As you may—or may not—know, the blog you are now reading belongs to the Weblogs, Inc. Network (WIN).

The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 80 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across 75 industry leading blogs that include Engadget, Autoblog, and TVSquad. We figured we would skim the cream and give you some of the top posts from a number of these sites—as determined by our bloggers—in one easy to read post each week.

Tons of linkage after the jump… enjoy!

Engadget has Creative Zen Vision about Microsoft "breaking some new ground" with a… Battlebot (?!) walking around with Sony Ericsson's new W600 Walkman Phone and chatting up how the Nintendo Revolution won't support HD.

AdJab covers AutoTrader's attacks, on Heinz one-liners, marooned on Gilligan's Island and then

Our network of blogs just launched AdJab, an advertising industry blog, and today we're blogging the Super Bowl commercials—live as they happen! Swing by and check things out!

The word is Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines. I heard Bloglines was on the block months ago, sounds like a good move by Ask Jeeves, and something Yahoo and Google are going to have to really take seriously.

As many folks know I tried to get Elizabeth Spiers to do a Gawker-killer for Weblogs, Inc. for the past year—unsuccessfully of course. She told me she was done with blogging, and like an idiot I believed her.  This week Elizabeth launched FishBowlNY for MediaBistro and I'm shocked to find out that she is—gasp!—blogging every day. ES how could you!?!?!

Seriously, I'm glad she's back in the blogging game (not crazy about the name), and if she didn't work with us, then why not Touby—she's an old school survivor. 

A lot's been made of this blog war between ES and Nick Denton, but truth be told the Gawker-blog space is really not a great business. Sure, it will be get you a lot of influence/party invites, and you can write about all your pals in the media business all day long, but the truth is local blogs are a small business, and local blogs focused on a vertical like media are an even smaller business.

I know this because I ran two local publications that were focused on verticals (Silicon Alley Reporter and Digital Coast Reporter). Now, they did turn into a $12M a year business, but a) it was during the greatest boom of our lives and b) most of our revenue came from events which drew folks from around the world.

These blogs are going to do 10,000 to 200,000 page views a day, and 20% of that will be the Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan Google traffic. That's 300k to 5M page views a month. If you can even find advertisers at a couple dollar CPM, and you run three or four ad slots, you're looking at like $2-20k a month in advertising. In other words, enough to fund your sales commissions, a full-time writer or two, and some modest rent. That's the best a local media pub like this will ever do (check in on the Observer or Spy). The way these are being done they are vanity businesses for the owners. So, why can't I have one??!? :-)

Seriously, congrats to ES… the writing is tight and I'm glad you're back in the game.

PS - Congrats to Nick on launching two more WIN knock offs—I mean blogs (zing!)—GridSkipper and LifeHacker. Interesting how four of the last five Gawker blogs follow Weblogs, Inc. blogs (Autoblog, Joystiq, HackaDay and Gadling)—flattering indeed! Look for a Gawker media version of Luxist and BloggingBaby next. :-)

PSS - Interesting that Nick launched his new blogs on the same day as ES launches her new blogs. I mean, Nick is launching new blogs every 120 days or so, what are the chances that lands on the one day of the past year that MediaBistro launches new blogs?! You're not holding a grudge against your ex- are you Nick?!?!

There have been a lot of reports about journalists—and bloggers—reporting on information that companies consider "trade secrets."

Now, 'trade secret' is not a legal term from what I understand, that is unless you sign an agreement that defines a 'trade secret' and your relationship with the other party in regards to the use of information defined as such.

I'm curious what the legal eagles, publishers, journalists, and bloggers think about these two situations:

Scenario One: An Apple employee steps out of the Apple offices with a iPod Shuffle three months ago. That employee has a non-disclosure agreement with Apple. The New York Times takes a picture of the person with the iPod and runs a story about the mysterious device before it is officially released. Has the New York Times broken the law? Has the New York Times done something unethical?

