It's that time of the week again, when I give my thanks to Marqui for sponsoring my blog for 3 months. Thanks! Anyway I thought I'd have a little fun with it this week and continue with the cut-up/remix theme I experimented with yesterday. I did a cut-up of recent Marqui coverage on blogs, using this method:

1) I'm subscribed to a PubSub search for the word "marqui". Using my Bloglines aggregator, I requested the last 48 hours worth of results from that feed (about 7,300 words).
2) I then ran it through the Grazulis Cut-up Machine 10 times, using the "random" setting.
3) Lastly, I condensed it to 100 words using Microsoft Word's nifty AutoSummarize feature.

The result was this, which came out rather poetic...

***start***

consumers
other marketing unspoken) posts. entrepreneurs program 
Marqui 

be Canter's Marqui product blogs small advertisers finally, some post:
experiment.

customers. blog):

financial and bloggers 
individual bloggers. about the time is company Marqui, their is paid? 
bloggers was participate in 
original highly Marqui. bloggers steps the marketing monster nicely.

I company. Blog Service
idea of Marqui 

of authorís Marqui changes 

activity pay. products. Marqui's with Weblog

already marketing own experiments.

A products.

launched products about? blogger

I marketing).

blogger).

Ladyís to bloggers link. talking points

***finish***

p.s. I think this 'blog for dollars' program is working out very well for Marqui, no matter what the bloggers actually write. Which is to say - the coverage Marqui is getting from this program is more important to its success than the words being written about them.

According to Ars, the Bush administration views the FFIA "as carte blanche to leak government information without penalty," and released a statement yesterday in opposition citing the "overriding imperative to protect national security," as a reason for their objection to the measure.

It should certainly be noted, though, that most major mainstream news organizations now employ full time bloggers and have detailed blogging strategies implemented on their web sites. Further, top news organizations like USA Today, Reuters and Fox are licensing blog content through BlogBurst for their publications. So it follows that at least some bloggers are firmly operating in the realm of traditional journalists and should enjoy the same shield protection.

The Senate will be considering a similar bill.

What do you think? Should bloggers be treated as journalists? Should any journalists have shield protection to allow them to keep their sources and notes private? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Foaf Http 201 Alist MacManus (if it's a boy)

Note: I think 'Foaf' could be the new 'Frank'... and his school mates could nickname him 'The Foafster'!

Blogatha Validate Post MacManus (if it's a girl)

Hmmm, actually thank goodness my daughter was born before I started blogging! :-)

Although it's quite possible that there aren't that many "real" people reading blogs, for those that do become interested in the medium as a way to communicate with others, that participation often encourages people to transition from being a blog reader to setting up a blog of their own.

However, for young people and teens getting involved in blogging, there are additional challenges that adults may not face. For example, Kevin Muldoon of Blogging Tips points out that young bloggers may have more issues with being able to afford domain and hosting costs than an adult would. But beyond that, they also simply need an introduction to the tips of the trade and the various blogging tools available.

This is how YBN can help. The site features a forum for communicating with others young bloggers, a resources section with blogging tutorials, and a YBN blog where anyone is able to guest post.

Are Young Bloggers Any Good?

If you think that young bloggers have nothing to add to the community, you need only take a look at Carl Ocab's site, which he began at 13. He's now 15, and the blog can certainly hold its own with any sites run by adults today. He writes about how to make money online, and by the look of it, he's already doing so with his site.

Then there's Jessica Mah (pictured), who was even interviewed by Valleywag last year. Now a junior in college, Jessica is an entrepreneur who began work at 13, when she ran a successful hosting business. She also was a co-founder of a startup called Shockapps.com

Another to take note of is the site FunnyMunny belonging to Paris Spence-Lang, a 13-year-old who wants to be a financial advisor when he grows up.

Two other young bloggers in the tech niche are Thilak Raj Rao of Tech-Buzz.net and David Wilkinson of TechZi whose personal sites are more impressive than many of the sites you may run across that are run by adults and just as informative.

The Next Blogging Superstars

Today's top bloggers won't be around forever, so a place like YBN that helps support and encourage the next generation of bloggers is an important resource. Despite their young ages, there are many bloggers who are already contributing to the blogging community - besides those featured above, the Retire at 21 blog posted a list of the top 30 bloggers under 21. Any one of those people could be tomorrow's blogging superstar...or tomorrow's superstar may still be undiscovered, only in need of some support and encouragement, like that which YBN offers, to grow their site and break out on the scene.

