According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

"Before you could be anonymous, and now you can't," said Nancy Sun, a 26-year-old New Yorker who abandoned her first blog after experiencing the dark side of minor Internet notoriety. She had started it in 1999, back when blogging was in its infancy and she did not have to worry too hard about posting her raw feelings for a guy she barely knew.

Ms. Sun's posts to her blog — www.cromulent.org, named for a fake word from "The Simpsons" — were long and artful. She quickly attracted a large audience and, in 2001, was nominated for the "best online diary" award at the South by Southwest media powwow.

But then she began getting e-mail messages from strangers who had seen her at parties. A journalist from Philadelphia wanted to profile her. Her friends began reading her blog and drawing conclusions - wrong ones - about her feelings toward them. Ms. Sun found it all very unnerving, and by 2004 she stopped blogging altogether.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.'"

Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.

Have a permanent link. Don't just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.

Have a link for everything. Don't have a single page with ten items on it. Blogging a link to the top of your fifty-screen-long page with a blurb about something halfway down generates 200 e-mails from readers who can't find the referenced item.

Use real links. Don't have links with expiring session-keys that are no good if someone revisits the URL later. If a blogger can't send the URL to a friend or put it on the Web, then that blogger can't send people to go look at your stuff. Likewise, avoid the giant, 800-character gobbledegook URLs filled with junky alphabet-soup GUIDs -- if it can't be pasted into IRC without linebreaking, there's some group of compulsive communicators who'll be unable to get to it.

The result is an intensely personal window into the lives, preferences and quirks of the powerful tastemakers at Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, who have spent years shielded from public view.

Their decisions about what makes it onto Wal-Mart's shelves have enormous effect, earning (or costing) vendors millions of dollars. It was a blogger on Check Out, after all, who first disclosed last month that Wal-Mart would stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format, rather than the rival HD DVD system. The decision was considered the death knell for HD DVD.

On the blog, Marvin Deshommes, a merchandise manager in the lawn and garden department, tells readers that he belongs to the Christian Life Cathedral church. His favorite quote from the Bible is Luke 12:48 -- "To whom much is given, from him much will be required."

Joe Muha, a video-game buyer, discloses that Ayn Rand is one of his favorite authors. Danielle Pribbernow, a toy buyer, talks about her cat, Sierra.

Wal-Mart says the Web site helps buyers solicit quick feedback from consumers on the merchandise -- and shows a softer side of the giant company, which has 5,000 stores, 1.2 million workers and annual sales of nearly $400 billion.

After the 14-hour plane ride from the Dominican Republic, it feels good to be on the ground again. I'm also delighted to be back in South Africa. It's been nine years since I was the first U.S. president ever to travel to this wonderful country. On that first visit, Hillary and I laid a brick at a women's center in Johannesburg, marking the beginning of my personal commitment to help rebuild a new South Africa. Since then, I've tried to return as often as I can. Almost a decade later, my Foundation carries on this commitment through its work here and throughout the continent, and I'm eager to see firsthand the progress we're helping to achieve.

Johannesburg is one of the cities partnering with my Clinton Climate Initiative to perform energy'saving renovations to their buildings. These simple, cost-effective measures, which we are working on in 16 cities around the world, will have a tremendous impact on lowering carbon emissions from urban areas while actually saving money for the buildings' owners and creating jobs.

Based on all the scientific evidence, it's impossible to deny that our planet is warming. Africa stands to suffer the most from global climate change, so it's only right that we partner with cities like Johannesburg to help them do their part to stop these alarming trends. By implementing eco-friendly policies and deploying green technologies, African countries have a remarkable opportunity to emerge as leaders in the fight against global warming.

Throughout our trip, my staff and I will be keeping an eye on what supporters like you are saying on our blog, so please share your thoughts with me. I look forward to reading your responses as soon as I have a chance. Until then, I hope you'll support my Foundation and the important work we have begun. It's a great day to be in Africa.

Are you fed up with having to remember dozens of usernames and password? Does the idea of creating yet another account on yet another site leave you cold?

OpenID is a new standard that hopes to alleviate some of the pain, and we've just made it available to everyone who has a WordPress.com blog. This means you can sign in to a growing number of sites using your existing WordPress.com account.

The answer would come from a range of data, for instance video recordings or databanks which store readings from electronic chips. Such chips embedded in people's clothes could track their movements. He told a privacy conference the internet would be capable of holding huge amounts of data very cheaply and patterns of information could be extracted very quickly. "Everything can be recorded for ever," he said.

He was speaking at a conference at which a report commissioned by Richard Thomas, the privacy watchdog, was launched. Mr Thomas has said Britain is "waking up to a surveillance society that is all around us" and that such "pervasive" surveillance is likely to spread.

