Eric Alterman of MSNBC's Altercation is off to Brussels this afternoon. We'll be guest-hosting Altercation once again this Friday, which is a Slacker Friday edition. As Eric mentions in today's column, please send any responses to what he has written this week to us at Alterlinks@aol.com. Charles Pierce will be hosting Altercation tomorrow and Eric Boehlert will do Thursday.

The website for Eric's new book, What Liberal Media is up and running. You can pre-order the book there, it should be hitting the bookstore's shelves very soon. We haven't read it yet, Instapundit got an advance copy, but not us. Still, we can't wait to read it. You can also read about it and buy it here.

There's an Instapundit, Senior--what a great guy he sounds like!

Check out Body and Soul's Strange Brew of headlines--showing that truth definitely can be stranger than fiction.

Jay Caruso over at The Daily Rant explains how to post URL's in the comments. It's important, because as Jay says, when you just type the url, it messes up the column spacing of our blogs and we have to go in and rebuild all the entries not just the one you commented on. TalkLeft has 1900 + entries and it takes a while to rebuild them all, and time is a precious commodity around here. (We had to do this last night so we're very sensitive to it).

Jay lays out the instructions very nicely.

The Horse takes on Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post for his "smarmy column" on John Kerry (link Via Hamster)

All of MWO is great today--they hit everything from Affirmative Action to Korea to whether ABC censured booing of "Poppy Bush" when he delivered a taped message at the American Music Awards ceremony Monday night.

We are off to Court for the afternoon, we hope you will check in here anyway and also visit the sites on the right. And today is Slacker Friday over at Altercation, always a must-read for us.

Where he gets the time, we have no idea. In addition to law school teaching and the publishing obligations that go along with tenure, in addition to updating Instapundit almost all day long, and in between producing music, writing a TechNews column and a FoxNews column, and parenting and spousing, our pied piper of blogging, Glenn Reynolds, now has a new weblog called Glenn Reynolds. com at MSNBC. Its focus is Technology, Culture, Politics and Law.

Glenn's blog debuted tonight, so go give it a read. Tonight's episode features business decisions that result in dumb lawsuits and techno music. You can read what Glenn has to say about the new blog on Kausfiles.

Oh, and don't forget to check out the recommended links on GlennReynolds.com--we're very proud to be included.

Update: The New York Times profiles Reynolds as Instapundit here.

From today's Page Six:

Front-row seat THE Rev. Al Sharpton got the front row on the shuttle flight back from Washington, D.C. on Sunday, and was pleased to see his rival for the Democratic nomination for president, Sen. Joe Lieberman, two rows back. Sharpton, who had just appeared on "Meet the Press," exclaimed to his entourage: "That's how it's gonna be when the votes are counted."

Also in the humor department, Ted Barlow is writing only "How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take....?" jokes all week.

Congrats to Oliver Willis who has an article up on PBS called "Why I Blog."

And for Priceless link of the day, from Maxpeak: Bush Releases New "1040"

Howard Bashman of How Appealing , in the last paragraph of his post, sends us to Memeufacture, a Weblog and Automated Trend Reporting site. Memeufacture scans hundreds of websites of different "genres" with some sort of formula using a python program, and comes up with the most popular sites in various categories, followed by the most influential sites in the same categories.*

How Appealing is the second most influential blog in the "law" category. We thought Howard was just being modest when he said there must be an error in balloting. So we went to Memeufacture to take a look. TalkLeft isn't in the law category at all, it's in the Politics-Left category, and they list TalkLeft as the second most influential weblog in the "Politics-Left" Category. Here are their top ten (as of this moment):

1 : Eschaton
2 : TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
3 : BuzzFlash - Daily Headlines and Breaking News
4 : Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
5 : TAPPED
6 : Cursor.org -
7 : Daily Kos: Political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation
8 : Matthew Yglesias
9 : NathanNewman.org - News and Views
10 : Eric Alterman: Altercation

Now, we know we get linked to a bunch, but still, number two in that category, when compared to the others? In our dreams, maybe.