Scenario Two: The same employee posts a picture of themselves and their iPod Shuffle to their blog and a message board for fans of Apple products. That employee has a non-disclosure agreement with Apple. The New York Times takes a screen capture of the person's website with them holding the iPod. The New York Times runs a story about the mysterious device with the screen capture before the iPod Shuffle is officially released. Has the New York Times broken the law? Has the New York Times done something unethical?

What do you think?

This is kind of funny… there is a blog conference at Harvard, but people are railing on it because it seems there aren't any bloggers invited.

I saw two bloggers on the list, Jeff and Dave, but it is funny to see a conference called "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" that has so few bloggers and so many traditional media companies!

I mean… Harvard is a huge place with a gazillion buildings. Why wouldn't you just do this event Dave Winer style and have everyone come to it?!?! Seems Dave has problems with the event himself.

The guy running tries to explain the story here saying:

"We will surely not have succeeded perfectly; we are sharply limited by space and money; and we know that, unlike with the free, open events we host regularly, there will be people disappointed not to be invited to this one.  (So, apologies in advance on this score.)"

You could easily just charge $100 per person and cover the cost of a bigger room… what would be so hard about that? How about putting a note on your blog saying "Can anyone out there help us pay an extra $500 for a bigger room, or can someone at the University find us a bigger venue?" I'm sure you would get 100 responses in a week and solve the problem instantly. Seems like this is an elitest thing… but, then again, what do I know about blogging, I mean you wouldn't want to waste a spot on folks doing blog businesses like me, Nick, or Rafat when you could have traditional media companies there right?

Many questions have come up recently related to ethics and blogging. Here are couple of simple survey questions to take everyone's temperature.

You must turn on JavaScript to view a mybackend.com survey click here to find out how.

I'm looking for someone to help produce our Podcasts. It's been fun having our bloggers screw around with audio software, VOIP, and sound levels, however it really is not efficient use of time. If we're going to be able to scale the Podcasting side of our business we need a tech person who can setup all the details, polish the cast, and let the talent focus on being—well—talented.

If you're interested in a paid gig as a Podcast Producer drop me a line at jason at calacanis dot com with the subject line of podcast producer, or better yet just fill out this form.

best jason

We've been growing really fast over here and even with my seven day a week, 20-hour day manic life. To give you an idea of my life right now I'm in Seattle for 36 hours, after 48 hours in NYC, after 72 hours in LA, after 72 hours in San Fran, after five days in LA, after 13 days in China, after… , after…, after…

Thank God I found Judith, who's totally saved my life in terms of helping me find great bloggers to join the network. Right now we need about 12 bloggers to do anywhere from 50 to 150 blog posts a month (really up to the blogger), so if you're looking to fill your Paypal account drop me a line. We're looking for people to blog about:

• Grid

• Cancer & other diseases

• Travel (on Gadling)

• VOIP

• Apple

• Scuba and other activities

• Cigars and other luxury items

• Hacking (and doing hacks like we do at www.hackaday.com and www.Engadget.com).

Just fill out the form here and Judith and I will get it and get right back in touch with you.

Congrats to Weblogs, Inc. largest blog, Engadget.com, for winning tech blog of the year! 

Peter and his team have been working really hard—well done!

I'm also thankful to all the sponsors who helped us pay all the bloggers who work on the blog (too many sponsors to name, but you know who you are).

I've been getting some flames from photographers on my personal blog who think I'm saying bloggers should be able to just use any image they find on the web, however they want, and just claim "fair use."

 

This couldn't be further from the truth.

 

What I'm saying is bloggers should respect photographers, not use their images beyond the conditions of fair use as described by copyright law, and work to find an equitable solution to the issues.

 

I had dinner with two big name photographers in L.A. recently. These are folks who's name you might recognize even if you are not in the photography industry. I asked them both under what circumstances could use their images without paying them, they both immediately responded emphatically "under no circumstances!"