Spin Thicket, as should be apparent, is patterned after one of my favorite Web sites, Fark.com, along with similar sites like Fazed.net and others. The difference is that it's specifically geared to people with an interest in the image-making professions -- advertising, PR, marketing, journalism, and politics.

Spin Thicket has no agenda. It's as much for people who read PR Watch as PR Week. It's as much for fans (or haters) of Michelle Malkin as Kos. It's as much for people who see bias in the NY Times as Fox News. Throw it all in the wash and turn on the spin cycle; that's the idea behind Spin Thicket.

With not a penny of paid media and in less than a month, "Dove Evolution," a 75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, for the Unilever brand has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows "Ellen" and "The View" as well as on "Entertainment Tonight." It's also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove's Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year, according to Alexa.com.

By those measures, "Evolution" is the biggest online-buzz generator in the U.S. personal-care and beauty industries, topping this year's effort from Omnicom Group's Tribal DDB on behalf of the Philips Norelco Bodygroom shaver. And that's before the campaign began rolling out to 10 additional countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America last week.

"Dove Evolution" also trounced another October darling of the blogosphere -- would-be investment banker Aleksey Vayner's self-promotional video -- for mentions on Nielsen BuzzMetrics' BlogPulse. And it ranked among the top 15 blog-linked videos last week on Technorati -- the only one, aside from a presentation by Apple's Steven Jobs, from a nonpolitician.

Nobody understands how online viral marketing really works. Worse: ever since big brands discovered its power, it's becoming harder every day to succesfully create some buzz online. It's true that a succesful "word of mouse" campaign is always cheaper to produce than, say, a street ad campaign. And yes, it's a perfect way to support a bigger ad campaign, or reach a different, more "webby" target group. But if a viral campaign is not handled right, it might hit you in the face, and sometimes even harm your brand. Or worse: be ignored completely, like the majority of them. All you can do is: avoid common mistakes, unleash the virus, wait and pray.

The Internet Society of China has recommended to the government that bloggers be required to use their real names when they register blogs, state media said on Monday, in the latest attempt to regulate free-wheeling Web content.

The society, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Information Industry, said no decision had been made but that a 'real name system' was inevitable.

"A real name system will be an unavoidable choice if China wants to standardise and develop its blog industry," the official Xinhua news agency quoted the Internet Society's secretary general, Huang Chengqing, as saying.

"We suggest, in a recent report submitted to the ministry, that a real name system be implemented in China's blog industry," Huang said.

Every Wal-Mart employee that Laura and Jim run into, from store clerks to photogenic executives, absolutely loves to work at the store. Sound like a great Wal-Mart publicity campaign? Anyone familiar with Wal-Mart and its reputation for being quite stingy with wages and benefits will roll their eyes at such a rosy picture. In fact, some critics are so skeptical that they wonder whether Jim and Laura are real or whether they were concocted at the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

"Wal-Mart has hired fake people," says Jonathan Rees, a labor historian and associate professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has also worked as a staff researcher at the AFL-CIO. In a blog posting for the Web site The Writing On the Wal, Reese published an open letter to Laura and Jim challenging them to reveal themselves and asking who paid for their RV and gas.

In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there's a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What's wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart.

Even these personal attacks won't sour my feelings about Wal-Mart. I've met too many great people in Wal-Marts across the county. I've met too many people - real people, not imaginary Internet people - who've told me about all the good Wal-Mart has done. I've camped in Wal-Mart parking lots. I've met these people and heard their stories firsthand. Which is something the people who attacked Jim and me haven't done and don't care to do.

So I've made the trip. I had a great time. I loved meeting the people we met, listening to the stories we heard. After everything that's happened, I even loved blogging about it all. And if I had the chance, I'd do it again.

In the end, that's all that really matters.

No stain or spill is too challenging for Dr. Laundry to tackle; he's claimed victory over numerous stain challenges. Baker is even a hero to little ballerinas in Berkeley, Calif. Leveraging his expertise, a costume designer with the Berkeley Ballet Theater was able to remove red lipstick from a handmade costume the night before a big Nutcracker performance.

From his base at Clorox's technical lab in Pleasanton, Calif., Baker frequently conducts Bleach 101 orientation sessions and demos on stain removal for new Clorox employees, presents scientific study results to outside industry groups and educates key Clorox customers on new Clorox products.

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from "numb fingers" to "60 single men" to "dog that urinates on everything."

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for "landscapers in Lilburn, Ga," several people with the last name Arnold and "homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia."