For Politics - Right, Instapundit is the most influential, and Oliver Willis is number 6. Wonder what Oliver will have to say about being in this category at all.

The most popular left political sites (as opposed to most influential) are:

1 : NathanNewman.org - News and Views: Pickering and Anti-Klan Testimony
2 : Eschaton
3 : Spinsanity - Taxing the public's trust: The Bush administration is stretching the truth again to sell its latest tax cut
4 : Long story; short pier.: Boom and Bust.
5 : Altercation: Slacker Friday
6. the next five are mainstream media newspapers

*This is Memeufacture's description of what they do: "The automatic content is generated using a simple Python program (about 200 lines.) Memeufacture scans hundreds of websites of several different genres. It determines which links are most popular and which websites posted those links first."

We are obviously missing something here. Can anyone explain Memeufacture and what they are measuring?

Update: We also expressed our puzzlement via e-mail to Memeufacture's chief, John Weher. He has replied:

The ranking mechanism is automated and objective.

Essentially it works by recording who links to what first. If two sites link to the same site at once, it is counted as a tie and disqualified. The rankings change quite frequently, but it is interesting to see the sites that consistently stay near the top, such as instapundit, metafilter and talkleft.

Your being listed in the top means that you tend to point out issues that others find important (and link to) later on. Congratulations for running a great site.

Our congratulations to Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, best known to blog readers as Instapundit, who just received a Chair at the University of Tennessee law school. He is now the "Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law."

Last week we reported that TalkLeft was being censored--at least at a few law firms that use filtering programs, including the firm of Howard Bashman who writes the excellent law blog How Appealing. He provided us with the name of the company that provides the filtering service to them, we contacted them and they have fixed the problem.

Apparently we were sharing an IP address with another site in the same database, causing an "accidental overblock." The company has moved us to the "news and media" category and modified their database so we are no longer subject to a "sex" block.

We're impressed, they responded quickly and corrected the problem. The company is Websense.

Thanks to Jennifer at Klyjen who has already noted the change and posted it.

If anyone else experiences a block when trying to access TalkLeft, please let us know.

The Chicago Tribune ran a very complimentary article about Instapundit Glenn Reynolds Tuesday. It's a good read--

Reynolds runs the Weblog InstaPundit.com, which is becoming a must-see for better known opinion-makers trying to stay informed on current events.

For the zillions unfamiliar with the concept of a Weblog -- commonly called a blog -- it's a personal Web site where anybody with the energy and/or ego can comment on anything, anytime, anywhere.

Reynolds, a congenial and entertaining fellow, does have opinions on a wide range of subjects, which he posts with almost fanatic regularity on InstaPundit. Equally, if not more important, he gobbles up other info on the Internet and provides Web addresses -- links -- enabling readers to click onto sites Reynolds has located for them.

A University of Tennessee undergrad with a Yale law degree, Reynolds insists in a phone interview, that, contrary to appearances, he has a life -- with a wife, a forensic psychologist specializing in murder, and a 7-year-old daughter"We're a household of media geeks here," he concedes.

He also teaches, has written three books, produces regular columns for the Fox News Web site and techcentralstation.com, gets $1 apiece from T-shirts he sells on his Web site, produces techno music under the name Mobius Dick -- and does go on vacation....

For his part, Reynolds explains his success this way: "People are hard-wired to gossip and what's going on the world, and I think blogs are a reflection of that. They're most like 18th Century coffee houses where people got together to talk about the latest news."

..."I get more attention than I deserve. Some bloggers deserve more than they get. I'm happy to have it. Nobody becomes a law professor without a big ego. But, I encourage you to scroll down on my Web site and look at some of the other Weblogs."

There's more. It's great to see blogs getting attention in print from mainstream media and mainstream pundits.

This new progressive weblog, Political Strategy, which its authors refer to as the "Sun Tzu Files" looks very good to us. They are looking for feedback, so go over and read and then give them some.