 

Interesting. I asked them if they had heard of the term fair use, and they said they had heard of it but their photo agencies had told them that no one can use their images ever without their permission. This, of course, is not true. There is fair use, and there is commercial fair use as well. The issue is how, as an industry, we will impliment fair use. It is, at the end of the day, up to us how this all goes down.

 

Today I'd like to hear from photographers what they think is acceptable fair use of their photos on blogs.

How would you like to see bloggers treat your photos?

Let's get specific, let's give examples. Everyone is talking about the legal issues in this space, which can be argued either way till the cows come home. At the end of the day us debating the legal arguments doesn't amount to all that much since if a case does go the distance a judge and/or jury will decide the issue.

Today I'd like to be pragmatic and hear what real-world uses you would allow, and which ones you think cross the nebulous lines between fair use, abuse and infringement. Perhaps the photographers can come up with some guideline for blog fair use.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

best, Jason
 

Note: Don't post flames in the comment—they will not make it up. Please stay on target and let's be constructive in our discourse. If you must be vulgar or abusive please do it on your blog, or just send your flames to me personally at jason at calacanis dot com.

After reading the New York Times piece on BzzAgents this past Sunday, I'm convinced more then ever that this company is the analog version of spam.

According to the Times story their agents lie and deceive folks to get their products out there.

Do we really want to live in a world where our friends are getting paid to pitch us on products all the time?

This is about disclosure, and BzzAgents go around—again, straight from the Times story—and pitch these products without ever telling their friends (a.k.a. subjects) about the fact that they are earning "BzzPoints" they can trade in for free products. Many of them, again according the Times story, never tell folks about the relationship they have with BzzAgent!

Agents in the story said they didn't think that their marketing efforts would work if they told their friends they were getting paid (or getting free product, another form of getting paid). Well, duh???!?!

Can you imagine your friend calling you up and saying "Hey David, it's Jason. I'm working with a great new company called Uncle Joe's Pork Sausages… did you know that Uncle Joe's only uses grade A quality swine in their sausages?" That could be the end of the relationship, I mean do you want your friends pitching you half the time like telemarketers? TIVO and HBO are so popular because they let you skip the commercials—are these marketers so desperate that they want to insert commercials into our daily interactions? At least on TV you know it's a commercial!

Relationships are built on trust and disclosure, and "word of mouth marketing," as the have dubed it, is based on lying and deception. Even if you were to disclose what you're doing, it's so "icky" that people wouldn't want to be involved with you. The truth is trust and deception can not both exist in the same place at the same time—something has got to give.

In the Times they say over and over again that their company is based on Seth Godin's theories, but BzzAgents have got Seth all wrong.

I've read all of Seth Godin's books.

I first met Seth Godin in 1995 or 1996.

I've spent time with Seth Godin.

I wrote about Seth Godin and his compny Yoyodyne for years in Silicon Alley Reporter.

BzzAgents… * YOU * ARE * NO * SETH * GODIN * !!!

In Seth's book he talks about great products leading to buzz and organic word of mouth. He specifically tells companies to not waste their time and energy on creating fake buzz. Godin's concepts and observations are based on great companies like Tivo or JetBlue making tons of little innovations that people love, remember, and talk about. No where does Godin say "hire a company to get people to deceive their friends into thinking your product is amazing!"

Of course, according to the Times story, Seth Godin's publisher hired these folks for his last book, and his book mentions the firm. Hmmmmmmm…. sounds sinister to me. Are we going to find out next that Seth has stock in the company?

The oddest part is that the Times story goes on to quote Seth himself:

New York Times: Seth Godin, the writer and speaker on marketing whose ideas partly inspired BzzAgent, agrees that the agents' honesty is crucial. Paying people to promote products, hiring supermodels to show up in a bar and request a particular vodka, is ''disingenuous, dishonest and almost unethical,'' and it represents a subversion of honest peer-to-peer communication. And honest peer-to-peer communication, he maintains, is the future of marketing.