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. "Those are my searches," she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

AOL removed the search data from its site over the weekend and apologized for its release, saying it was an unauthorized move by a team that had hoped it would benefit academic researchers.

But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data.

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman said. "It was an innocent-enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."

The bloggerati just need to get over every blog coming out the gate reading like a conversation at the local pub and not rehashing the past trials and tribulations of bloggers. It takes time for a corporate blog to find its collective voice.

By the way, I agree with Andy Lark that we should be nicer to new companies that try the bloggy Web. At least give them a couple of weeks to get settled into their new homes before we start lobbing rocks through their front windows. Of course, I doubt anyone will listen to me because these companies came into the bloggy Web so late that the mob isn't gonna automatically be nice the way they were to me three years ago.

Give Dell some breathing room, let them find their voice, offer them advice. If they still suck in a couple of months, then have at them. In the meantime, think back to when you first started blogging and how nice it felt when people cut you some slack.

When I said I was going to a press screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," a friend said, "Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor...ing!" This is not a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore's concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

Well . . . I've decided to write a new book. Yep, 300 Incredible Blogs on the Internet.

So . . . if you have an incredible blog or know of one, let me know about it.

The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.

The rule will take effect at the start of the next school year, officials said.

District officials won't regularly search students' sites, but will monitor them if they get a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.

Mary Greenberg of Lake Bluff, who has a son at Libertyville High School, argued the district is overstepping its bounds.

"I don't think they need to police what students are doing online," she said. "That's my job."

Associate Superintendent Prentiss Lea rebuffed that criticism.

"The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

The number of comments in the entire blogosphere is comparable to the number of posts in active, non-spam blogs. Therefore comments constitute up to 30% (150,000) of the daily volume of blog posts (700,000), according to BlogPulse data

Less than 2% of all blog comments are syndicated in feeds

The textual size of the commentsphere is 10 to 20% of the blogosphere

Use of comments is beneficial for ranking blog posts in useful ways

They demonstrate with data that comments are an indicator of the popularity of a weblog

They also do the same for controversy; high comments = high controversy

Clearly comments are undiscovered country and Nielsen BuzzMetrics is working hard to figure out how to search this critical data pool and use it to measure influence. Here here. This data is essential and it's underutilized, yet difficult to mine.

My goal is to rule the fast food world with an iron fist. And raise a happy family. I was born on a cattle ranch in Colorado. I didn't have much except a love for burgers and pretty women. What else does your average red-blooded American need? Then I headed to sunny California. Why? Cuz I had this idea to let people order burgers from their cars...and, well, people in California love their cars. (Not to mention I have a thing for blondes.) So I opened up Jack in the Box. Met my wife Cricket. Got my sweet yellow hat and an even sweeter jet.

Two weeks ago after a long long day at work, I came home and ate 4 tacos, 2 jumbo jacks, onion rings and a diet soda. My all time record.

So only hours after she died in an automobile accident near Valdosta, Ga., early on the morning of Feb. 27, her father, John Walker, logged onto her MySpace page with the intention of alerting her many friends to the news. To his surprise, there were already 20 to 30 comments on the page lamenting his daughter's death. Eight weeks later, the comments are still coming.

"Hey Lee! It's been a LONG time," a friend named Stacey wrote recently. "I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven, where I'm sure you are in charge of the parties. Please rest in peace and know that it will never be the same here without you!"

Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users in recent years, especially the young, who use them to expand their personal connections and to tell the wider world about their lives.

Inevitably, some of these young people have died -- prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems -- and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time.

Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said in an e-mail message that out of concern for privacy, the company did not allow people to assume control of the MySpace accounts of users after their deaths.

"MySpace handles each incident on a case-by-case basis when notified, and will work with families to respect their wishes," Mr. Anderson wrote, adding that at the request of survivors the company would take down pages of deceased users.

But Mr. Kukral made two mistakes. For one thing, Mr. Cuban almost always prefers e-mail to the telephone. For another, there are lots of people vying for his attention.

"He has sent me so many e-mails, he knows I won't call," Mr. Cuban said Thursday in an e-mail.

Mr. Kukral denied bombarding Mr. Cuban with e-mail. "I think he has me confused with somebody else."

And he's not defeated, even though he spent money on a press release. "Right now, just by the fact that since I put a press release out, I've gotten a reporter from The Dallas Morning News to call me, who has in turn talked to Mark about me," he said.

"For $80, Mark Cuban knows my name."

"This is a first of its kind blogging experiment," said Mr. Kukral. "I want to see if I can use a quickly made blog and some inexpensive blog promotion techniques to get a person like Mark Cuban to notice me, and actually call me."

