blogger

Way back near the end of 2005, Lot 49 reported that the Federal Election Commission had basically ruled that bloggers are journalists:

The Federal Election Commission today issued an advisory opinion that finds the Fired Up network of blogs qualifies for the “press exemption” to federal campaign finance laws. The press exemption, as defined by Congress, is meant to assure “the unfettered right of the newspapers, TV networks, and other media to cover and comment on political campaigns.” The full ruling is available at the FEC site. A noteworthy passage: “…an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity…” (emphasis added)

So, yeah, it’s double-edged, I mean that last line is basically the Fox News Channel exemption, but it also gives those bloggers who consider themselves citizen journalists a leg to stand on.

And the folks in that camp should be happy to have the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s help. As Donna Wentworth says, Bloggers: You Have a Right to Remain Vocal.

The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?

The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.

So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).

Wendy Seltzer alerts us to the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Cahill v. Doe, a case that tested our rights to anonymity online, as well as the standard for judging defamation.

As it turns out, the court decided against the plaintiff, a city councilman, and protected the identity of “Proud Citizen,” who the councilman accused of posting defamatory remarks in an online forum. Further, it also decided that the context of the remarks “a chatroom filled with invective and personal opinion” are “not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.”

In short, as Seltzer points out, the ruling hold readers responsible for seeing materials in the context they’re presented in:

The standard empowers a wide range of bloggers’ speech. Because readers can use context to help them differentiate opinions from statements of fact, bloggers are freer to publish their choice of opinionated gossip or citizen journalism. And thanks to courts like Cahill and Dendrite, they can do so using pseudonyms or their real names.