OK, Seth, I get it. You don't think BzzAgents should be lairs, and you don't think they should be involved in deception. Great, I agree!

However, the Times story goes on to question the deception that BzzAgents are doing when promoting books (not sure if they are referring to the promotion of your book Seth or other books—the Times story doesn't say, but I wish the writer of the story, BzzAgents or Seth would let me know):

New York Times: Those suggestions in the Bzz guides to call bookstores and pretend you don't know the exact title or author you're looking for are pretty hard to define as ''honest.'' Similarly, it's most unlikely that Amazon.com (let alone The Concord Monitor) would consider the reviews of a BzzAgent quite as unbiased and helpful to readers as a review from someone who hadn't consulted talking points compiled with input from the publisher. The whole tone of the Bzz guides — which read like a cross between a brochure and a training manual — is a bit difficult to square with the idea of genuineness.

Seth, now that you know that BzzAgents are using your name and concepts to lie and deceive the public, are you willing to come out and says that you don't support these activities? I guess you don't have to come out and say this, since you already did in the Times story!

Come on Seth, these guys are basing their company on a bastardized version of your clearly stated beliefs—are you cool with that? Stand up and call them out on it. Are you going to just sit there and let them convince the world that lying is ok, and that you by extension edorse their behavior?!

Superman where are you?!?!!? We need you Superman!

When William Gibson wrote about these concepts in his book it was a WARNING, not something to be strived towards!

As I said when I started, BzzAgents are the new spammers. They use any method to get your attention, and—at least according to the Times story—they are well-skilled at the art of deception and lying.

Word of mouth marketing companies will wind up in the back alleys of the marketing world, along with the spammers, spyware folks, and those evil people who print advertisements on the back of fake parking tickets (thanks, I really need to have all that stress as I walked up to my
car today… now I associate your brand with anxiety and being angry—NICE JOB IDIOTS!!!).

The most reprehensible thing about all this is that these slimy companies without ethics are joining forces to create a Word of Mouth Marking Organization (WOMMA). BzzAgent has the WOMMA logo on their site as if the fact that they are part of this organization makes their behavior ok.

WOMMA claims they are going to bring ethics to word of mouth ma

As all bloggers know the use of images on your blog is tricky. At Weblogs, Inc. we ask our bloggers to use their judgement, and when using images always think about the "Good enough for Google" rule. That is, if Google is comfortable showing a thumbnail image for navigation purposes we are too.

In almost of a year of blogging (we start on January 1st 2004), we've had this issue come up three times (that I know of). Two times it was on autoblog.com, and recently another blog had an issue.

We resolved the issue the two other times, and we've resolved the most recent issue. All by talking to folks on the phone or via email, and explaining our position. In this case, the copy right holder doesn't care about the traffic, so we took the post down. In the other two cases we discussed the size of the image and the percentage of the overall picture we would run.

I'm highly confident that the issue of copyright and images will be fine, except for those blogs out there that take huge images from the New York Times, New York Post, etc. and run them at 400x400 pixels ten times a day! This is not a good thing, because you actually keep the person from having to go the New York Times or New York Posts' site. If you look at Nick Denton, he does a good job of doing a smaller, cropped thumbnail images that actually makes you want to click through to the New York Times. Thus the reason the New York Times has not had a problem with Gawker. In fact, the New York Times should pay Gawker!

Anyway, here is my latest response to a copyright holder, with the details left out…  feel free to use this as a template if it helps you when you have photo copyright issues.

Dear COPYRIGHT OWNER,

Forgive the long response… but publisher to publisher I wanted to be as respectful as possible and explain the situation since I wasn't aware we had used such a large image.