The point of this blogging experiment is to further prove the power of of instant publishing/blogging as an effective method of promoting your business online.

"If I can use a simple blog and a press release to get the attention of a successful businessman and mogul like Mark Cuban, then actually get him to call me, I can further prove that blogging is indeed a powerful way to get attention and accomplish specific goals, cheaply and quickly."

Kukral hopes that Mr. Cuban will be drawn to his offer from the creation of a press release through PrWeb.com.

"This blogging experiment only works if Mark finds my offer to call me on his own, either by reading this press release, or from some other bloggers writing about it and him becoming aware of it through them."

"She said some things that I won't share, but she did tell me that this could be bad for me -- bad for my career. Well, screw you!" the movie star told me yesterday about a conversation he had with the doyenne of Huffingtonpost.com. "I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Clooney, in his only interview on the subject, took off the gloves in his fight with Huffington over a blog purportedly written by the "Syriana" Oscar-winner and posted on her Web site Monday.

"I feel abused," he said.

But Huffington insisted (and forwarded me E-mails that seemed to back her up) that she believed she had explicit permission from one of Clooney's PR reps to publish his disparate quotes as a single piece of writing. "This was a misunderstanding," she told me yesterday, as the disputed blog was removed from her Web site.

Clooney told me: "Nobody has ever written an op-ed piece for me. If I say I've written something, I've written it. When I go to the Oscars, I write everything I say...I stand by what I do, but I'm very cautious not to take giant steps onto soapboxes because I think they're polarizing."

Clooney said that when he demanded a disclaimer from Huffington, she refused. "She told me that it's a big no-no in the blogosphere, where people are supposed to write their own pieces."

Milk Pig, another blog reported to have been disappereared, is also back in action. Both Massage Milk and Milk Pig are hosted on Yculblog.com. However the third blog mentioned in yesterday's Danwei report, Pro State in Flames is still not functioning.

Hmm.

This bill would require an operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish, maintain and enforce a policy requiring an information content provider who posts messages on a public forum website either to be identified by legal name and address or to register a legal name and address with the operator or provider prior to posting messages on a public forum website.

The bill requires an operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.

In addition, the bill makes any operator or Internet service provider liable for compensatory and punitive damages as well as costs of a law suit filed by a person damaged by the posting of such messages if the operator or Internet service provider fails to establish, maintain and enforce the policy required by section 2 of the bill.

What is different about Wal-Mart's approach to blogging is that rather than promoting a product - something it does quite well, given its $300 billion in annual sales - it is trying to improve its battered image.

Wal-Mart, long criticized for low wages and its health benefits, began working with bloggers in late 2005 "as part of our overall effort to tell our story," said Mona Williams, a company spokeswoman.

"As more and more Americans go to the Internet to get information from varied, credible, trusted sources, Wal-Mart is committed to participating in that online conversation," she said.

Copies of e-mail messages that a Wal-Mart representative sent to bloggers were made available to The New York Times by Bob Beller, who runs a blog called Crazy Politico's Rantings. Mr. Beller, a regular Wal-Mart shopper who frequently defends the retailer on his blog, said the company never asked that the messages be kept private.

The author of the e-mail messages is a blogger named Marshall Manson, a senior account supervisor at Edelman who writes for conservative Web sites like Human Events Online, which advocates limited government, and Confirm Them, which has pushed for the confirmation of President Bush's judicial nominees.

"But Mr. Manson has not encouraged bloggers to reveal that they communicate with Wal-Mart or to attribute information to either the retailer or Edelman, Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart said."

In a sign of how eager Wal-Mart is to develop ties to bloggers, the company has invited them to a media conference to be held at its headquarters in April. In e-mail messages, Wal-Mart has polled several bloggers about whether they would make the trip, which the bloggers would have to pay for themselves.

Mr. Reynolds of Instapundit.com said he recently was invited to Wal-Mart's offices but declined. "Bentonville, Arkansas," he said, "is not my idea of a fun destination."

Along comes modern day Tom Sawyer, aka Marshall Manson, a sr account supervisor at Edelman, who enlists right wing bloggers to whitewash the tarnished image of WalMart. Many conservative bloggers regurgitated emails and press releases Manson fed them right into their blogs.

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.

The zero movement website features a manifesto, downloads of its branding material, and blog-type entries on topics that pose wistful questions like: "Why can't every weekend be long?" and "why can't I still get toys for Christmas?"

Although the goal was to tease the market and create some buzz among the web-savvy "neos" in the twenty something age-bracket, the blogging community has issued its own verdict.