The French Press Agency reported on the bill yesterday and according to The Committee to Protect Bloggers, the BBC's The World radio show will offer a more in depth report in the coming days.

Blogging is wildly popular in Iran, where a new generation of young people frequently challenge the old, hyper-conservative religious government. The Committe to Protect Bloggers says that Iran is "among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well as students." You can see the group's extensive coverage of Iranian cyber-censorship and harrasment of bloggers here. The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr, among other sites.

We at ReadWriteWeb condemn the application of the death penalty to bloggers as itself an abhorent crime. Cultural relativism has its place, but this isn't it. We want to offer our support to the new generation of Iranian young people struggling for freedom online and elsewhere, in any way we can, short of a US invasion of the country.

It's reminiscent of the recent film Persepolis and helps put "social media" in a much more serious context than people often presume it goes on in.

The short video was created by Aaron Chiesa, Hendy Sukarya, Lisa Temes and Toru Kageyama and written by Kate Tremills.

To learn more about the struggles, victories and defeats of bloggers around the world, check out The Committee to Protect Bloggers, Global Voices Online and Reporters Without Borders.

As much as those bloggers who receive these gifts would like to claim this isn't the case, freebies like free laptops, trips, or gift cards are likely to influence a writer's opinion of a product. We just heard from a food blogger last week who told us that she regularly receives expensive spices, books, and mail-order steaks from companies that won't to be covered on her blog.

Do We Want the FTC to Regulate the Blogosphere?

At the same time, though, we do feel queasy about the FTC starting to extend its reach to the blogosphere. While we dislike the idea of not disclosing these gifts, we're not sure having the government intervene here is such a great idea, either. We also can't help to wonder how the FTC is going to monitor the thousands of small-time bloggers who regularly receive freebies. The FTC also won't be able to do much about the large number of these blogs that are based outside of the United States.

If FeedBurner decides to take its sweet time in delivering the news, that's bad for bloggers. Unfortunately, that's what's happening right now. We've been seeing delays of up to 20 minutes between posting to our site and our posts appearing in our FeedBurner feeds. That's a pretty serious problem and we're not alone in experiencing it.

If you're still pinging the old URL, and you probably are, we're guessing that FeedBurner isn't even noticing. The service checks all indexed blogs for new posts automatically every 30 minutes so that's probably how your posts are getting noticed at all. FeedBurner says both ping servers are still operating but we only noticed the issue after seeing lengthy delays in updating.

The Consequences We Face

We love FeedBurner for all it does for us, but this is pretty irresponsible on their part. We've noticed that our posts are being seen late by Techmeme, subscribers are getting them later and when other bloggers do a blogsearch for a breaking news topic to see who else has covered it - we're not there. It's bad news. Meanwhile the FeedBurner blog hasn't been updated in 4 months.

In response to an inquiry about the issue, Steve Olechowski, Business Product Manager at AdSense (Adsense now being the raison d'être for our beloved publishing tool) told us, "there's nothing secret here, we're just trying to make sure everything works as expected for publishers before we get a deluge of emails about issues we already know about." That seems like a pretty snide response to a common part of customer service - getting emails about issues you already know about.

We're pinging the new server now and we hope that will work. We suggest you update your software as well and we hope that FeedBurner will be more sympathetic to the needs of the bloggers they exist to serve in the future.

As we've seen in the US, going from Internet popularity to votes cast is a tall order to fill, and in Malaysia especially, the bloggers-turned-candidates will face a tough uphill climb to get elected. Only about on fifth of Malays have access to the Internet, yet about 42% of the country's 26 million people are registered to vote. Because getting press attention outside of the Malaysian blogosphere is nearly impossible for these candidates, making an impression on voters will be difficult.

Though the bloggers have found a devoted readership outside of the largely pro-government mainstream press, there isn't much faith in their ability to make much of an impact on March 8th when polls open. "Beyond the major cities like Kuala Lumpur and Penang, there's not much the bloggers can really hope to accomplish," Mohamad Norza Zakaria, a leader in Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's UMNO party, told Reuters.

