I was going over my handwritten notes from a recent book festival panel and came across this phrase: “kleptocracy of the Internet.”

The speaker was referring to the tendency for online content providers, such as bloggers, to steal content from elsewhere without any economic motive. I believe this was a Keen observation.

I just did an interview with John Havens of About.com who expressed great interest in a pet podcast project of mine called “Random Kindness.” In the whirlwind of the Blogger & Podcaster magazine launch it made me remember why I got into this business in the first place. This is a podcast where I find deserving people in need of a helping hand and tell their stories in a podcast show. Here’s the experiment I’d like you to participate in: Go and listen to the story of Susan Benaszek & Lamonte Chenvert at www.randomkindness.net. Then give a dollar or two and then pass this along to a few friends and ask them to do the same. I think we can change the world through podcasting — $1-2 at a time. $1-2 won’t be a hardship on anyone and by working together we can turn the lives around of this family who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and is still struggling to this day. Once we get them back on their feet, we’ll take all the extra funds from this grand “experiment” and do even more for other forgotten victims of Katrina victims. C’mon let’s put podcasting on the map as a force for good — $1 at a time!

- Larry

Wired News reported yesterday that new rules prevent Army soldiers, contractors and even civilian employees from blogging, sending personal email or other communication via the Internet without prior approval of their commanders. Before the regulations, which took effect April 19, military bloggers were encouraged to seek input from commanders before posting material “that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum.” but the new rule goes far beyond a common sense guideline intended to protect sensitive military information. It’s prior restraint, pure and simple. See Dadmanly’s blog for an interpretation fo the new regs from a military point of view.

If you’re interested at all in how the Iraq war looks from the point of view of people fighting it, you’ve probably read milblogs. If not, try Black Five and The Mudville Gazette. They offer insights and unvarnished assessments you simply can’t get from conventional media. The new Army regulations could well kill miliblogging.

But these regulations don’t merely affect bloggers: they potentially constrain anyone who sends email to friends and family, posts on MySpace, or uploads Flickr photos. You don’t have to be a blogger to be silenced by these onerous rules. Even if soldiers seek and receive clearance to communicate with the world back home, the requirement to clear every word, picture and YouTube video with a commander will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on speech by military personnel. Aside from the obvious free speech implications, such a heavy-handed regulation will surely do harm to the morale of Army members who have grown accustomed to expressing themselves via the Internet. According to the Wired story, military officials don’t anticipate scrutinizing every blog post and email. So it’s all or nothing. They could censor selectively if they wished to, or simply rule that all blogging is forbidding. And having such regulations in place makes it dead simple to silence soldiers who are critical of the Army.

To be sure, there are tactical plans and activities that should not be compromised via blog or email. The military has an interest in maintaining operational security. But these regulations go far beyond what’s necessary to do that.

-shelly

So, I’m next to feed the blog, and have been for a few days now. I started to riff on a South African’s rant about bloggers’ expectations of privacy. Then I wanted to weigh in on a New York Times story about the impact of literary blogs on the book review world. But by the time either was almost ready to post, they were old. For big businesses like IBM, a few hours amount to a nanosecond; in the real-time realm of the Internet, things seem stale in minutes.

One thing successful bloggers and podcasters all agree on is that the best Web-based publishers come up with original ideas or offer unique takes on well established ones. Everyone else tends to fall into the enormous “me too” category, producing content that’s already out there in one form or another. To avoid that trap, I’ll attempt to use my weekly appearance to offer a peek inside this magazine.

I’ve conducted quite a few interviews this week, and at the end of each, I’ve been asked either directly or indirectly how we’re handling the “feedback.” We’ve gotten a lot of encouraging comments and, of course, numerous nasty ones. One need only Google us to see examples of both. We’ve privately debated staffers’ different interpretations of the snarkier commentary. We’ve also begun acting on the more constructive criticism to improve on processes and policies.

Some of those improvements have been immediate; others won’t be realized by the reading and listening public for a couple of months. For example, we’ve had to adjust our publication dates to the first of the month due to printer and podcast producers’ schedules. That means the next issue will be out around June 1. Eager to see how the next issue’s received? If the content continues to meet the needs of a targeted, tempermental audience? If the naysayers eventually carry the day? Yeah, me too.

–Anne

Like a lot of bloggers and podcasters (no really, almost everyone I know on Twitter seems to be one or the other), I’ve succumbed to the allure or Twitter. I haven’t been able to bring myself to call what we do on Twitter “microblogging”, but I may be changing my mind. Twitter has certainly begotten a lot of interactivity, enthusiasm and community-based effort that has resulted in good things happening. These represent values prized by bloggers, and made possible by that medium.

Last week was one of those amazing times for me on Twitter, when examples of its power to connect people were everywhere.

On Monday the folks in my Twitter circle began counting down the days, hours, minutes (?) until Steve and Maureen’s baby was due. Steve’s a prolific Twitter user, and I chat with him several times a day. Every time a new tweet from Steve came over the line, I checked quickly to see if this was the moment that he would leave work to join Maureen for the birth of their first child. As the week wore on, I felt bad about asking “any news?” because the baby had apparently decided the time was not right. Since Maureen is also on Twitter, we awaited her messages, too. “What are you doing?” indeed! I posited that if Maureen would only let Steve know by Twitter that her contractions had started, the suspense for the rest of us would be eliminated. No comment from the parents-to-be.