Those searching out blogger commentary on the zero movement are likely to find posts along the lines of: "How many ad agencies does it take to patronise a demographic?"

Welcome to the Bad Pitch blog. We're tired of the public relations industry taking the blame for a minority of its members that pollute communication channels with bad pitches, poorly written news releases and useless phone calls asking "did you get the release?"

So we're outing the guilty parties in full view of the highly-networked blogosphere. It's our hope that the Bad Pitch blog will entertain the true victims of this practice, the PR industry, and it will help the guilty parties improve. Hopefully the blog will someday become obsolete.

Bernie's Blog -- ostensibly written by brand mascot Bernie the Rabbit, the blog features short articles and news notes on organic food, healthier living, and a healthier earth.

"Our cause marketing person Kathryn Keslosky writes it. She's a recent grad of Villanova and she's had a passion for environmental issues and political action since she was a student. I feel the blog world likes the activism and passion in it."

Key -- prior to starting the blog, the team met to carefully discuss what Bernie's attitude would be. Instead of writing negative or critical articles, the team decided Kathryn would focus on the positive. Example - links to articles on sustainable agriculture, instead of articles on how mainstream farming hurts the land.

It has also come to the notice of Robert Scoble of Microsoft's internal innovations division, after arch-blogger Macleod cannily namechecked Scoble. This prompted a reply from the Microsoft staffer, meaning that Stormhoek's blog campaign is now associated in bloggers' minds with Microsoft, which has done nothing to harm its cause.

Some bloggers are paid for posting their observations. At Wofford, for instance, student bloggers receive $25 per week. Allison Kretz, a sophomore at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, earns $500 per semester for being an online scribe. Colgate's Burnham, on the other hand, received no compensation.

Until the university approached her, Kretz had never considered becoming a blogger. "I had applied for a tour guide position, but I didn't get the job," she said. "But they had my references from professors." The recommendations, and her desire to share her college experiences with family and friends, made her an ideal blogger. "I've really fallen in love with the university, and it's a good way to let people at home know how I'm doing," Kretz said.

Bloggers don't rely on a set of rules or a handbook to guide them on the content of their posts. Instead, the universities rely on the students' good judgment. "As for the rules, we don't have formal written guidelines," said Colgate's O'Keeffe. "But I sit down with the students and have a good discussion about the university's expectations and goals. I let the students know we're not interested in posts about parties or trips to the local taverns."

Most of the US cases in this area relate to defamation actions. In one recent case, the Delaware Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling that a council official, suing over remarks posted online by an unknown blogger, could force the blogger's ISP to reveal his identity. The official first had to prove that the remarks were capable of a defamatory meaning -- which he failed to do, according to Chief Justice Myron Steele.

"Blogs and chat rooms tend to be vehicles for the expression of opinions; by their very nature, they are not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely," wrote the Chief Justice. He added that plaintiffs harmed by a blog have an instant remedy available: blogging themselves.

Word comes from RL that the Army has hired PR firm Hass MS&L of Detroit to offer "exclusive editorial content" to blogs willing to run government propaganda.

"The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out," account executive Charlie Kondek has written to a number of pro-military blogs in a January 6 Email.

"To that end, the Army plans to offer you and selected bloggers exclusive editorial content on a few issues you’re likely to be interested in," Kondek says

I'm writing from a PR firm on behalf of the U.S. Army. We're contacting a few bloggers to test a new outlet for public information. The Army believes that military blogs are a valuable medium for reaching out to soldiers. To that end, the Army plans to offer you and selected bloggers exclusive editorial content on a few issues you're likely to be interested in. If you do decide you are interested in receiving this material, whether you choose to write about what we send you is, of course, entirely up to you.

Like I said, we're only contacting a handful of bloggers at this time. If you are interested, please let me know, and we'll send you further information as it becomes available. Either way, thanks for your time.

But the "content" under discussion, an Army public affairs officer tells me, is not the nitty gritty of deployments and living conditions overseas. It is planned to be an official counter to the perceived unwillingness of the mainstream media to report the "good news" from Iraq and the war on terror.

#23 Worst Overhyping of a Marketing Trend-BLOGS
Blogs provide almost no new information. They're frequently inaccurate. They contribute to the hysterical polarization of our nation's political discourse. And they're often written by people who can't, you know, write. So naturally marketers have flocked associate their brands with them. Seriously, it's not entirely clear why so many marketers have rushed to get themselves name-dropped in one of the most unreliable media environments yet invented, we're sure there's a PowerPoint presentation on their ROI being prepared as we write this.

The entries were part of a new program called Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company's online bookstore site. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.