In the US last week, another blogger was nearly drafted into the political arena. Popular blogger, author, columnist, and law professor Lawrence Lessig was said to be contemplating a run for the US Congress in California's 12th district after a Facebook group urging the run attracted over 4,000 members. Lessig announced yesterday that he would not run.

But bloggers have become the thought leaders for a new generation. Blogs are increasingly becoming hubs for political and social discourse, so it makes sense that people see bloggers whose ideas they respect and admire as viable political candidates. We've had an actor become president in the US, why not a blogger?

Bloggers who embed YouTube links tend to be male and young. The most active group of YouTube users is between 25 and 35 years old. Bloggers who embed YouTube videos are mostly male (58%), and Break.com is the most male-dominated video site (885), while MTV attracts more female bloggers (68%).

The most active video embed users live in the US, followed by Brazil, Spain, the UK and Canada. In the US, most of these YouTube users live in California, followed by New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida. The size of these states account for a large chunk of these differences. Connecticut, Alabama and South Carolina come in last.

Taking all video-sharing networks into account, the most active bloggers can be found in New York City, followed by Sao Paulo, London, Madrid and Paris.

In Asia, more than 90% of bloggers are younger than 35. In North America, 28% of all bloggers who embed videos are older than 35.

Focus on YouTube

Unsurprisingly, YouTube is the most popular video service in the blogosphere. The site attracts 82% of all embeds and direct links from blogs, followed by Vimeo (8.8%), DailyMotion (4%) and MySpace (1.1%). YouTube's dominance in this market becomes even more apparent when compared to other popular sites like Hulu and MTV. Hulu accounts for only 0.5% of all blog embeds, and MTV is dead last on Sysomos' list with 0.1%.

In Asia, YouTube is even more dominant, accounting for 88.5% of all embeds; and in South America, YouTube leads with an 87.4% market share. Some of these differences can be explained by the fact that some of the services that Sysomos looked at are simply not available in these markets.

More Data

Sysomos' report offers a lot more demographic information than we could highlight in detail, but here are a few more nuggets of interesting information:

• The most popular day for embedding videos is Tuesday.
• The most popular time is between 11:00 am and noon EST.
• YouTube's most active demographic group (20-35) is three times larger than the second-most active group (35-65).
• 20% of bloggers who embed YouTube videos are teenagers; 2.4% are over 60.

Starting yesterday and running through the 18th of January, the BlogOnExpo includes interviews and short tutorials from names many readers here will recognize.

Context

The idea of offering a "conference" on blogging for free, online, with such high profile contributors is a good one. Most real-life conferences strive to have big names but end up with mediocre content and the best value comes from conversations in the halls with other attendees. In this case, the content in the BlogOnExpo is pretty darned good. I was skeptical about how many of the listed participants would actually participate but a few days into the event - I am impressed!

If I had any criticisms they would be that the interview transcripts are a little awkward and the participants are limited primarily to tech bloggers. There are a lot of bloggers online who are wildly successful who don't write about blogging or tech at all. My favorite examples are the blogs Simply Recipes and Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. It would be nice to hear from some more top bloggers outside of technology about what's worked well for them.

That said, Aditya Mahesh has done a remarkable job in this first iteration and I look forward to seeing what he does next.

Following on from my post entitled Gettin' Paid: A Future for Content Creators? Redux, I noticed (via Darren Rowse) that Yahoo already has a beta blog service running. Yahoo's Health Expert Blogs is not disimilar to what weblogsinc and Gawker do - blog about a certain topic under a business brand. Indeed there are signs that Yahoo is about to launch a Technology blog network.

However it's not at the level of what I had in mind in my Gettin' Paid post. I am envisaging a network of independent experts, each with their own unique brand. This may be a pipe dream of mine, but I still hold out hope that Yahoo or perhaps AOL (with Feedster's help) will implement what I dream of. btw Yahoo and AOL, I'm available for consulting work to help you do that! ;-)

Yahoo's Health Expert Blogs are certainly one step ahead of Microsoft's Filter network. The fact that Yahoo names its bloggers, and indeed centers each blog around the expert that writes it, is fantastic. e.g. Rodney Yee's Yoga blog has some great writing in it. All it needs though is some unique branding and design to bring out Rodney's personality even more. The design of the Yahoo Health blogs is bland and doesn't do justice to the 'voice' of the blogger. That's why I'm pushing a vision of independently branded bloggers, yet still identifiable as part of a network of bloggers who write about a defined topic.

A note about the terms I'm using: each topic has a number of niches. There is 1 blogger per niche but, for example, 10 bloggers per topic. So there is real potential for a Yahoo or an AOL to collect together groups of like minds ("experts") and get the best of both worlds - independence and network effects.

Yahoo or AOL (or another bigco) should let the bloggers keep the unique brands they've built up, but fold groups of them under their wing as blog networks - and pay them! The bigco's benefit by gathering experts into networks and promoting them on their homepages. And they get great content :-)

If I had to come up with a term for this - it'd be a Network of Niches. Which I define as: a group of niche bloggers, each with their own unique look n' feel but collectively part of a branded network of like minds.

All easy enough for me to say, of course; I have a job and make a pretty good living (touch wood). I can imagine that I might be tempted to modify my views if money was short and a blog review could put another meal on the table for my kids. Then again, for every blogger out there who's struggling to make ends meet, there are countless more blog readers - the people the marketers are really trying to reach. Don't they deserve to know about the relationship between product and blogger when they assess what they're reading?

I'm a fan of disclosure, and while I haven't examined the FTC guidelines in detail, I support the idea in principle.

But it's interesting that the FTC went after bloggers rather than, say, entertainment writers who don't mention the expensive junkets that movie studios take them on. A blogger who has to disclose that she or he received a free package of hot dog weiners has every right to feel burned after dropping fifty bucks to take the family to the latest "THRILLING!" "FANTASTIC!" "SURE-FIRE WINNER!"

More Noise to Signal.

I won't disclose what ReadWriteWeb pays its writers, and I honestly don't know what the site's revenues are like, but suffice it to say I make enough to pay my bills by blogging here full-time. And I don't think that's a bad thing. But the majority of bloggers probably aren't being paid what their outlet could afford to pay them. Some, like those who write at the Huffington Post or DailyKos, might not be paid at all.

A bloggers union is an idea that was most recently advanced last month in an issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. "It’s a Wild West out there for bloggers -- even though, without them, the Internet’s frontier would not have expanded so broadly or so rapidly. And even though, without them, the Web-derived profits many of these blog sites are starting to rake in simply wouldn’t exist," wrote Chris Mooney.

Mooney envisions a professional guild for bloggers, not unlike the Writers Guild of America, that would strictly rep professional bloggers. How you weed "professional bloggers" from the hobbyists would be task number one for guild organizers, whom Mooney thinks would initially be the blogosphere's most successful writers -- i.e., people who have sway with management. Unionizing bloggers is something the National Writers Union recently voted to be a priority.

Organizing bloggers is also a meme that popped up last August when some political bloggers started talking about it. There were arguments made both for and against the idea, which organizers hoped would give them the leverage necessary to demand better healthcare, better pay, and more access. All of which are generally good things.

The arguments against blogger unionization are mostly two-fold: 1. blogging is still in its infancy and is barely ready for a unionized workforce, and 2. the blogosphere is built on the idea that anything goes, and organizing would undermine that premise.

However, like it or not, I think some sort of bloggers guild is probably on the horizon. The first steps toward that idea might actually have been taken this week with the announcement of a new ad network aimed at long tail bloggers by Blogger & Podcaster magazine. What makes the BPN ad network stand out is that they're planning to provide healthcare for members and that it is non-exclusive. Though it's not quite what Mooney envisioned (BPN is working with long tail bloggers rather than those writing for top-tier sites), it does have the makings of a foundation for a future organized coalition of bloggers. (Note that there are a number of real challenges to organizing bloggers under the National Labor Relations Act in the US -- this post on MyDD has a good overview.)

What do you think? Mooney says that organizing bloggers is "not only inevitable, but necessary." Do you agree? Or do you think organization goes against the freewheeling principles that the blogosphere was founded on? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Currently, Lijit displays Google AdSense ads in its search results, but its advertising network would allow publishers to sell their own search ad inventory. As many bloggers and publishers are looking for ways to monetize their blogs through services other than AdSense, chances are that there are quite a few people who would like to at least give Lijit's ad network a chance.