The public relations war of newspapers against both Google and blogs shows no signs of ebbing. Today, we get a proposal that newspapers deserve special laws to protect them. I’ll come back to that, but I wanted to float the idea that perhaps it’s time for an Associated Blogs to take on the Associated Press.

The newspaper industry is very privileged. They have guaranteed seats provided to them at places like the Oscars, the White House plus the fact that when they call sources out of the blue, they have brand recognition that might get them callbacks out of proportion to their actual circulations. The industry also has plenty of support groups, from specialized organizations like Investigative Reporters & Editors to The Poynter Institute.

Bloggers got bupkes. We have no lobbying group. We have no organization designed to help members learn the intricacies of uncovering government documents. We can’t get government agencies to call us back at all, at times (I know, been there and done that). And we’ve got a newspaper industry increasingly portraying us as part of an evil axis that’s killing them. Blogs steal their attention, and Google steals their visitors.

Or something like that. If you’re new to my blog, the past posts below will go into great detail to dissect some of the charges some newspaper industry representatives have been making:

• Hey Washington State: Make It A 40% Tax Break For Journalism, Not For Newspapers
• Do Newspapers Owe Google “Fair Share” Fees For Researching Stories?
• Time For Google To Fund An Online-Only Version Of The Pulitzers?
• Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It
• Hey AP! How About Running A Real News Web Site?
• New Yorker On Death Of Newspapers & Blogs
• Blogs & Mainstream Media: We Can & Do Get Along

As you’ll see with the first item, newspapers in Washington State have won a tax break simply for printing on paper. Online journalists get no such reward. Meanwhile, Google might be planning special assistance for the New York Times. Today, lawyers argue that newspapers need protection from search engines (because apparently, they don’t know how to use robots.txt files to block themselves from being spidered).

Hmm. I don’t recall Google calling me in, or TechCrunch, or ReadWriteWeb, or VentureBeat or any number of other online media outlets and asking about our financial health and ways they could help us. I don’t recall any groups proposing special laws to help our financial health. But I do get sick and tired of seeing the journalism we do not getting near enough credit from mainstream media sources that depend on us, plus us being dismissed as mere bloggers.

I’m a journalist, not a blogger. I use a blog platform to publish, but that doesn’t make me a second class citizen in the journalism world.

I want online journalists to get organized. Yes, there’s the Online News Association, but that seems an extension of “traditional” journalists working in mainstream organizations with digital outlets. I think we need an “Online Journalists Association,” or a “United Bloggers” or whatever catchy name you come up with. As for its mission? I’m not certain, but some thoughts:

• Ensure the news blogs get an equal seat at any table where news and journalism is being discussed
• Help promote deeper reporting and recognition of work that already happens
• Perhaps share correspondents and photos

As a student journalist at UC Irvine, each paper in the UC network shared a common “Sacramento Correspondent,” someone we could depend on to provide us with stories or pursue particular angles, if needed. Similarly, I could see news blogs potentially sharing political correspondents, in some way.

Maybe. Then again, as my Time For Google To Fund An Online-Only Version Of The Pulitzers? post explains, news blogs largely haven’t needed a wire service or correspondents because we support each other. We collectively, naturally build out stories whereas the traditional media outlets often take a “we’ll do it ourselves” approach. We don’t need an image wire in some cases, because more and more, so much multimedia content is put into the public domain.

But maybe a shared wire service, shared correspondents might be useful. Certainly having a louder common voice would help. Some in the newspaper industry simply are not going to shut up and continue putting pressure for special breaks. I think any breaks should go to journalists overall, not just to for-profit enterprises that have failed to secure a solid bedrock for journalism despite having plenty of time. It’s like rewarding banks that contributed to the financial collapse.

I love newspapers. I might do a future post to literally illustrate how much joy I get from sitting and flipping through the pages of the Los Angeles Times. In fact, that’s what I was looking forward to doing with my Saturday afternoon before seeing this latest round in newspaper bailout game.

But while I love newspapers, came from them and hope they continue to find a place (more on their future later, short story, expect 4-5 “nationals” to survive), I’m begging them to stop seeing bloggers as enemies. Many bloggers are journalists, part of the news ecosystem, colleagues that are entitled to respect.

At the very least, I’m begging the management of newspapers who view blogs with hostility to get out into your newsrooms and talk with a few of your reporters that interact with bloggers. Many of them know the valueable role we play. You should learn, too.

It’s been over three years since I launched Daggle, and things have been overdue for an update. So, I’ve finally gotten to that. For those who care, a rundown on changes and some further thoughts on the latest version of the Thesis theme for WordPress.

WordPress? Yes, I’ve moved off of Movable Type. Since my blogging at Search Engine Land shifted to the WordPress platform last December, it made sense for me to use the same system here. Plus, I do love the Thesis theme that makes it very easy for me to add things to my sidebar units and elsewhere.

Shifting to WordPress was also an easy way for me to move off using TypeKey registration for commenting. I didn’t have to use TypeKey with Movable Type, of course. But I’d rigged things up that way from the beginning, and it was going to be a hassle figuring out how to disconnect all the custom stuff I had in place.

So, for all you who suffered with TypeKey, thanks — and those days are over. In fact, I’m dropping registration altogether. Anyone can comment without registration, and we’ll see how well the Akismet spam detection system works. As for having your own picture or “avatar,” well, if you have Gravitar, you’re good. Use the same email as your Gravitar-registered photo, and it will appear. I haven’t yet figured out a way to allow users to upload their own without using Gravitar, even if I enable registration (OK, this plug-in likely will do it, if I add the right code to my pages — but I don’t have time to poke around on the right way to do that within Thesis). Hang in there!

What you’re not seeing is a major redesign. I’d really like to get a new logo done — but what, I dunno! So I kept the old logo and personal pictures off my Flickr account (see Adding A Flickr Photo Stream To My Blog), but out-of-the-box, Thesis gives the entire thing a fresher, more legible look (or so I think).

I keep mentioning Thesis! See my past post, Launching My Wife’s Blog & Playing With The Thesis WordPress Theme, for much more about the reasons why I love this theme. I’ll also build on some things I’ve learned since that post, which I employed in the Daggle migration.

Most important tip – get Thesis Open Hook! In my earlier post, I talked about the saga of editing the custom.css file. OK, it wasn’t a saga, but with Thesis made so many other things easy, I didn’t want to have to open up that file in a text editor and FTP things across.

Thesis Open Hook makes those issues go away. Using it, I was able to add background colors to my custom.css file easily. Similarly, I didn’t have to edit that file in order to insert my custom logo, as was the case the last time I wrote about Thesis.

Thesis Open Hook also made it easy for me to insert ad units into my pages, though exactly where content appears before you insert it into one of the “hooks” isn’t always clear. After some experimentation, I figured out that code in the “Before HTML” box would come at the very top of the page (where the big AdSense unit now shows), while “After Content” made code show at the bottom of a post and before comments (where my smaller AdSense unit appears).

In the old blog, I had an annoying AdSense unit that would appear usually a few paragraphs into a post. It would show between wherever the “top” of a story ended and the “more” part began. Annoying, but effective — people did click. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view), I couldn’t find a way to make that happen easily with Thesis or Thesis Open Hook.

Of course, I’m not trying to make a living off Daggle. Good thing, too — the blog’s traffic has stayed steady, but AdSense payoffs just keep dropping. AdSense here is more to play with how AdSense itself works.

Thesis Open Hook also made it quick and easy to customize my footer and customize the text on the 404 page.

I installed the latest version of Thesis (beta 1.5 r5), which fixed some of my earlier wishlist items. But I still have more!

• Give me a field to block a particular page from being spidered (or let me insert a custom meta tag of my own choosing, in addition to setting custom titles, descriptions and keywords — which, of course, are great to have). As a workaround, use the Meta Robots plug-in. That lets you set the meta robots tag for any page (options appear at the bottom of your edit window). As an added plus, you can install NOODP and NOYDIR tags. Need to know more about these things? See my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More post. I was glad to see that Thesis seems to have dropped the unnecessary “robots=all” tag that it was inserting.
• Ability to save widgets and easily move them between sidebars 1 & 2. It’s a real pain if you make something for one sidebar and then decide to move it to the other. You have to copy, paste & delete.
• Ability to force a line break in the title text of a widget.
• Still hating the fact that I cannot change the text of the search box to something other than “To search, type and hit enter.”
• I have a new appreciation of how you can make any category into a navigational tab at the top of the page. However, now I want to control the order of those tabs. And I still want to have a “master” page that lists all categories. I had to hack one together that doesn’t automatically update if I add new ones. Down the line, I’d like to feature some categories and then have this master category page appear at the end with the heading “More Categories.” I also found that if you have lots of tabs, Thesis nicely wraps them into additional lines — but the “Subscribe Option at the end doesn’t play nice with this.
• I wish the Recent Comments widget had an option to show the actual comment, rather than the name of the person and entry.
• Give me an easy way to make the headline of a blog post also be a link.
• Give me an easy way to lose the “comments are closed” messages on pages.

I think Thesis is also preventing me from putting out a full-text feed here on Daggle. I’ve tried everything to restore that but have had no luck. I’ll keep looking at it.

Let me close with huge thanks to Michelle Robbins, who helped solve most of the line-break problems that resulted from the Movable Type to WordPress important. If you see any oddities, do let me know — there are a few still lurking around. Michelle also set-up the redirection so all my old former date/time-based URLs forward to the new keyword-based ones.

Now we are a two blog family. My wife, Lorna Harris, now is blogging over at Calif Lorna. I spent a few years here on Daggle talking about life in Britain from the perspective of an American. Now she’s doing the flipside, looking at being in America as a Brit!

It’s also the second blog I’ve launched within a month. Behind The Scenes Of The Greg In Hollywood Launch covered a lot of the technical backend stuff I was involved with to get a professional, journalistic-oriented blog up-and-running. I thought I’d share a few more details of what I did with Lorna’s personal blog. Note that if I don’t explain something, such as the FeedBurner Feedsmith plug-in, that’s because you’ll find it already covered in the post about Greg’s blog. So read that, too!

As with Greg’s blog, we went with Tiger Tech for their great and incredibly low-cost hosting and WordPress for its ease of installation. Unlike Greg’s blog, we didn’t dive into doing a major design. Instead, this was going to be a straight-forward “take-an-existing template and personalize it with a logo” operation.

That’s where the Thesis Theme for WordPress came in, from Chris Pearson. I’d heard both Rae Hoffman and Michael Gray raving about it on Twitter, so I checked it out. I liked what I saw with the screenshots — lots of options to customize many things about the look-and-feel without having to know coding. Nice, bring it on.

I bought a copy and dived in (I went for a developers license, so I can use it on as many web sites as I want — gotta kid who wants to blog next). Immediately, I was impressed with the ability to choose between 1, 2 or 3 columns — and control the size of the columns all by using control panels.

Another thing I loved was the ability to insert “widgets” into the 2 “sidebar” columns I ultimately went with. There are preset widgets, such as the ability to insert a Search box, a Recent Post display, Recent Comments and more. This is wonderful. With the few themes I’ve played with in the past, inserting or removing this stuff involved getting into the template code. With Thesis, it’s a toggle on or off process. And want to change the order of widgets? You just drag them above or below each other as you’d like.

There’s also the ability to use the “Text” widget to insert anything you want. For example, I wanted to have Lorna’s Twitter feed appear in her sidebar. I selected Text, then inside the box that appeared, pasted the Twitter HTML widget code into the box. Voila — Twitter on the blog, no plug-in needed nor any editing of template files required.

Similarly, I was able to make a custom “Subscribe” box by simply using HTML code to link to some of the options and adding the FeedBurner email subscription code that it provided.

I put some AdSense on the site using the Text option — why not. But this was an area where I wanted Thesis to provide more support. I felt like it should be an existing widget. In fact, I wanted not only too have standard 1, 2 & 3 column formats but also formats to insert AdSense (or other ads) at the top of pages, bottom, across multiple columns — you name it.

Let me say — some of this might be there, and I haven’t looked hard enough. One intriguing feature is the “Feature Box” option that can put a standing unit in the content column, above all columns or at the top of the entire blog. You can also do it just for your home page or sitewide. But I didn’t play with this, as it involved messing with a Thesis “hook” (more on that later), and I had plenty of other work to do.

Another disappointment was that with the Search widget, you’re stuck with “To search, type and hit enter” as the standing text on the box, with no easy way to alter it. I’m sure you can by editing some files, but since so much is already made easy, I want it all easy. I’m greedy! The font I went with meant all that text wouldn’t fit unless I expanded the column more than I really wanted. It works for now, though.

There was plenty more to love with the customization, and I’ll just bullet-point some of the options I was able to control within the theme’s control panel:

• I could show only the site name in the title tag, not both the title and the tagline (but you could do that, too)
• I could insert a custom meta description tag for the site’s home page
• I could set the text to encourage people to read the rest of a story when only a summary is shown to whatever I wanted
• I believe it makes using the Feedburner Feedsmith plug-in unnecessary if you provide it with your own custom feed URL. I haven’t double-checked this, so I’m continue to run both, at the moment.
• It gives me a nice navigation menu at the top of the page where I can add any page or category (but annoyingly, I cannot add a link to a master archive or master category page — though later, I can create these pages manually and link them)
• I could easily insert tracking software for Google Analytics (and more, if I want) but entering it into a single box that in turn tucks it into the footer of all pages.

One of the main features of Thesis is the “Multimedia Box,” which shows images that rotate (if you want that). You can draw images from your own server or pull from other sources — if you know the code. I liked the box providing a nice visual resource for the site, but I was frustrated I couldn’t control the size or color form a control panel. There’s other ways to alter it, but that requires getting into some files (again, more in a bit).

For Lorna’s blog, I pulled from Flickr — using tips I learned from Chris Pearson ages ago (see Adding A Flickr Photo Stream To My Blog). I so wished this was somehow built into the multimedia box and that it could make those pictures bigger than the stream’s standard API allowed. Or if I was going to make use of the ability to have Thesis use pictures on the bog, I wanted it to allow me to upload them directly from within WordPress rather than having to FTP them across. I can FTP — anyone can with minimal instructions. But I’m lazy, and it’s a pain. But it’s working well enough, for now. The Flickr pics flow in, and everything even nicely resizes if the pictures change from horizontal to vertical.

One of the biggest disappointments — a huge oversight for a theme that makes so much so easy — is the inability to control the blog’s logo from within a control panel. I mean a custom, image-based logo. If you want to get fancy with just text, then Thesis rocks. But someone ages ago — I think Jennifer Slegg — said one of the easiest ways to make a blog stand-out from the crowd if you’re going with a common theme is to just slap your own logo on it.

Lorna had one (her Welcome to Calif Lorna post has more on this), but it was down to me to figure out how to get it into the site. The logo was made a year ago with no particular thought of it flowing into some standard template.

Me, I wanted to upload the logo within Thesis and have it automatically resize it and place it according to various choices. Instead, I had to reduce to a standard width then read Rae’s awesome post, Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies, to figure out how to edit a key file and get the logo in place.

I got it there, in the end. I understood even some of what Rae broke down about how “hooks” work. But like her, I had an initial “I’m scared” reaction when I saw these mentioned at all. I still don’t want to see them. I want EVERYTHING to be through a control panel.

At the very least, if I have to edit a file, I want to be able to edit that file using an interface in Thesis. Amazingly, unless I completely missed it, you have to edit the key files and then push them across via FTP. I think this makes life harder for some of the same non-tech people who are so saved by other aspects of Thesis.

