Ad and technology expert Michael Dissan at Personal Democracy has some good ideas for Blogads and for advertisers wanting to benefit from ad placements on blogs. With the politics no longer driving the ad trade, there's plenty of room. Idea number one:

1. Branch out.

If you visited a blog in October, you couldn’t have missed TBS’s ads promoting reruns of “Sex and the City.” And rumor has it that TBS is planning another large Blogad campaign around their new reality show “Gilligan.” In addition to TBS, Blogads were also purchased by Sharp Electronics and a handful of other non-political advertisers. Blogads should proactively market themselves to online ad agencies as a way to reach influential and engaged consumers. Just don’t let the non-political advertisers buy up all the ad space!

We were pleased to see we made the article under idea number 4:

4. Label blogs based on their ideological slant and physical geographic location

Here’s how you go after incremental dollars. Help those purchasing ads on one blog know about other blogs that also match its particular ideological or geographical slant. When someone checks out, take a cue from Amazon.com’s playbook: “People who purchased ads on DailyKos also purchased ads on TalkLeft. Click here to add TalkLeft to your basket.” While local campaigns are prone to buy placements on well-known blogs, they might consider others if they can easily discern their ideological or geographical slants.

Henry and the Blogads team were the revolutionaries this year in creating a mutually beneficial relationship between the political community and activists. That same vision, with helpful ideas like these from the media and ad gurus, can apply with equal force to other industries, particularly media (television, radio, music) and publishing. How about the travel and arts industry? Banking, stock market, food industries? We'd love to host them all.

[link via Jerome at My DD.]

The word blog has officially arrived:

A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was one of the most looked-up words on its Internet sites this year.

Blog will be a new entry in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. The complete list of words of the year is available here.

Last Thanksgiving, I had a cast on my wrist and reduced my blogging for the weekend. Little did I know then it would get progressively worse until March when I finally had sugery on it. Jay Allen, who is the creator of MT-Blacklist that despams our comments, once had the same thing, called DeQuervain's Tensonsynovitis and began a thread at his blog about it that is still in use today. It was a great place to go and find others with the same problems. Some were musicians, some were engineers, everyone needed their wrists to work.

Thankgiving, 2002, we gave thanks to other bloggers who had helped put us on the blogging map. What's great about re-reading it is the realization that all of them are still blogging.

Holiday blogging will be light here, as the TL kid is going to be in town and I'm getting ready to move houses for the first time in 13 years. It doesn't mean non-existent, just light. TChris is away for the holidays, as are lots of bloggers. But having blogged through the past two Thanksgiving holidays, I know that many will be blogging throughout. If you are one of them, or if you know of some, please put them in the comments here, so everyone else will know too.

Don't feed the trolls (post a menu when you see them, that will alert everyone to skip the comments and go onto another thread) and give a read to those on our blogroll. They are there because we think they're special, not because they asked for a link.

If you're interested in Colorado news, 5280 will be live through the holidays, and I'll be contributing. Today I wrote about the new "drug courier profile" being used to catch "doctor-shoppers" in the mountains. Yesterday it was about the new law giving you a free credit report, and how credit card companies are gouging consumers to the gills, while raking in $2.5 billion a month in profits (yes, you read that right.)

One day early, Happy Thanksgiving to all, and a special thanks to TalkLeft readers, commenters and contributers....you are what makes the site a success and keeps it strong.

[Comments now closed on this thread.]

Time to update your bookmarks....Avedon Carol of Sideshow has moved the blog to its new home. Here's the new link.

Libertartian Robert Prather is back blogging, this time as part of the group blog Signifying Nothing.

Say hello to Grits for Breakfast, concentrating on the evils of the drug war.

Norwegianity has the JFK blogpost of the day. 41 years ago today.

Eric Alterman:

So the next time some one asks you if you’re glad that we’ve removed Saddam Hussein from power, you might want to ask them if they’re glad that, after we’ve spent 200 billion dollars and killed tens of thousands of people, 400,000 Iraqi children are now suffering from acute malnutrition. That and oh yeah, the world hates us and the pool of Al Qaeda recruits has been vastly increased. And oh yeah, I’m betting on a draft.

Skippy is in an apologetic mood. Very classy. Very Skippy.

Mad Kane has an ode to Alberto Gonzales.

Avedon Carol's Sideshow is offline, we're getting a message when clicking there that she's exceeded her bandwidth and been removed. When she comes back on, if she has a tip jar, send her a few bucks so it doesn't happen again.

Roger Ailes has news on former Tom Delay staffer, Tom Scanlon, and how he is now the subject of a Texas grand jury investigation.

What's on your mind? Here's a space to let you vent while we're busy with work.

[11/18: Comments now closed, we'll start another open thread.]

I've been wanting a GMail e-mail account since July when I blogged at the DNC in Boston next to Ezra at Pandagon who had one. It's in beta-testing still and you can't just sign up for one. Just this week it integrated with Outlook.

Instapundit to the rescue. Glenn graciously provided me with a Gmail account yesterday. With hundreds of e-mails a day coming in, the search feature should be big benefit. I'll let you all know soon on how it compares. My e-mail address there is talkleft@gmail.com.

In New York City today, liberal bloggers have packed the Tank, for a symposium on how liberal energy can remain focused and effective following the 2004 election.

There will be a Drinking Liberally party tonight at The Tank, open to all.

The Tank was home to liberal bloggers for the RNC in New York. Here's a picture of a bunch of us blogging there.

A big thanks to Crooks and Liars, the new liberal video blog, for making this clip of the debate on Hannity and Colmes last night on the Scott Peterson verdict. They edited the show down to highlight my segments. It's best viewed on Windows XP but it looked fine to me on Windows 98.

Alternative viewing: Keith Olbermann interviewing Joe Trippi on the role of the Internet in finding voter irregularities in the election.

Or this most entertaining Daily Show clip of John Stewart discussing John Ashcroft's resignation.

Thanks to all the TalkLeft readers who contributed to our "pledge drive" the past two days. There were about 30 of you, who contributed in amounts from $1.00 to $50.00. Just as great were all the notes of encouragement and appreciation that accompanied the donations.

There's so much work ahead of us the next four years. I really do believe that bloggers can make a difference. We get the word out, shore up support and provide a place to vent. As frustration over this Administration's policies and choices mount, it's nice to have a place to call home, and the left-leaning blogosphere is now home to hundreds of thousands of readers. We'll carry on. Thank you for your support.

Congrats to Noah Shachtman whose excellent blog Defense Tech was just bought by Military.com. If you're not familiar with Defense Tech, it's a blog about how technology is changing "how wars are fought, crooks are caught, borders are protected, and individual rights are defined."

Good luck, Noah, and thanks for including me in your list of site thank yous. I'll be reading you over there regularly.