"The program gives people who are interested in a particular author a way to get new insights into them, and gives the authors a way to develop more of a one-on-one relationship with readers," said Jani Strand, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The authors write on "anything they'd like their readers to know about them," Ms. Strand said, including what inspired their books and details about their experiences. Authors are free to update their blogs as often or as little as they like, and a linked profile page has information about other books, reading recommendations, personal information and, in some cases, e-mail addresses.

Ms. Wolitzer, in an interview, said she welcomed the blog as an opportunity to address readers more often than she usually might - that is, every two or three years, when a new book comes out. "Anything that can get fiction on people's radar is good," she said.

Carolyn K. Reidy, president of the adult publishing group at Simon & Schuster, which has already signed up at least 10 authors for Amazon Connect, said that when Amazon approached her company this year with the idea of author blogs, she quickly embraced it.

"It enables the author to have a conversation with readers on an ongoing basis, easily and in an ongoing place," she said. "We hope that somebody who reads one of an author's books will go back and discover one of the rest."

Why so? Every blogger speaks to the world, and every post has the potential to set off a conflagration. So, he says, it makes sense to count the matches. It's true that the A-listers play a crucial role. They fan the flames. But by the time they're onto a nasty rumor, complaint, or embarrassment, according to Umbria, it's no longer just a flicker in the forest. It's a blaze. And by that point, you probably don't need a market intelligence company to tell you about it.

6. Can I get the same insights Umbria provides using a blog search engine?

No. Blog search engines use key word search queries and generate results in real-time, making it very difficult to remove "Splogs" (Spam blogs or fake blogs created to "spoof" or fool search engines and elevate these URLs in search engine rankings) and false positives (e.g., a search on "Apple Computer" that may yield results about someone eating an "apple" while working on their computer). Incidence of Splogs and false positive can skew analysis results by as much as 50%. Umbria has invested in some of the most robust blog spam and false positive detection capabilities available to ensure we produce high quality and highly accurate analysis results unavailable from blog search tools.

Now that blogging has officially become the new "cool" way to market a movie, it seems as if we no longer need to see the film once it comes out since the entire thing has already been shown to us over the course of a year and a half on that damn webpage. Between the interviews and the assortment of behind-the-scenes tours, these blogs are waging a tough battle against, what used to be, a sweet spoiler-free world.

Hef is a really good guy. We watched the fight together the other night. I think he's a really special guy - he's the greatest guy ever. He doesn't have his nose up in the air like every other rich guy ... he's down to earth. He eats pizza just like all of us. We go to McDonald's all the time. He's a regular guy.

Celebrity Kaori Manabe appeared in Tokyo on Monday to officially launch a blog promotion committee aimed at increasing the number of people who write blogs on the Internet.

"There may be a lot of people who read blogs, but there aren't too many people who have their own ones," said Manabe, who appeared in a suit and wore glasses. "I want to spread them much more."

The committee was launched with support from major Japanese Internet provider Nifty, with the aim of promoting the correct use of blogs and increasing the number of users. Manabe will serve as head of the committee.

But there can be a down side. Teens are doing more than just pouring their hearts out in these online forums; many are posting provocative pictures, discussing real or imagined sex lives, berating and threatening one another, and recounting drinking and drug use. And that can get them in trouble with stalkers, authority figures and even future employers, experts say.

"Kids are doing outrageous things to get attention," said Parry Aftab, a privacy lawyer and executive director of WiredSafety.org, a Web site dedicated to online child safety. "They are looking for their day in the sun, 15 minutes of fame, something to show how they are special."

Aftab tells parents to focus on the "three Cs": content, contact and commercialism. Content -- what kids are actually saying online and how they say it -- often comes as a shock to parents but isn't always the most critical thing. "Their first concern is (obscene) language," Aftab said. "Their bigger concern should be about contact: who can communicate with them that they don't know."

Many of the teen-oriented blog sites now have privacy options that let users restrict who can view their site, giving access only to people they know. Parents concerned about safety may want to suggest or insist their teen use those access controls, Aftab added.

But now networks are piling on the blogs even for scripted shows. Many are written in the voice of a character -- usually not the main figure but an especially popular or quirky sidekick. Executive producers for other shows drop the charade of writing in character and merely use their own names.

Together, they present a network's united blogging front for a show, rather than cede control to do-it-yourself, sometimes obsessive fan bloggers.

"Blogs are a great way to bring millions of viewers who enjoy our programming into the creative process," CBS Entertainment President Nancy Tellem said in announcing more than a half-dozen blogs on, or coming to, CBS.com.

With a disclosure that Alexander was indeed a fictional character, the blog launched last March. But the response was not what the women had hoped for.

