Robert Cox's blog

The AP has a story up today which is getting a great deal of attention in the blogosphere today:

FTC plans to monitor blogs for claims, payments

I was interviewed for the article and quoted here:

"It would always be better for bloggers to self-police," said Robert Cox, president of Media Bloggers Association in New Rochelle, N.Y. "We have laws on the books. They apply to everybody, not just people who write blogs."

The FTC provided the following information about their proposed guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials to the Associated Press who, in turn, provided them to me so that I might comment on them for the AP story which ran today.

As you will see, these guidelines have existed for many years but are being updated to include the Internet, online publishers and, specifically, bloggers.

Panel on "News in Transition," talking about trends in Internet journalism. Left to right, Jeff Birnbaum of The Washington Times, me, Kinsey Wilson of NPR and Ju-Don Roberts of washingtonpost.com, Lou Ferrara of the Associated Press/Sports.

Event sponsors are Newspaper Guild, Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, Knight Foundation, Online News Organization, Merrill College of Journalism -UMD.

Trend among people here--Jeff Birnbaum hired to run washingtonpost.com, John Harris running Politico, Vivisn Schiller running NPR, Kinsie Wilson running NPR.com--all arguably fish out of water stories. Are there tech people asked to come in and run online news operations. Of course you have Digg, Google News, etc. What to make of this.

I was reading Maurreen Skowran's article on E-Media Tidbits, NYT Readers Brainstorm Business Models, Paying for Online News, and it got me thinking again about the "death of journalism" issue and, in particular, the strange idea of "paying for news".

Maurreen wrote:

Two of the Times essays focused on paying for news. The one by Steven Brill (founder of The American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, and Brill's Content) was headlined "Culture of Free" Is Suicide. With newspaper fortunes sliding as they are, the question of whether and how to ask readers to pay for online news has recently gained prominence, including in Walter Isaacson's Feb. 5 Time.com piece, "How to Save Your Newspaper." But Tidbits founding editor Steve Outing advocated a different approach in his Editor & Publisher column yesterday: soliciting donations for online news via a new startup, Kachingle.

The Associated Press reports on a Kansas report getting permission to cover a federal criminal trial using Twitter from his cell phone:

Copyblogger has a good interview with Seth Godin who operates out of my old hometown of Irvington, NY. The interview is getting heavily re-tweeted right now. Asked to share some universal principles on leadership from his new book "Tribes", Seth offers these pearls:

• People want to belong, they want to be missed when they don’t show up.
• Charisma doesn’t make you a leader, leading gives you charisma.
• Most of all, people care about themselves.
• Faith is belief in the future and it is critical. Religion is a set of rules designed to amplify faith at the same time it guarantees the status quo. As you can guess, heretics have a lot of faith, but not so much patience with religion. And heretics are the ones who make change.
• When in doubt, work with small groups. If you can’t find 5 followers, how will you find 1000?
• Talk to people with respect, don’t advertise at them.
• Transparency is your only option, because the tribe will smell artifice.

I think that can be summed up as:

My Powerbook G4 blew up when I attempted to install the latest update to 10.6.  The good news is that the HD is OK,  Better, I use Time Machine so my files are backed up.  The bad news is that I misplaced my Leopard disk and it looks like I will have to buy a new one later today just to restore.  Also, until I actually see my files restored I feel sort of sick to my stomach.

This problem is forcing me to think though something I have been considering for a while - do I really need my laptop?

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting the Kindle 2 which just began to ship this week.

If you don't have time to watch the whole thing I have condensed the entire interview down to a 70 seconds audio.



They have the full video over at Gizmodo.

"...the business of creativity has had very little to do with creativity or the artists themselves. It has become the purview of smart business people who view creative endeavors as their property."

- Terry Heaton

Terry has a brilliant piece up on his pomo blog entitled We Don't Need No Stage in which he dissects the fatal flaws with current "content" business models. His essay goes a long way to providing the correct context for the Spectrial going on in Sweden right now. His basic point is that "There is no stage in the online world, and value propositions based on such are unworkable. Content has been freed from the limitations of the stage, and the sooner we all accept that, the sooner we can get on with the task of creating ways to pay for the costs of creating content."

We set up some new social media thingy's to help spread the word about the MBA. We are looking for volunteers to help manage our presence on these and other sites so if you would be interested to serve as an admin let us know.

We have a fan page so click the chicklet above and "fan" us. This a good way for our members to let their friends know they've joined the MBA.

The Twitter feed is automated with Twitter Feed to publish "official" MBA feeds:

* MBA Legal which will aggregate posts from our lawyers and our legal intern to keep people informed about important cases, rulings, legal controversies, MBA Legal Alerts and more.

* MBA in the News is our "clip file" of MBA media mentions so you can see what news organizations are saying about the MBA.

Once again I am in a family pool for the Academy Awards. I've seen all the movies, researched all the reviews, surveyed all the critics and will surely get beat (again) by someone who saw three of the movies and guessed in every category.

Actor in a Leading Role: Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler
Actor in a Supporting Role: Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight
Actress in a Leading Role: Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married
Actress in a Supporting Role: Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler
Animated Feature Film: Kung-fu Panda
Art Direction: Changeling
Cinematography: The Dark Knight
Costume Design: Australia
Directing " The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Documentary Feature: Man on Wire
Film Editing: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Foreign Language Film: The Class (France)
Makeup: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Original Score: Slumdog Millionaire
Original Song : Down to Earth - Wall-E
Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Sound Editing: Wall-E
Sound Mixing: Wall-E
Visual Effects: Iron Man
Adapted Screenplay: Slumdog Millionaire
Original Screenplay: Milk