In a court ruling earlier this week, The California Supreme Court said Internet publishers cannot be held liable for if defematory comments, which were written by others, are found on their sites/blogs.

The court, in a unanimous decision, said those claiming defamation can only sue the original source of the allegedly offending comments, not publishers or distributors, even if the distributor is an individual. Internet users are protected by the same 1996 Communications Decency Act that grants immunity against defamation claims to publishers in most circumstances, the court said,

This has been the source for several law suits so far and it is good to know that the issue had been resolved in the publisher’s support.

[via Bloomberg]

Tags: Web Publishing, Blogging

Nick Wilson knows his stuff when it comes to blogging and social media. He started Threadwatch back in 2004 and turned into a leading technology board/community/blog on the net. He then sold the board and started Performancing, which later ventured into different avenues covering from publishing tools and up to a job board for bloggers.

Nick’s latest venture is podcasting and you can hear (and read) his podcasts at CommuniContent.com. So far he had managed to tell off some bloggers, drop some f-bombs and cover other areas of blogging. He has a unique style which captures many people, try it out.

Tags: Blogging, Podcast

Seems like people high up there are starting to realize that bloggers are regular people and that some of their work may be qualified as actual news reporting. Now, forget the fact that blogger’s have been reporting the news for a couple of years now, a new bill offers that some bloggers may “qualify as a journalist under the Free Flow of Information Act”.

So who can qualify?
Pence said bloggers would likely have to be considered on a “blog-by-blog” basis.

“Frankly, there are some that are out there gathering news,” Spence said at Inland’s 120th annual meeting. “There are many people though, who just link to your newspapers. It would be hard to argue to anyone that privilege applies to those people just because they have a Web site.”

Very inspirational, indeed. After rumors started flowing in last night about a possible deal between AOL and WeblogsInc for the sale of the successful blog network for around $25 Million. It’s been officially confirmed in an email correspondance between Duncan and Jason Calacanis.

Some people like to see this sale as an attempt for a “quick way in” on the corporate side. Others like to see this as if “we’re in the right business” type of thing. Either way, I am not going to hate on this sale, it is a success story in itself. Take a concept, develop a business, sell at it’s highest value, move on. Ideology tends to keep people broke…

AOL and SixApart have announced a partnership that will allow bloggers to add their AIM services into SixAparts LiveJournal and TypePad.

Under the new agreement, AOL will allow SixApart users to show their their presence status on their blogs and improve connectivity with other bloggers and readers.

With AIM Presence, you can display your availability on your blog, on your home page or anywhere on the Web. It’s easy — add one line of HTML, and you’re done. Want more flexibility and customization? We have an XML interface for you as well.

More on AOL presence.

Graywolf is fed up with Google’s site targeting option and is dumping Adsense. He is offering advertisers which currently target his blog to contact him directly (which makes a lot of sense).

I will be removing Google Adsense from this blog this week. If you had previously used site targeting to get your ads to appear here and would like to continue to advertise here in the future please contact me directly.

Google has officially announced that Adsense EFT is now out of beta:

Electronic Funds Transfer is ready for the big-time! We’ve been working hard on our payment system, and with our thanks to the thousands of AdSense publishers who took part in our beta test, we’re now ready to bring EFT out of beta.

If you would like to sign up for the first time, you’ll need to enter your bank account information through your AdSense account. Google will then make a small test deposit into that bank account – once you’ve verified the amount of this test deposit, you’ll be all set up for direct deposit.

With the new re-organization and announcement of b5media, Duncan had posted about a position as an editor for his blog Search Engine Herald.

I decided to take the challenge and offer myself. I obviously still hard of blogging, but he mentioned to me that he expects a minimum of 15 new posts a day, so I figured it can probably get me into some habit of writing, as I find it hard to do so by myself…

Anyways, I am not doing this for the pay, as I will most likely not get rich of it, however, I think that with the wealth of information shared between the owners of this new blog network, I can gain a huge amount of knowledge, a well as get my posting habits in order.

Either way, stop by, take a look, you may even learn a thing or two…

This is an interesting post by a college graduate who chose to write his thesis about blogging.

To give a brief over view of the paper, it was written for people who have a basic understanding of Blogs. I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.

He claims to have surveyed 174 Technorati ranked bloggers, and then analized the results. He put together some nice stats about blogging such as:

85% allow comments on their blogs
33% use Google Adsense
22% use BlogAds
45% generate no revenue
40% generated under $5,000 per year
4% generated over $100,000 per year

This is a long thesis, 145 pages at 4.5 Megs stored as a PDF.

The question of “what to do in case of losing your million $$ Adsense check?” came up in a forum post at DigitalPoint. The answer, aparently is very simple. Alph wrote:

I’ve had a check get lost in the mail. You have to wait 30 days from issue date, then contact them and they will issue a new check to you. No extra fees were involved.