Robert French, a communications instructor at Auburn University who blogs about marketing on a site called Blogthenticity, was the first to notice. Delicious Destinations, he wrote, was a prime example of so-called character blogging, something that has become increasingly popular on business blogs. "What value do you find in this tactic?" he asked his readers. "Is it authentic?" The blogosphere responded. Hugh MacLeod, who runs Gapingvoid, a highly regarded and often scathingly critical site for marketing professionals, decided that GourmetStation's new blog merited special recognition -- the Beyond Lame Award. Soon, GourmetStation was the talk of all the marketing blogs. "Horrible. Stupid. Insane. Worthless. Ineffective," wrote one person. "The ultimate in false advertising."

Lynes-Miller has no regrets. For one thing, traffic at her site almost doubled as a result of the controversy. Besides, blogging is just one part of the company's marketing plan. In May, for example, GourmetStation was touted on Good Morning America as a great place to shop for Mother's Day gifts, which helped send second-quarter sales up 158%.

Meanwhile, T. Alexander's culinary adventures continue uninterrupted. "I didn't expect the negative feedback we initially received," Lynes-Miller says. "Though there was no negative feedback from customers -- and that's the feedback I'm most concerned about."

The power of the press... press release that is. So last night at 2am central time my press release finally went out. Yesterday I wasn't really sure what would happen. It could have brought me 2 visitors, or it could have brought me a little more. Well, I would say it was $30 well spent.

Within 12 hours of the release going out, I have already been contacted by 3 local news stations. In fact, in just over an hour the first one will be showing up at my house for an interview. Later tonight the other two stations will be doing the same. Let me also share the release stats with you:

The business of being an author has changed considerably over the last ten years. No longer is it sufficient to write a brilliant manuscript and manage to get it published. Authors now need to be excellent promoters of their own work. And for the intrinsically shy, that can be problematic. But an Internet trend has the potential to revolutionize author marketing, even for those who despise public speaking: blogging.

Juicy Fruit had lowered the bar on blogging so that anything could slither over with its blog, that David Weinberger, and BusinessWeek's Heather Green were among many to considered just about the worst ever -- myself included. I just had the pleasure of inserting a paragraph about it into the final draft of Naked Conversations and this morning discovered it was gone... GONE and in its place was a button that would allow me to watch TV Spots of the Juicy Fruit Lame ads. I just wish I chewed gum so I could boycot the stuff.

Yet, perhaps the single most important explanation for the refusal of CEOs to blog can be summed up in four words: CEOs have a life. If a CEO is doing his job properly, he doesn't have time to spend preparing the type of glorified online diary that is associated most intimately with gas bags, blowhards, navel-gazers, crackpots, conspiracy theorists and lonely guys. CEOs are expected to make important decisions about products and policy, not to ramble, rhapsodize, rant, blue sky, build castles in the air, muse out loud or bloviate. That's what bloggers are for.

But as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Donald Trump and even Matt Drudge will tell you, if you're not getting paid for it, it's probably not worth a whole lot. In this sense, encouraging CEOs to blog is like encouraging them to clean up the local lake or remove graffiti from public transportation. It's a nice thought, but CEOs have better things to do. If you're running a company and you have time to write a blog, maybe it's time to find someone less chatty to run the company.

Well, here's the deal people : You have crossed the line. It is not viral marketing on my blog when you pay for advertisment to other bloggers. When you do that, you have an ad campaign in place. Asking me to do it for free is in labor-talk, "explotation".

I am going to go one step further. To expect me give my labor for free when you have deliberately passed on paying for advertisement on my site is tacky, rude and, quite frankly, insulting.

And what is most upsetting about all of this? These people are supposed to be the champions of the new labor movement.

Sorry honey, but I am not your blogmonkey.

Our staff editors will contribute to the blog, but it won't be as "journalistic" as the stories that publish in our News section. Blog entries won't be third-party edited or fact-checked, as all our news stories are. They won't be subject to the thumbs-up or -down scrutiny of the daily news meeting. The blog won't necessarily be subject to the outside verification rule we hold our news stories to. We may write up something on the blog directly from a press release, for example. Doing that in a news story without first speaking with outside sources is a big no-no. The blog's a place where inverted-pyramid reporting isn't the rule, and a wee bit of opinion or bias may sneak into the text.

Does that undermine our blog's credibility? We doubt that very much. ClickZ editors' coverage of interactive marketing and advertising issues is, after all, a far cry from your Aunt Selma blogging the same topics. We're professional journalists with deep and highly specialized industry knowledge.

We're also using the blog to update, expand upon, or annotate existing news stories.