My edit different from Rae’s in one key way, this line, at the bottom:

add_action(‘thesis_hook_before_title‘, ‘add_header_image’);

See, I had told Thesis not to show the site’s name in text in the header — or really, that is, as the big headline text at the top of every page. That’s because I had a logo that was saying the same thing. But I did want to have a tagline in text come under the logo, at least originally. So changing to say “before title” rather than “after title” meant that the image logo was placed before the site’s title text. And since that text was disabled, it meant that the subtext/tagline came right under the logo.

I also wanted to center the logo, and fortunately I found this guide that provided the code I needed to put in my custom.css file:

.custom #header {text-align:center;}
.custom #tagline {font-weight: normal; color: #888; text-align: center}

That centered both the logo and the tagline nicely. Then Lorna didn’t decide she liked the tagline showing, so I disabled that. But at least I knew how to center it using Thesis for the future!

That custom.css file is also where I set the body background color and the border. It was pretty easy. I followed the tutorial on adding custom backgrounds, then just altered the code to use two colors from the logo that I thought would be OK.

That’s my big tip for the color challenged, by the way — me, the guy who needs Garanimals for adults, because I think gray and brown look awesome together. I don’t get colors. But if someone does a logo, they probably do — and the colors in the logo look good together. So choose your link or background or other colors from the logo, and you’re good.

Back to Rae’s tutorial, I used that to alter the footer of pages (but again thinking I wanted a control panel to do this). I thought about using what she explains on adding social media buttons to the bottom of each post, but instead I just went with the Add The Any Plugin to do that without having to touch code at all.

Thesis has a lot of thought put into SEO issues, but there are still some issues I caught out of the corner of my eye. I need to look more closely at them.

For one, it inserts the new canonical tag into every page, as best I can tell. Plus, I think initially it wasn’t doing this correctly. I think that’s fixed now, and giving it a very fast look-over, things do appear good. Given that WordPress spits out pages in a variety of different URLs (stop doing this, WordPress!), the tag (which is still a “hint” to search engines) doesn’t hurt. But I want an on/off switch for these types of things.

Another issue is that I’m pretty sure it’s tagging all pages as robots=all, which is unnecessary. For the long answer, see Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More). The short answer, it’s like putting a Post-It note on your chest reminding you to breathe. Forget to look at that note? Well, you’re going to breathe anyway.

The problem with this is that there are some particular pages I don’t want indexed. I think there’s a way for me to flag these using some custom header insertion options using Thesis, though when I tried, I didn’t see them show up. And if they had, I’m pretty sure I’d have had a page saying to both index it and not index it (and in that case, the NOT should win — but you still don’t want to confuse things).

One more issue was nofollow being slapped on links without me being asked, like links back to the home page. I’m guessing the idea here is to do a little link sculpting (see Sculpting with Nofollow Works Pretty Darn Well and Sculpting your PageRank for Maximum SEO Impact). Well, I want that choice, rather than it being decided for me.

A final issue I caught was that while Thesis says there’s no need for things like the All In One SEO Pack, since it does many of the same things that plug-in does, I didn’t see that Thesis was automatically making meta description tags. Again, I haven’t given some of this a very close look, but still after several checks, that did seem to be the case. So I kept All In One running, specifically with only this option enabled.

While I’m being critical, I am in love with this theme. I know Chris, and I can see so clearly that more and more of it is going to improve and give me all the customization via control panels that I want. I just want it all now! But I’m so happy to get so much of it already.

In case you’re wondering, I will move Daggle onto it in the near future (and the migration to WordPress will help with the commenting here, too). But that’s a big job, as I’ve got lots of post and comments that need to come over. Plus, I might want to get the logo and design tidied up a bit.

A few other things. In Rae’s review of Thesis below, she wishes it had built-in support for contact forms. So do I. But Tiger Tech has super easy contact form script you can use. So if you host with them, you just copy the form into a WordPress page on your site, and away you go. And so I did for Lorna’s site.

Also, no site’s happy without a favicon. How awesome if Thesis helped you here, from making it to uploading it. Ya gotta do it manually. So get yourself over to Dynamic Drive’s nice FavIcon Generator. Give it an image, and back comes a nice favicon. Then FTP that to your root directory, and you’re done.

I’ll leave off with two other Thesis reviews: A Review of the Thesis WordPress Theme from Rae last August and Thesis Theme for WordPress Review from Michael Gray earlier this month.

In Read The Wall Street Journal For Free, I explained how to get Wall Street Journal content for free via Google News. But in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a problem. You can’t find some of the articles that the Wall Street Journal publishes using Google News, not if you look for them using their exact titles. And maybe I’m wrong, but I kind of get the feeling the Wall Street Journal has done this to have all the benefits of Google News traffic without people deliberately using Google News as a way past the paid barrier.

Here’s an example. Via Techmeme, I see this is a popular Wall Street Journal story today:

Icahn Pushing Yahoo Back to Microsoft

When I click through from Techmeme, I can’t see the entire article — I get that “Free Preview” message instead. No problem. I go to Google News and search for it by its exact title. And when I do that, it’s nowhere to be seen — even if I do a phrase search, where I’m ensuring that I get only pages that have all those words in that exact order.

It should come right up. The WSJ is a Google News source, and this is the exact title of one of its articles. Wazzup?

