I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but Halley’s interview of Megnut sounds like a good ‘un.

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Chuck Olsen made a good documentary called “Blogumentary.” Now someone is trying to bully him out of the name. Not being a lawyer, I don’t know who has legal rights to the name, but now that I’ve seen how this new guy responds to a civil inquiry, I have asked him to drop me from his list of interviewees.

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The conference to which my tiny, content-free post referred was a get-together of Big Co marketing communication VPs. I was on a panel on blogging with Rebecca Blood, Alan Nelson of CommandPost (who chaired it), and John Hinderaker of Powerline. This panel was the first time in the group’s history that they’ve allowed any proceedings to be on the record.

The discussion went well. Rebecca explained what blogs are and aren’t. John gave examples — e.g., Rathergate — of how blogs have beat the mainstream media at their own game. I tried to preempt some of the obvious marketers’ misunderstandings by saying that it’s a mistake to think that only the high-traffic blogs count, that blogs are conversations, and that trying to manipulate weblog conversations is a very bad idea.

I’m not doing the session justice, of course, but it seemed to go well. And it was great to be on a panel with those folks. [Technorati tags: RebeccaBlood Powerline]

I don’t know what sort of schmuck leaves his computer behind when he heads for the airport but — oh, yeah, now I remember: It’s a schmuck exactly like me. But Mara, the woman driving Rebecca, Alan and me to the airport, stuck with me for 15 minutes, tracking down my computer and then arranging for a competitive car service to bring it to me on their next next trip out.

Thank you, Mara, of Dolphin Transportation in Naples, Florida. She saved my veggie bacon and was incredibly sweet about it. She wouldn’t even let me tip her. If you need a car service in Naples, you can reach Dolphin at (239) 530 0100.

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Bill Koslosky wonders why the blogosphere isn’t jumping on the stem cell topic. ” The Republicans sitting on the fence are just waiting to hear the roar of grassroots activism.”

I haven’t much about it because I’ve got absolutely nothing interesting to say about it, where “interesting” = “something you are not certain to have come across somewhere else.” Further, I know people like Bill are doing an excellent job of tracking the issue and aggregating links.

Since I’m not the only thinking this way, it seems that blog numbers are particularly bad indicators of blog public opinion.

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There’s just a whole bunch o’ goodness over at AKMA’s these days, including comments on why anyone would take the Star Wars twaddle seriously, a way not to take Star Wars seriously, a discussion of the difference between narratives and narrative theology, and a new drawing by Pippa. What a terrific blog. [Technorati tag: akma]

Dan Bricklin has started podcasting a series explaining software licensing issues, especially Open Source. I haven’t heard it yet, but obviously Dan knows this stuff. Sounds like a good way to get your pointy-haired boss up to speed on “All this open sauce malarky.”

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Michael O’Connor Clarke has started up his blog about PR again. Yay! The new entry is the first in a series called “The Seven Deadly Agency Types.”

And on the topic of PR blogs, I checked in with Richard Edelman‘s only to find out that last week he blogged a conversation he and I had. That’d be perfectly ok, of course, even if (disclosure statement!) I weren’t on retainer to Edelman PR, but I feel bad that I fled the country immediately afterwards and thus missed the interesting discussion of the post.

I argued that PR needs to get out of the way, connecting passionate clients with the public. That’s always been what the best PR people do: They find the right person in the organization for you to be speaking with, which is not necessarily someone in marketing. Richard puts forward other ethical and valuable roles for PR agencies, and I do appreciate the role a PR agency can play in actively pulling together interested parties, and sometimes even as a content creator.

I like Richard’s phrase that PR is about building public relationships. I continue to believe that in most cases that relationship should be between the client and the public. If the PR agency is in the middle, it will usually be assumed that that’s because the client can’t be trusted to speak for itself. That’s one reason why blogs are so important: They are public relationships.

[Technorati tags: pr edelman]

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Confusability is scraping bloglines and noticing how people are categorizing feeds. Great idea. First results: A list of the 100 most popular categories. It shows the gap between the categories we use for ourselves and those we use for others. I have a category called “Web” for entries in this blog because within the confines of my blog, it’s a useful way of sorting posts. But tagging a post “web” for retrieval within the wide world of resources would be pointless. We’re either going to get more sophisticated in how we tag, or our computers are going to have to get ever more clever about reading lots of implicit and metadata to help us find what we’re looking for. Or both.

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Miles Wolbe of TinyApps.org has stumbled across a site, StarGeek, that re-posts contents from blogs, larded up with with irrelevant ads. For example, here’s a page that “repurposes” one of my posts.

The site says:

projectGrok is a beta portal CMS written in PHP and driven by RSS content. Using MYSQL tables to store headlines and text from a bank of RSS url’s from your target niche, projectGrok automatically clusters entries of relavant and timely content.

Or possibly it uses other people’s content to try to get ads in articles returned by searches at Google. Hard to tell, but their article on “Keyword Research” is about search page optimization. So I’m suspicious enough to use the “nofollow” attribute when linking to them. If I’m misjudging these folks, let me know and I’ll post a correction immediately below.

BTW, the latest entry in the weblog on their home page is dated 7/13/04 [Technorati tag: spam]

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Gotta love the Blogher conference’s idea of a “do-ocracy“: Want to get a topic on the agenda of this one day event? Do it!

And the political philosophy behind this:

“How do you subvert the dominant hierarchy? You give up control.”

So writes Surfette (Lisa Stone).

Sounds like a great event. I look forward to following along via blogs and IRC… [Technorati tags: blogher do-ocracy surfette]

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The OpenNet Initiative (U of Toronto, Berkman Center and U of Cambridge) is releasing a report on Thursday about the sites China prevents its citizens from seeing. From the press advisory about the press conference:

“Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005” documents the degree to which the Chinese government controls and manipulates the information environment in which its citizens including websites, blogs, email, and online discussion forums. Since ONI last released on filtering in China in 2002, the Chinese government has developed far more sophisticated filtering techniques. Using a distributed testing application run from within China’s trusted volunteers from different locations and network access points, ONI’s report empirical and comparative study of China’s filtering systems. The report also offers legal and regulatory regime that supports and justifies these filtering practices.

These topics are particularly timely given recent efforts by the Chinese government to monitor websites and chat rooms, large-scale arrests of Chinese citizens who post material the government deems offensive or threatening, and the firing of prominent scholars critical of the Central Propaganda Department.

If you happen to be in DC on Thursday, you can mosey on over to Room 285 of the Russell Senate Office Building at 9:30am. If you’d like to get a copy of the report when it comes out, you can send an email to amichel /AT\ cyber.law.harvard.eud. [Technorati tags: china censorship berkman]

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