He doesn't consider this kind of blogging as "writing." The blog posts are quick annotations of 100 to 150 words - or fewer. Only once or twice a week does he take the time to write something longer ("It takes more time and thought").

Thanks to the blogosphere, on relatively short order, I went from writing twice a week to 10-15 times a week and sometimes more. There are plenty more where I came from that are feeling and responding in-kind to that same pressure. But, as the established media community picks up the pace, there are those of us in it who would prefer to keep constant the number of chances we're taking. But if the PR community doesn't also reinvent itself to keep pace with the media revolution by responding to the fact checkers on blogopshere time, it will leave those writers with no choice but to take more chances. I don't know about you, but if I were a PR professional, I sure wouldn't want to be the guy that blew that one opportunity to contain the story that snow-balled into a disaster for the company I represent.

Of course, most blogs are mind-numbingly dull. You need to dig deep to find the gems and that is exactly what Best of The Web has done for you. We identify 100 of the best blogs in 20 categories ranging from Art and Literary blogs, to Small Business, Marketing, Shopping and Music blogs.

But while Leffelman's playinthecity.blogs.com doesn't mention it, the 23-year-old waitress and aspiring journalist is getting a little help from Milwaukee's tourism office: a year's worth of high-speed Internet access, $1,700 in computer and camera equipment and free access to many of the outdoor diversions she'll be describing in her twice-weekly musings.

Last month, Pennsylvania's tourism site, visitpa.com, launched six blogs written by "real people" taking road trips across the state. Accompanied by digital photos and videos, the diaries cover such diverse pursuits as antique shopping, mountain biking and attending a NASCAR event. The authors - a family of four, a history buff, and a Harley-Davidson rider among them - receive $1,000 for each of three journeys they'll write about this summer.

Minneapolis' visitor and convention bureau, meanwhile, is soliciting applications for three culturally diverse "online tour guides" - a heterosexual couple, a family with children, and a gay male couple or group of gay male friends - who will post journal entries on the bureau's Web sites at least once a week for six months. The bloggers' payback: a "package of fun" that includes hotel rooms, event tickets and gift certificates.

More importantly, Mr. Cassar said, sites must figure out how to keep customers from straying from the store to the blog without ever returning to shop. Because typical blogs feature links to articles elsewhere on the Web, they can represent a one-way ticket away from the site.

Such is the dilemma faced by executives of Ice.com, an online jeweler based in Montreal. Ice.com has created three blogs in the last six months: a celebrity jewelry site (SparkleLikeTheStars.com), a question-and-answer site (JustAskLeslie.com) and a company news site (blog.ice.com).

Shmuel Gniwisch, Ice.com's chief executive, said the company was "having an internal struggle" about whether to put links to its blogs on Ice.com itself. Currently, people reach them through search engines and links from other blogs.

"Our blog people want the links on our site, but our brand people say it'll take people off the site," Mr. Gniwisch said. "We'll probably test it and see what it does."

Mr. Greenberg said the blog allowed eHobbies to project the homespun image that sometimes eluded even small companies like his, which has only 25 employees. "It lets us pull back the curtain and show how we're a company of hobbyists who love participating in the things they're buyers for," he said. "It humanizes us."

In addition to featuring the link to the blog at the top of the eHobbies home page, the company will soon begin promoting the blog in e-mail messages to customers, and hiding coupon codes in the blog to give people incentives to visit, Mr. Greenberg said.

What's interesting is that some of these companies are actively promoting the blogs in their correspondence with customers and even hiding coupon codes in their blogs to give people an incentive to visit. These online retailers are obviously hoping that a huge blog audience will translate into additional sales, or at least, additional buzz around certain products.

On July 11th, sustainablog will be two years old. While I didn't make a big deal of the first anniversary, this year I want to celebrate. So, from 9 am (CST) on July 11th to 9 am July 12th, I'll be "Blogging 'Round the Clock." That's right -- a 24-hour blogathon. There's a method to my madness, though (and, yes, I realize this sounds like madness) -- sustainablog will be raising funds for St. Louis' premiere site for all things sustainable, the Missouri Botanical Gardens' Earthways Center.

Journalists mostly used blogs for finding story ideas (53 percent), researching and referencing facts (43 percent) and finding sources (36 percent). And 33 percent said they used blogs to uncover breaking news or scandals. Still, despite their reliance on blogs for reporting, only 1 percent of journalists found blogs credible, the study found.

To those of you who are used to seeing nuggets of your internet goodness regularly reprinted in Page Six or reinterpreted in New York mag, the following will come as no surprise. For the rest of you innocent waifs, however, it’s time to realize that your trusted journalists rely on the most questionable of sources: