China’s bloggers are a focus of organizers of the President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit, echoing similar efforts by the administration to use social-media tools to communicate with Americans.

On Thursday, U.S. State Department officials held simultaneous press briefings for a select group of predominantly Chinese bloggers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, giving a rundown of the U.S. president’s China schedule and took questions from the bloggers.

The attendee list included many influential bloggers, such as journalist Michael Anti, who blogs about freedom of the press, and Rao Jin, whose Anti-CNN Web site scrutinizes China coverage by the news network and other foreign media.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

An online news start-up is going where Google (GOOG) and other giants haven’t: sharing revenue with the people who write the news.

Fwix, a one-year-old start-up backed by BlueRun Ventures, is one of a growing number of portals for “hyperlocal” news, a buzzword that refers to sites about schools, culture, gossip and other information on a neighborhood level. Other hyperlocal aggregators include Outside.In and EveryBlock. Some, like Patch, have their own staff, while others, like Fwix, mostly organize news written by bloggers and community members.

Now Fwix is launching a new advertising product, AdWire, and agreeing to split revenue with the people who write the local information, laying down the gauntlet against big news aggregators from Google on down.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Online advertisers joined the blogger backlash against the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines that require bloggers, Twitterers and others to disclose any cash or freebies they’ve received to hawk stuff online.

Noting the new guidelines have created a “firestorm of controversy within the ad-supported interactive-media industry,” Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg suggested the FTC rescind the new guidelines.

“These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinguish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered,” he wrote in an open letter to the FTC on Thursday. The online-advertising trade group suggested the FTC try a do-over, after opening up the issue for discussion with bloggers and online advertisers…

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A Twitter campaign that rippled through the U.K. Tuesday helped to induce an about-face on a legal injunction that was preventing the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a public parliamentary proceeding.

Bloggers and Twitter users, led by Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger, expressed indignation about a court injunction that called into question the British newspaper’s right to report on a parliamentary debate.

The catalyst was an order filed against the Guardian on Sept. 11 by Carter-Ruck, the London-based law firm representing Trafigura Ltd., an oil-and-gas firm alleged to be responsible for dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As you’ve likely heard by now, the Federal Trade Commission is trying to reign in freebie-grabbing bloggers and graft-happy social media users masquerading as unbiased critics. The agency announced an update to the FTC Act of 1980, the requisite guidelines for consumer endorsements and testimonials. For many, the takeaway has been this: Bloggers Must Disclose Every Single Freebie Sent to Them From Companies–or Pay an $11,000 Fine. Scary.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Some bloggers are beginning to save their words on paper after all–collected between hard covers in a bound volume to pass along to their children.

A service, Blog2Print, from New York custom-book maker SharedBook, prints blogs into books and says that demand has been been growing 50 percent every month, although from a small base.

“When we launched, people would say, ‘Who would want to print their blog?’” said Caroline Vanderlip, chief executive of SharedBook. But while demand was slow when the service was first introduced, she said after Google (GOOG) featured Blog2Print in a communication called “Blogger Buzz,” some 5,000 people clicked the link in 24 hours. It also works with other blog services such as TypePad and WordPress.

“It’s the modern equivalent of writing a journal in a black, bound book,” she said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on blogger payola.

The agency, which protects consumers from fraud or deceptive business practices, voted 4 to 0 to update its rules governing endorsements, and the new guidelines require bloggers to clearly disclose any “material connection” to an advertiser, including payments for an endorsement or free product.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A recent amendment to the federal shield bill being considered in the Senate will exclude non-”salaried” journalists and bloggers from the proposed law’s protections.

The law, called the Free Flow of Information Act, is intended to prevent journalists from being forced to divulge confidential sources, except in cases such as witnessing crimes or acts of terrorism. The amendment, introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) last week, limits the definition of a journalist to one who “obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity…”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Attempts to censor the Internet are spreading to Southeast Asia as governments turn to coercion and intimidation to rein in online criticism.

Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam lack the kind of technology and financial resources that China and some other large countries use to police the Internet. The Southeast Asian nations are using other methods–also seen in China–to tamp down criticism, including arresting some bloggers and individuals posting contentious views online.

That is distressing free-speech advocates who had hoped that Southeast Asia–until recently a region where Internet use was relatively unfettered–would become a model of open debate in the developing world as its economies modernize.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Business models are important–but questions like “what kind of journalism best integrates with the nature of 21st-century democracy and society?” are also practical problems. So in this post I want to apply the model to a few real new organizations, describe what problems I think it might help us solve, and answer a few questions raised by my previous post.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

An alarm went off on some desk at The New York Times business section: Oh-oh, time to slam blogs again. But the latest assault reveals as much about The Times and the culture of classical journalism as it does about bloggers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been, and remains, one of the world’s harshest censors of the Internet, frequently blocking sites that are deemed “immoral” and politically offensive to the unelected authorities in power. Dissident bloggers and journalists of diverse ethnic, political and religious backgrounds are imprisoned and at times even executed for expressing their views online.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader has already inspired hope for new digital business models for book and newspaper publishers. Now the Kindle wants to do business with bloggers too.

On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a beta program that pays bloggers for Kindle subscriptions to their posts.

The Kindle comes with an experimental Web browser that allows users to surf ordinary Web sites. But for the sake of convenience, Amazon also sells Kindle subscriptions to a select list of blogs that are automatically updated and made available on the device’s home screen. Those subscriptions can cost as much as $2 per month.

Under the new program, Amazon will pay registered bloggers 30 percent of its subscription fee–pretty low, considering that Apple (AAPL) gives iPhone developers a 70 percent cut on sales of software applications for the device. So that’s about 60 cents per reader, per month, for the most expensive blogs.

Read the rest of this post

A number of Juggle readers are parent-bloggers themselves–and many of you read mom- or dad-blogs regularly. In many cases, parent-bloggers review products, such as diapers, toys and baby gear, and often receive free samples or services from companies hoping to see their wares get real parents’ seal of approval.

But things may be changing in the blogosphere, as the Federal Trade Commission considers whether to impose new rules for parent-bloggers. The FTC is weighing whether these informal endorsements should be considered paid advertisements if the blogger receives any quid pro quo from the manufacturer, either in the form of free goods or money.

The news is making a lot of parent-bloggers nervous. A number of parents have turned to blogging as a way to earn income or get free products during these tough times. But the FTC is concerned that the manufacturer-blogger relationships may not be transparent to readers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Can mommy bloggers become mommy tweeters?

A new microblogging site targeting moms and modeled after Twitter launched Friday. Rachael Herrscher, a 31-year-old mother of three, has added the abbreviated commenting feature to her site Today’s Mama.

Ms. Herrscher is not the first to rip off the idea of Twitter. The more popular the site becomes–it is adding millions of users by the month–the more knockoffs pop up. There are Twitter clones for different countries and a handful by subject or topic.

Dubbed “Connect” on Today’s Mama, Ms. Herrscher’s version has several Twitter traits. Posts are constrained to 140 characters or less, comments directed at someone begin with the “@” symbol and topics are marked by the “#” symbol.

Unlike Twitter, however, Today’s Mama has a group function. Ms. Herrscher has created groups by region, such as Bay Area Mamas, and topics, such as parents of teens or the book “Twilight.” After a user joins a group, she can send a message to it by adding an exclamation point and the group name.

Read the rest of this post