I was in magazine publishing myself (Silicon Alley Reporter and VentureReporter.net which I sold to Dow Jones). I too would hire people for photo shoots and artwork on a regular basis, so I totally understand where you are coming from. Seeing images you paid for on another site with ads is a bummer.

Copyright and fair use is evolving in the digital age as you well know given the number of sites you have (surfing them in ten Firefox Tabs right now… wow, you guys are keeping busy)!

The blog space is certainly working out the details of copyright and fair use. You can easily debate the issues of fair use for the blogger or for the content owner. There is merit to both sides of the discussion.

In this case, I think we should have only shown 25-50% of the image and we would be ok under the fair use for navigation/commentary. Or, we could have asked you for permission as you said. Either way, even if we *could* do a smaller image and get by with fair use, we would take it down if that offended you… we're content creators as well, and at the end of the day we respect our fellow creatives.

For background, I think this is the third time we have had an issue come up regarding photos. We've got 65 blogs, thousand of blog posts, dozens of bloggers and hundreds of millions of page views across the network, so that isn't so bad (I think I had more problems when I did the magazine in fact!!!).

In the other two cases I discussed it with the publishers, and they determined that the amount of traffic we sent them was so valuable that if we used an image once and a while they didn't mind. We did agree to make the images no greater then a certain size (I think 250x250), and we agreed to use no more then 50% of the original image (i.e we cropped the images).

So, in those two cases both parties won… blogger and traditional publisher. The publishers got thousands of free readers, and the blogger got a nice photo to go with their text. Win, win.

In your case, you don't get any value from the traffic we are sending you from what you're telling me (your Google Adsense isn't making money?!?), so I guess there is no way to work this. So be it.

I promise we will never link to, write about or mention your site every again. If something does come up somehow let me know immediately and I will take care of it.

In terms of the value of blogs, well, time will tell. :-)

all the best, Jason

BTW: BLOGGERNAME is a real stand-up guy and very talented. I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it and I'll talk to him tomorrow about everything. I'm sure he feels bad about it… it seems he is just fan of your site.

What sites do you use to search the blogosphere? Here's a look at the five I use most often.

Brian Morrissey, formerly of Silicon Alley Reporter, gets the scoop on Vibrant Media getting kicked out of Forbes. As you all know I hate  this company—like really hate them.

Basic idea? Vibrant Media puts their ads into the keywords in a story. So, if you were reading this it would have all kinds of links trying to get you to buy something. It's tacky for sure, but it will have a chilling effect on editorial because editors and publishers will start looking at how many keywords writers put in their stories. They will see exactly how much money each post makes, and they will push writers to high-kyword value stories. It's just a mess… also, it creates mistrust with the users. Users will read stories and think that the writer mentioned the word mortgage just to make $5 every time someone clicked it. Really bad stuff… evil in fact.

The CEO of Vibrant Media wont even respond to my posts! Talk about a loser… they just sit there and don't defend themselves. That is just sad, then again what they are doing is not defensible.

Turns out Forbes is tired of the non-sense and they kicked out Vibrant Media. Way to go Forbes!!! I love you guys!

Check out Doug trying to spin his toss:

"This is going to be a prevalent ad unit in the future," said Doug Stevenson, Vibrant Media's CEO. "It just takes a bit of time to get comfortable with it. Over time, we will get IntelliTxt running across all the major sites."

Yeah right… sure you will Doug. You're going to be relegated to the lowest of the low sites along with spyware, popunders and spam. That is your crew… you're no better then them.

What is wrong with you guys anyway!??! Don't you have any respect for writers?!? The editors at Forbes objected to your concept. They did not accept it. Doesn't that tell you anything?!?! Why don't you just stick to putting your ads on the side like Google Adsense does?!?!

The story is best summed up with this one quote:

The links were removed after editors objected to the appearance of advertising influencing editorial decisions.

Vibrant Media is going to implode because editors—real editors—will never let this technology stand. Real editors will walk out the door before they pander links.

Way to go Forbes, you did the right thing.