the primary season now upon us — or at least the netroots primary season now upon us — it seems that this is a good time to reiterate my blog ad policy.

I accept ads from any Democratic candidate or progressive organization and most private industry or public relations firms, proceeding with the assumption that my illustrious readers, being media savvy enough to find this little blog in the first place, are media savvy enough to negotiate the world of advertising and p.r. without any help from me.

…the general policy around here is laissez faire, laissez aller, laissez passer. At the going rate of $20 per week, of course.

We’re beta testing RSS feeds into blogads — the blogad’s text auto updates with the advertisers RSS updates. If you’d like to beta test, give us a shout.

Monday morning, new presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined the ranks of blog advertisers. She’s the first to buy some hi-rise units (150X600 plus 300 characters of text) and the first to cross the aisle.