To find the article, I have to do something different. I have to search for key terms that I know are in it, like this:

icahn source:wall_street_journal

See that source: part? That restricts the search to the Wall Street Journal. And the first listing that comes up is this:

Icahn Will Launch Proxy Contest To Unseat Yahoo’s Entire Board
Wall Street Journal - 11 hours ago
By GREGORY ZUCKERMAN and KEVIN J. DELANEY Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is launching a proxy contest to unseat Yahoo Inc.’s board of directors,

Now click on that link (from Google News, if you want to see the entire thing), and you get this as the headline:

Icahn Pushing Yahoo Back to Microsoft

See? Different headline from what Google News is listing. That means a different headline is being fed to Google’s news search than a human sees. In the SEO world, we call that cloaking. Except for Google News, where we call it “First Click Free.” This from Search Engine Land explains more about that:

• First Click Free: Accessing Subscription-Based Articles For Free Via Google News

If I wanted to be all snarky and controversial, I’d write (over at Search Engine Land) about how the Wall Street Journal isn’t making use of the First Click Free program’s allowance of cloaking in the way it is supposed to be done. That’s because to my understanding, I should as a reader see exactly the same content that Google’s spider saw. I don’t. I see an article that has a different headline.

Cloaking! Real cloaking, allowed by Google. That’s not what bothers me. What upsets me is that the cloaking is being done because, from what I can tell, the Wall Street Journal wants to play both sides of the fence. They want the free traffic from Google, but they don’t want the hassle of figuring out how to properly “trap” second clicks — and they also don’t want people to “abuse” getting their free content on Google News. So they feed out different headlines, I’m guessing.

If so, lame. In fact, the entire thing is lame — there are so many ways to get Wall Street Journal content now for free that the pay barrier should go. And I say this as someone who actually does pay for access. It’s just easier and less hassle for me to get in through other methods. At the very least, let readers of Techmeme click through without a pay barrier.

Last week, I did my own personal account of how it felt to have left newspapers behind to do blogging and the perceived rivalries but also support between them. Guess there’s a meme going around.

Today, the New Yorker has a nice article looking at the seeming coming death of newspapers and how blogs like the Huffington Post have moved into the gap. It concludes with the same concern I have — will we be losing the in-depth journalism that the mainstream media has provided, and will those that depend on it (not as readers, but to have someone speaking for them) be at a loss.

I certainly don’t know what will come, but I can only hope that somehow, that type of work will survive even if newspapers don’t.

More discussion on Techmeme.

There’s been noise this week about the rivalry between competing blogs as well as the rivalry between blogs and the mainstream media. I found myself reflecting on all of this from the perspective of someone who has worked in both places, who has a great love of online reporting but also deeply appreciates the in-depth work that can be the hallmark of some mainstream publications. Personally, I don’t see rivalry. I see complementary efforts that help each other and readers. But I do worry that some of the classic journalism that I learned, that I love to read, might get lost as the mediaspace continues to change.

To get into my thoughts, I have to share some of my background and personal interests. I hope readers will keep with me as I make these detours along the way.

I’m a voracious reader, and newspapers were one of my first great reading loves. I think it started when I had to do current event reports way back in fifth grade, and I’ve been reading them ever since. When deciding about college, I also had to decide on a career — and I settled on newspaper reporting. Suddenly reading the paper wasn’t just entertainment. It was required homework to land one of those all-important internships.

I chose the wrong college to become a journalist. UC Irvine has no journalism department. Of course while I say it was the wrong choice, that’s not correct. It just put me down a non-traditional path. Had I made the “right” choice, I might not be doing the online reporting about search that I love today.

Without a journalism department, those of us at the campus newspaper, The New University, taught ourselves. We read everything we could find about journalism. We went to journalism conferences. And the really serious ones among us took the two (count ‘em two) non-fiction writing classes that the college offered. These were taught by Joseph N. Bell — Joe Bell, as we called him.

I’d describe Joe as a grizzled old magazine writing veteran, and that description is meant with a great deal of respect and affection. Joe had been around. He’d written all types of non-fiction and often joked about having written in the last edition of several great magazines. I learned from him how to better interview plus the great art of crafting a feature story.

Well, feature stories can be a great art when done right. I can’t say I personally was a great artist with them. It’s been years since I’ve done a feature story in the way that I was taught, working with multiple sources, taking great care with quotes, really crafting a tale that sings out. That was more back in my print journalism days, and I never really got as far along that track as I thought I would or expected to.

Instead, the internet came along. I found myself as a newspaper reporter at the end of 1994 looking at the internet and not wanting to miss out on the publishing revolution that I and others could so clearly see coming. I couldn’t wait until the newspapers decided if it was going to be AOL or Prodigy or CompuServe or something they created that was going to be their future. The web was the future, and I jumped ship in early 1995.

My time as a web developer was brief. I’d joined a friend’s company, and neither of us really knew how to price web sites that were a hard sell (at least for us) back then. By mid-1996, he focused on software development. I went on my own as a consultant as well as maintaining some pages I’d started that covered the search engine industry. I also started picking up freelance magazine writing assignments.

Those assignments were a lot of work for not really that much money. Lots of interviews to dig into a subject, lots of long-distance calling and lots of effort to start building up relationships with a variety of magazines if I wanted to continue on that path. Instead, I decided in early 1997 to focus on my web site, those pages about search engines, the ones that later became Search Engine Watch.

If we’d had blogs back then, that’s what those pages would have been — a blog about search engines. But we didn’t have blogs. We didn’t have the attention that gets focused today on blog publishing giants like TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, paidContent.org, VentureBeat or GigaOM. We just called them web sites. There were relatively few of us doing online journalism through them, but we were out there.

For this reason, I have a little chuckle sometimes when I read about the “new wave” that’s happening now. I’m sure someone like Andy Bourland must have a similar chuckle. He started ClickZ back in 1998 or 1999 and later sold it to Jupitermedia for about $16 million. ClickZ wasn’t a blog, but it was an online publication charting new waters and finding its own audience just as much as some of the current blogs I’ve named.

The revolution to me, I guess, is that it seems easier than ever for people — individuals even — to self-publish. Certainly online publications seem to be getting more attention and recognition than ever. By and large, I think that’s a great thing. As a writer, I’ve never looked back and wished I was back with a mainstream publication. I’ve felt in control of my own destiny and have been happy to chart my own waters, to be building something new and valuable.

But make no mistake. I know I’m not doing the classic journalism that I thought I would be doing. I’ll personally go into depth to help explain a particular story, and I’ll bring my experience to provide an analysis that I hope is helpful to others. But I’m not doing deep, multi-person interviews. I’m not spending days or weeks on a story. And neither are most of the online publications that I read.

This really has been on my mind since yesterday, because I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by New Yorker writer Ken Auletta for a book he’s working on. It will be his 11th. I was fascinated about the process. Bookstores and libraries are like hallowed places to me, such is the respect I have for books and the authors who’ve invested so much time and talent to create them. I hope someday to find the time, energy and skill to do my own book on something. But the process especially for a non-fiction book seems so daunting. Ken indulged me to talk a bit about it, and I hope he won’t mind me sharing a bit here. How many interviews will he do? Hundreds. How long will he take? Maybe years.

We also talked a bit about the process of doing a magazine article. He talked of spending weeks or months on a project. I found myself getting oddly emotional. You see, it’s been so long since I’ve even thought of spending that much time on a piece — and suddenly, part of me wanted to get back to it. Moreover, I’ve read so many quality pieces of journalism that I know have taken that long to compile, appreciated having read them but found myself worried that they’ll die off. Who’s going to fund writers producing these? Did Ken, a veteran of writing such articles, worry they’d disappear?

Yes, he did. He was encouraged that some publications that produce such work are seeing circulation rises, The New Yorker, The Economist and the Atlantic Monthly being some examples I recall him giving. But he was also concerned that maybe the appetite for such work won’t be maintained, especially among younger readers.

I certainly hope it will, and this leads me back to that rivalry between the mainstream media and blogs that I mentioned earlier. In Michael Arrington’s self-described rant, he talks of taking apart CNET and the politics between bloggers and the mainstream media. Me, I didn’t realize we as bloggers/online publishers/the non-mainstream media had politics between the mainstream media or that we were at war with them.

Perhaps I’ve been in my own protective little bubble. Of course, I’ve had irritation with the mainstream media. I’ve watched the Daily Telegraph twice lift quotes or factual information from my own stories without attribution, something I stopped short of doing a rant about (I might come back to it the next time the Daily Telegraph’s editor starts yapping again about Google as a content thief. Don’t get me going about how the DT thinks it can just help itself to Facebook photographs, either). I’ve read mainstream media articles about search that I’ve found stunningly inaccurate, which in turn make me wonder why I trust anything else I read by them. I’ve seen them come late to stories, and I’ve long-since given up hope they’ll link to publications in the way that blogs commonly link to them.

Still, I’ve also commonly seen the mainstream media as the place doing that type of journalism I don’t find on blogs, those deep multi-source digs into a particular topic. For example:

• Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem): This was a fascinating piece done by New York Times magazine author Clive Thompson, digging into how Google was dealing with Chinese censorship demands. I learned tons, and it is simply not the type of piece I would ever see myself producing in the way I write now.
• The Search Party by the aforementioned Ken Auletta went into depth about how forces might ally against Google to stem its advance in seemingly all directions.
• Journey to the (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google from GQ was a fascinating account of Google’s IPO, filled with color.

These pieces are complementary to what I do. They help me do a better job with my flavor of reporting and analysis, my niche that the mainstream media doesn’t do. For me, I’m cheering these writers and often speaking with some of them on the phone for stories not in hopes of getting a quote (sure, it’s nice) but because I want to help, want to contribute and want to learn from the ultimate story that comes out.

I’m not saying that blogs can’t do this type of work. Indeed, I’m probably overlooking places like Salon and elsewhere that it’s already happening at. As a writer, I’ve been shamefully, woefully far too restricted in what I’ve been reading over the past few years. That’s starting to change as I find myself falling in love again with writing, the writing process and reading good writing of all types.

Yes, blogs can do this work, this type of heavy investigative lifting. But to date, I wouldn’t say that’s a key role they’ve fulfilled. My main point is that they do the opposite — they provide the commentary, analysis and perspective that the mainstream media often misses — not to mention they can break news faster, as well.

In Mike’s rant, he also got a lot into the idea that there’s a lot of linking politics between blogs, that the blogosphere is “a frontier town with no lawman.” Maybe in his world. In my search world, not so.

If Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped has a nice look at some topic about Google, more power to him. I’ll happily point at him and figure that’s one less topics I need to dive deep on. The same is true if John Battelle has something, Search Engine Guide does, SEOmoz does, Marketing Pilgrim does, Search Engine Journal does, Online Marketing Blog does or even the publication I compete with the most, Search Engine Watch. Naturally, I want Search Engine Land — my own publication — to have the best content, the greatest stories and the hottest scoops. But no one publication does it all, and at least within the search blogosphere, I think the various publications have all had excellent relations linking to each other and crediting each other. I think to some degree we all understand that we can complement each other even if we also compete.

I’ll end with two articles from writers I respect and who have come from the mainstream media:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog: Goodbye Dead Trees! is from Kara Swisher earlier this year. I loved this part:

First, after almost eight months of daily blogging for this site, I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career-such that it will be-publishing online only.

Sing it sister, or more perhaps more appropriately, welcome to the choir. I went through this back in 1997, and it’s been nice to see more and more of the journalists from the mainstream space jump into online. Honestly, the more the merrier.

What I’ve Learned as a Blogger for The New York Times is from Saul Hansell of the New York Times, another writer I greatly respect and who I also saw yesterday after talking with Ken. We also talked a bit about how blogs and the mainstream media are intersecting and the positives that are emerging because of that. I especially liked in his piece how he’s been finding that blogs indeed can be part of a conversation or extend traditional stories in other ways.

To conclude, I don’t feel we have to have blog-on-blog violence, much less blog-on-mainstream media violence. Yes, we can all get along, and I think we make ourselves stronger in our diversity and in understanding that collectively, we make a better whole.

Jason Calacanis is great. Sure, I know there are those in the SEO community
who think he’s full of shit. But come on? Do you really understand Jason and the
reasons why you should listen to him?

To understand him, you first have to know him better. He’s not just the
"Entrepreneur in Action" at Sequoia Capital. This is the guy who has paid his
dues, first as the former editor of Silicon Alley Reporter, then as former GM of
Netscape. Away from his birthplace of Brooklyn, Jason — along with his trusty
bulldog Toro — now struggles with the bright yet beautiful sunshine of Southern
California, sometimes testy as he tries to drop some blogging weight through
exercise.

Having accomplished so much, he still continues to amaze. He turns the
rejection of a phone interview into an
awesome
podcast. When everyone thought it was over with online publishing, he pulled
out Engadget. When it was assumed Digg ruled the social news world, he conjured
up Netscape reloaded.

So much of his wisdom shows up in his blog posts. Several times he’s inspired
me:

• Why social news sites should give Credit to bloggers (or "giving credit where
  credit is due") (mentioned in my
  Case Study: Digg Versus Google
  News Traffic post)
• How I handle RSS theft
  (mentioned in my Full Feeds Petition? How About A
  Copyright Infringement Petition? post)
• YouTube down…
  (mentioned in my Web 2.0 Versus Web 1.0: Web
  1.0 Sites Keep It Up post)

He also inspires outside his blog. Who could forget his smackdown with Alan Meckler in the
Wall Street Journal,

Can Bloggers Make Money?, which I commented on in my Can Blogs Make Money? Can Web
Sites Make Money! post. Magnificent performance.

I know a lot of people think he’s arrogant, but when you’ve hung with him as
I have, you begin to see his kinder, gentler side. He’s a pretty nice guy,
pretty engaging and never with a dull moment.

Sure, he gives SEO a bad rap. I took a big swing at him once in
Why The SEO Folks Were
Mad At You, Jason. But hey, he also was big enough to jump in and

accept an SEO challenge.

Heh.

Nah, Jason, I don’t want the link. Dude — what, Search Engine Land isn’t on your
daily read list? C’mon, shove it up there and call it Danny. I want that link,
baby!

And hey — tell people I need some more feed subscribers over there. C’mon –
Battelle’s

sitting up there with 68,000 subscribers, and I’m starting all over again
with SEL. We’re closing on 10,000, but I want to make May the "Break 20,000"
month. You’re the man. Tell them to take our feed
here. Or here:

(Anyone else want my big ass feed icon? Go here.)

And hey hey, see you at
SMX Advanced for

your debate on June 4. It’s gonna be sweet, you taking on the SEOs!

Checking my email, I found not one but two different requests to be an
coauthor at MyBlogLog. It’s making me guess that this is simply a new way people
are trying to draw attention to their own sites, related to the MyBlogLog visit
spamming

reported by SoloSEO last month. In one of the cases, I was actually made a
coauthor even though I didn’t confirm this.

In both cases, I got emails that said something like:

I would like to add you as a co-author of my MyBlogLog community below:

Blog/Site: [INFO WAS HERE]

Your MUST click on the link below to accept this request:

[CONFIRMATION URL WAS HERE]

With the first one, I went to checkout the site and was shocked to discover I
was already made a coauthor of the blog. I have no idea how that happened, since
I didn’t — most definitely did NOT — click on the confirm link.

By making me a coauthor, suddenly this blog was showing up in my
profile. It
also seemed like there was no way to remove myself as a coauthor.

Finally I figured it out. Go to the site listing (if this happens to you).
Then choose the Edit Site Settings option. Scroll down and find the Remove
Site/Blog button. Push that. It sounds scary, like you’ll delete the blog
itself. No — it just removes you as a coauthor.

FYI, for more about MyBlogLog, check out the
Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog
& More On How It Works I did last month at Search Engine Land. Lee Odden had
a good

story on the service recently, too. Also checkout Shoemoney’s feature
request

list. I’m totally with him on the need to better control messages — that’s
an entire other world of spamming that’s going on.

I run backlink checks on the sites I watch over via Google Blog Search, you know, now the number one blog search or something like that. For the past two weeks, they’re getting clogged with the type of crap I’ll list below. There’s always been some of this, but it’s worse than normal.

Now really, I should file a Google spam report. Or, I should also go to each of these splogs (all hosted on Blogger’s BlogSpot), stop some of them from reloading junky content and then use the little “Flag Blog” link that shows on some off them (not all of them, by any means) to report the objectionable content. But screw that.

In the spirit of the squeaky wheel gets the grease, I’m skipping past all the usual methods and just outing them for being so f’ing annoying. Sorry, but three days off from work left me mellow, which in turn leaves me ranty and irritable about this crud when I get back to work.

Here’s one of the backlink checks I do; here’s another (yeah, I still watch Search Engine Watch in case someone links to something I’ve written in the past). I also run checks on Daggle and The Daily SearchCast. Take a look at these items that flooded my feedreader today:

• Free No Purchase Background Searches That I Can Do Myself
• Free Only People Search Uk
• People Search Engine
• Search For People To Talk To On Yahoo Messenger
• Yahoo People Search 20
• People Yahoo Search Uk
• Search People From Yahoo By Location
• Yahoo People Search Australia 20
• Search Engines List For People
• No Fee Based People Search Engines
• Fee People Search Engine
• Lost People Search Engine
• Yahoo People Search 20
• People By Address Free Search Engine
• Locating People Search Engines
• New People Search Engines
• People Search Via Address
• Msn People Search Find Email Address
• Tail Long Search Find Study Case Things Users People Show
• People Search Engine Background 20
• Most Powerful Search Engine For Locating People In
• Search Yahoo People Chat
• People Search Com Yahoo 20
• Village People Search Engine
• Engine Free Only People Search Uk Virgin
• Tail Long Search Find Study Case Things Users People Show
• Village People Search Engine

Most of these pages simply feature scraped Google search results. That’s the search engine food, of course. Then they fire you off to another site using this code to load a frame up:

<iframe frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” width=”1″ height=”1″ src=”http://bestpriceforall.com/detective/counter.php?tm=people_search” align=”left”></iframe>

Like I said, I could do the regular spam reporting route. But that means covering at least 10 different Blogger accounts. I don’t have time to do this. Who does? And isn’t the algorithm supposed to weed this garbage out? You know, algorithmically. Isn’t Blogger supposed to be halting sign-ups of accounts like this, you know, like they say:

Automated spam classifying algorithms keep spam blogs out of NextBlog and out of our “Recently Published” list on the dashboard.

Um hmm. Like how after I flagged one of this, then clicked Next Blog out of curiosity and ended up on a phentermine blog. Argh. Argh, argh, argh!

There’s one big caveat on this, of course. The relevancy of backlink lookups is much different than the relevancy if I was doing a keyword search. Pages that might otherwise get buried in a keyword search (and thus not be annoying) are more likely to show up in a backlink search. Then again, Robert Scoble wasn’t that impressed recently with the splogs on a keyword search for his name.

Anyway, I just want it to be magically fixed. While you’re at it, fix the Google News Search press release junk Greg’s complaining about. And ban the affiliate site(s) generating this. And their families. And burn their villages, salt their fields and yank the site paying the affiliates for a day or two.

I’ve confessed my love of Techmeme many times. I still love it. But man, the drama of late. I was thinking that we shouldn’t be having so much drama right now, during the holiday season when everyone’s hoping things will wind down. But then I thought that lots of families have drama during the holiday seasons. Maybe Techmeme is simply reflecting the blog family having a big meltdown.

The latest round of TechCrunch’s UK meltdown kicked me off today. It’s so tiring, having to read chapter after chapter about it.

Worse was having to read the drama about Leblogs. Didn’t go to it. Wasn’t that familiar with it. Didn’t care about it. But man, did I have to scroll through the stuff about it.

There’s been other stuff like this that is hard to point to, since I can’t easily page back through how Techmeme changes during the day (tips on this are here). Gabe, please, make it easy to go hour by hour to see Techmeme “front pages.” The new river of news view is nice, but I love the front pages — even when the news itself makes me hate them.

Over the past few months, it’s just felt like there’s been a growing breakdown in civility and decent behavior toward each other. I can get as snarky as anyone, but I do try to stamp it down. I know drama sells. Sometimes if the drama is in a coverage area I like, it can be that guilty fun pleasure of watching it. But if I had to pick, I’d go dramaless.

Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette? from David Pogue at the New York Times came out last week and really struck a chord with me, as I’ve watch the sniping and drama grow. He gives the reasons why people might act this way, chiefly that you are anonymous on the internet or far removed from those you might be attacking.

Those aren’t good reasons for bad behavior. Again, I’m far from perfect. But I always try to think that if I write something, I might very well have to talk to someone I might be writing about. That doesn’t mean I won’t write something negative. But is it fair? Will I be comfortable to say to them, sorry — but this was justified, this particular tone. And in particular, I think about what if I have to meet someone in person. Would I behave in a particular way in a face-to-face manner? I try to exercise those face-to-face manners online, especially when leaving comments or in forum discussions.

After all, during your Christmas or holiday meals, are you going to leap across the table and start slapping friends and family members if you disagree with them. Will you call them profane names and spit in their faces? OK, so I know it’s not a Hallmark moment for lots of families. But still, we should act online as we’d do in person. Less drama, but we could probably use less of it.