You might have noticed that many of the stories I write link to blog posts elsewhere, and some even have a “Found via [source]” link at the bottom. This is because it’s a core value of news blogging that if you find a story somewhere else, you link back and so share some of your readers with them—at least in part because if you do, they’re likely to reciprocate and share their readers with you next time. But it seems that the “professional” press continues to have trouble with this idea. On GigaOM, Mathew Ingram looks at a kerfuffle...

Technology writer and blogger Robert X. Cringely (the one behind the 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds, not the InfoWorld columnists) has announced he is going to be rebooting his written-in-1989, updated-in-1996 history of Silicon Valley, Accidental Empires for the modern Internet age: he is going to blog it. Over the next few months, Cringely will be reposting the entire book to a blog, and inviting reader participation to help him update it for the final e-book form. Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use...

I have had a little fun over the last month, perhaps about the same kind that comes from watching a train wreck, in watching the fracas surrounding TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s decision to start a venture capital fund, and his subsequent ouster from the tech blog he founded. There was some concern that being a venture capitalist could somehow lead to a conflict of interest in his reporting on the blog, and after some discussion AOL (in the person of Arianna Huffington) decided it would be best if Arrington was let go. Fellow TechCrunch writer Paul Carr followed shortly afterward....

This is my coverage of Michael Stackpole’s presentation on how writers can take advantage of the e-publishing revolution. Stackpole does charge for this talk (it was $8 at GenCon; he will be giving it again at DragonCon in September), and gives it at a number of conventions. It was a very interesting panel, and more than worth the admission fee. If you’re in the area of DragonCon, or any other convention where Stackpole is speaking, I strongly encourage you to go. In deference to his need to earn a living, I will condense my detailed notes down to general...

Remember Cooks Source, the little foodie magazine that ripped off a blog post, got smarmy when called on it, and then got smacked for it by a significant portion of the entire Internet? Well, it looks like it’s time to cue up the Streisand Effect again. Blogger Ian Dennis Miller has posted a story to his blog about a newspaper, the Long Island Press, plagiarizing a blog article he posted (about a “petite lap giraffe” viral marketing campaign) based on original research—and then, when he complained, the paper altered the article to remove the borrowed information rather than give...

In reference to my post a few days ago about free on-line writing possibly devaluing paid prose, an interesting post came my way from Mary Hamilton at her Metamedia blog in which she talks about unpaid work versus paid from a standpoint of social relationships. Hamilton cites a chapter from a book called Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, on the effect of market forces on social relationships. The chapter talks about an experiment studying how hard students would work on mindless tasks if paid nothing, fifty cents, or five dollars for their work. It turns...

A few days ago, NPR carried an interesting story looking at the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL. As David Carr pointed out, much of the value of the $315 million sale was created by bloggers working for free. When you look at personal blogs and social media, you might see random people telling the rest of the world trivial things like what they ate for breakfast—but altogether, what this mass of personal creativity represents is content. "As we all twitter away and type away and update our Facebooks, we're creating the coal that sort...

A month ago I covered a post by Robert Scoble about the question-and-answer website Quora, which has been coming in for a lot of attention lately. Scoble thought that the site had the potential to become “the future of blogging.” And while I couldn’t quite see that, I nonetheless thought that, based on Scoble’s remarks, it was worthy of investigation. However, now Scoble himself has changed his mind. It turns out that a number of problems with the way Quora handles questions and answers make it considerably less useful for blogging—notably the way that other users can come in...

Paul Carr’s latest column on TechCrunch looks at an interesting problem that arises from the ad-and-search-based nature of many Internet blogs and publications. The problem is that sites that make their content freely available to all have incentive to slant their editorial coverage toward topics that draw the most search engine hits—which invariably leads to catering to the lowest possible common denominator. For free, ad-supported content, pageviews are king – and pageviews are what slideshows and celebrity fluff and SEO generate. Those horseshit pageviews are then magically transformed into money which is used to hire more...

Robert Scoble has a post on his blog talking about answer-finding service Quora, and why he feels it is significant. He points to a tweet from venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar who believes that it is “the future of blogging.” Blogs may not be e-books, but they are on-line content and certainly that’s a form of TeleReading. I had never heard of Quora before today and was curious, so I went over to check it out. What I found was an answer-finding service, where you post your question and other users will answer it. I wasn’t sure...

Break out the popcorn, everyone; the saga of copyright troll Righthaven just veered right into summer blockbuster territory. After signing MediaNews, the US’s second-largest newspaper publisher, for its copyright protection racket, Righthaven has just filed suit against Matt Drudge, the notably pugnacious blogger behind the Drudge Report, (Found via Techdirt.) Drudge had the temerity to use a photo from MediaNews paper The Denver Post, as well as linking to the Las Vegas Review-Journal website. (Ars Technica’s story on the matter reprints the photo as it appeared on Drudge; perhaps they’re daring Righthaven to sue them, too.) As...

Lately, social networking has often been hailed as a kind of great equalizer to help writers connect better with fans and sell more books. It’s a way to connect with fans, show that you’re a real person, and show the human face behind your stuff so they might be more inclined to support you. But, as guest writer Daniel Kalder notes in a Publishing Perspectives editorial, too much emphasis on social networking as a sort of publicity cure-all is fundamentally misguided for several reasons. For one thing, it runs the risk of turning into specious “magical thinking”. ...