Campaign Finance Rules vs. Freedom of Blog

If you've ever blogged about politics in the US, this might be of some interest to you. The Federal Election Commission is considering rules (Proposed Rules PDF) that would apply federal campaign finance regulations to online speech. The FEC says it wants to regulate only paid advertising on the Internet but the proposed rules seem to go well beyond that. For example:

Proposed Rules for Bloggers
• Mandatory disclaimers on political blogs
• Team blogs must register as a "political committee"
• Bloggers to file campaign expenditure reports

The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University have launched a campaign to educate the FEC, and have posted a helpful website where you can learn more and take action.

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Your Friendly Neighborhood Blog

My former neighborhood of Potrero Hill in San Francisco, CA has its own blog. It's a really nice one too. There's a post about a purse snatching on 20th and Connecticut, another about a free outdoor showing of Spaceballs, and even on-the-street updates about 22nd Street Caltrain Station improvements.

A neighborhood blog is a really cool idea. It'd be neat if all neighborhoods had a blog like this. Then when you're thinking of moving somewhere, you can just Google the neighborhood and get the skinny.

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Behind The Comedy

Steven Johnson was a guest on last night's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" to talk about his book Everything Bad Is Good For You. It was something he was really looking forward to and it didn't disappoint. Steven wrote about it in his blog: Behind The Comedy On The Daily Show.

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Blogging At BEA

There was a blogging panel at this year's Book Expo America. I kinda wish I had remembered BEA earlier and at least made an attempt to go. There are thousands of exhibits, hundreds of authors, conference sessions, parties, latest titles across genres, and lots of meeting with various publishing people of various sorts and kinds. Plus, it would have been nice to visit with friends in New York. Nevertheless, these bloggers went.

• Buzz Girl
• Chekhov's Mistress
• Return of the Reluctant
• Beatrice
• The Elegant Variation
• Rachel Pink Rides the Bus

So there you have it. At least blogging was in the house.

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Entourage and Mail-to-Blogger

I just discovered something lame. You can only insert hyperlinks from your Internet Explorer Favorites or History when you are composing a rich-text email with Entourage. What if you don't use Internet Explorer? What if you haven't already visited the page you want to link to? That's crazy. This affects Mail-to-Blogger users who use Entourage to update their blog and want to put hyperlinks in their posts because of the way Blogger handles HTML in Mail-to-Blogger. Not sure how many users we're talking about here. It might just be the one guy who emailed me but, still. It's a fact.

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Blogging from Everest

Gavin Bate who has been blogging while climbing Everest on a solo bid in aid of Moving Mountains children's charity (we posted about him here) has summitted Everest! He even left an Audioblogger message from near the top.

As a deflated Gavin prepared to make his descent he noticed a slight change in the winds and decided to wait and see how things would unfold. That night the clouds cleared and the winds dropped and it was all back on again.

Good work on that.

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Autoblogger

His name is Kai Chang and he's an autoblogger user. "You have a life. AutoBlogger helps you live it." Funny.

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