On Friday, Steve’s announcement winged its way into my Twitter client: “We’re having a baby.” We knew he wouldn’t let us down. We knew that before he put his car in gear to rush to his wife’s side, he’d alert the Twitterverse. We sent him off with best wishes and prayers for a safe and easy birht. As it turned out, 24 more hours would pass before Steve had more news for us. In the interim, my home Internet had gone out, and I felt profoundly out of touch until we managed to get back online, just in time to read the news that Rebecca Blair Loopipe had entered the world. By yesterday, we had pictures!

Also last week, Matt wrote in to say that his grandfather had died, and that he wouldn’t be doing his podcast this week. Friends offered condolences to Matt, and one quickly spoke up to say “I’ll do your show for you.” another friend, and then another chimed in. It was a joke at first, but within 15 minutes, and with Matt’s blessing, five of us (including Steve and Maureen, as it happened) had agreed to use Matt’s format, his bumpers and effects, and his feed to produce an episode of The Redboy Podcast. We jumped off Twitter and into email to plan and ship files around, then recorded the show via a Skype quad-ender (each participant recording his or her own audio). The instigator of our group took on the job of editing, and within a few days of Twittering our offer to keep Matt’s weekly show on track, we had published an hour-long episode.

These aren’t the kind of stories you read in business books, or hear about during presentations at technology conferences. They are utterly homegrown, and utterly human, not commercial. But the accessibility and community spirit they suggest will be just as crucial to those who have larger, more mercenary goals for their Twittering, or who see the service as a way to stay connected in real time with “big ideas”. This stuff is pretty cool.

-shelly

Apologies for the delay in getting out our podcast edition. Most of the April stories are now finally posted on our website, but the RSS feed still needs to be created. This will happen shortly and will enable you to download the entire issue (or just the stories you care about) and listen when and where you desire. Thanks for understanding as we work through our launch “kinks.”

- Larry

Maybe this is like those 4 Things About Me memes that tend to sprout, bloom and then die quickly, but I haven’t seen too many initiatives like the campaign calling for a blogging Day of Silence on Monday in honor of those lost in the Virginia Tech shootings and victims of violence worldwide.

Outreach is one thing, and there seem to be a lot of personal blogs spreading the word of this pending demonstration of solidarity in this Web community. But there also have been some questioning the gains from leaving Monday’s post for another day. So I’m curious, especially for those of you with financial or business obligations tied to your blogs – are you going to keep quiet and just enjoy what appears to be a community-sanctioned break from blogging? Or will you ignore it, and if so why?

–Anne

With the launch of Blogger & Podcaster Magazine, we simultaneously launched the B&P Guide. It’s designed to be like “TV Guide” for blogs and podcasts, allowing you to easily find new content on the subjects you care about. If you click the B&P Guide tab you’ll see our listings have grown pretty nicely over the last week. It shouldn’t be too long until this is a great and more complete resource. If you have a blog/podcast you want to have included, listing in the online directory is free. You can sign-up at www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/guideinfo.php

- Larry

I made the decision to charge for the print subscription to allow as many people as possible to have access to the magazine. If we would have given the print edition away for free, like many trade publishers do, we would have had to cap circulation at around 10,000 before our printing and mailing costs would force us to have to charge advertising rates that would be too steep for what the industry can afford at this time. By offering the digital and podcast editions for free we can literally allow millions to have access to the content without having to significantly raise our advertising rates. Hope you understand.

- Larry
Publisher
Blogger & Podcaster Magazine

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced a week ago, during our blogging break. Strange as it may seem to some new media types, I was eager to blog about them. You see, I think the Pulitzers give us something to think about.

As there is as yet no prize for blogging, those of you who enjoy predicting the exact date and time that newspapers will cease to exist may not be interested. But I am. I note the Pulitzers not only because I’m a journalist by profession, but because I’m interested in knowing about the things contained in some of the stories written by this year’s winners, all of which appeared in (gasp) newspapers.

I acknowledge and celebrate the impact of the political blogosphere in uncovering government hanky panky. I admire the immediacy of blogs written from the scenes of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or tragic crimes like the shootings at Virginia tech. But The Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal dug deep into the use of presidential signing statements, and back-dated stock option grants, respectively. Other journalists, most working for regional papers, exposed corruption, profiled people most of us know little about, and the impact of China’s economic boom on the nation’s infrastructure. They were able to do this because editorial budgets and staffs were still large enough to support investigative journalism that required days, weeks or months of reporting. The people who reported and wrote these stories added to the national conversation, just as surely as bloggers do every day. The people who still pick up a morning paper with their coffee (or who read it online) were informed, and perhaps moved to ask questions of their government.

The problem with “old media” newspapers is not the content itself, it is the inability to continue to prosper in a marketplace that has moved on. Blogging is a more democratic, more diverse medium for many readers, and newspapers who have not figured that out are suffering financially. But as blogging flexes its muscles, and as its leaders sneer derisively at newspapers, its practitioners and champions should also ask themselves how the infrastructure of blogging can be strengthened to provide the support needed for investigative journalism of the kind still practiced primarily by newspapers. When this happens, there will and should be a Pulitzer category (or more than one) for blogs and other new media outlets.

-shelly