I can’t believe this even needed to be considered. Of *course* privately-run blogs unfunded by candidates are exempt from FEC regulations! Why would it be otherwise?

The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to
make an easy but powerful global information system.

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should
be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within
internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by
support groups.

Check out Google’s archive of his post (note: Google didn’t even *exist* back then!).

This joins an interesting conversation, and is one that we have had trouble answering for years (over at The Mac Observer, that is). TMO is, of course, an advertiser-supported site and has been since its inception. While we work to keep the lines between advertising and content delivery as thick as possible, there are some realities to face. Our RSS feeds don’t (currently) have any ads in them, and as such we have always just posted the snippet/teaser to the article (the same piece that appears on the home page of the site). The entire text is then available when you click through. This way people get to peruse the site in their aggregator and, if they find something interesting, come to the site to participate more and, “pay” for the content they’re reading (by “pay” I mean “allow us to show them advertisements of our choice”).

However, this is a policy we instituted years ago, and RSS has most definitely matured since then, in that people are using it *very* differently than they used to (en masse, anyway).

So are RSS ads the solution? Do they actually work? This is an experiment we’ll definitely be doing more of, but I’m not yet convinced that’s the answer. Are you?

Technorati Tags: advertising, dave slusher, evil genius chronicles, mac observer, RSS, web advertising

Technorati Tags: advertising, branding, new york, web advertising

Technorati Tags: podcasting, pr, new york

That said, it is interesting to see The Interdictor, a blog from a few guys who run a data center in the French Quarter. They have chosen to stick around (they apparently have some survivalist training) and have been blogging from the data center (some very interesting stuff there, for sure!). The fascinating part is that the Internet is working, despite the fact that there’s no power, phones, etc. They are generating their own electricity, but beyond that, IP connectivity lives on! Fascinating… Just like Milo Medine envisioned it.

Macworld Expo in Boston last week was productive, as well. As I’ve said many times, folks who are expecting to see the San Francisco-sized crowds (and direct sales) at a much smaller Expo are going to be disappointed, but taking it for what it is, the Boston show is a fantastic opportunity to get some quality time with folks. Consumers, industry folks, and press included, it was a wonderful networking event. Now lets hope the show’s organizers can just pitch *that* message going forward, instead of the “we wish Apple were here” message. I think we’d all be better served because of it.

Anyway, all of this has caused me to spend some time thinking (and ranting!) about the definition of a “blog”. And, to me, Think Secret couldn’t be further from that definition. A blog is a web-diary, written by one person, sharing his or her direct views, and basically having an asynchronous conversation with his or her readers (usually by way of comments or trackbacks). Some examples of true blogs would be those written by Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, David Parmet, Darla Sasaki, Jason Calacanis, and Dave Winer. You’ll notice I don’t even mention the *name* of the blogs, because really a blog is about the person who writes it. Surely the blog itself can have a specific guiding message or purpose, but it’s about a personal point of view. While I can imagine it being possible that a blog could have multiple authors and still be a blog, it would have to be such that each writer had their own distinct personality, separate from every other writer. Possible, but not altogether likely or common.

Some sites that shouldn’t be categorized as “blogs” are Think Secret, The Mac Observer, Engadget, Autoblog, (and really most Weblogs, Inc. properties), and Gizmodo. Sure, a lot of them use software/rendering/publishing engines that are either used by blogs and/or appear the same, but the content has nothing to do with that of a blog. It’s news, plain and simple, presented by multiple people (most of whom are employed to write it), and often times in written in the “anonymous group” style (“we found this”, “our experience is..”, etc) where there is an overall personality to the site, but not a distinct personality attached to each author.

It’s a pretty clear distinction, and hopefully the rest of the world will figure it out before it’s too late.