Bay Area Blogs

A group of high-profile bloggers—including celebs Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble—is headed to San Quentin today to talk social media and learn how the prison is using technology to manage inmates, keep correctional officers safe, and communicate with families.

The trip is part of a series of similar outings, called "Embarks," organized by California journalist and documentary filmmaker Dennis Hall.

Other bloggers on the trip include RSS pioneer (and Berkeley resident) Dave Winer, Gina Hughes (Techiediva.com), Jen Leo (JenLeoLive.com & LATimes.com), and Ponzi Pirillo (Techiediva.com).

Hall told BayNewser the visit is mostly a reporting trip where bloggers will get a chance to learn about the prison's use of technology. Hall organized a similar trip for high-profile bloggers to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in May. An Embark trip to the USS New York, which was constructed in part from materials recovered from the site of the World Trade Center, will feature Noah Schactman, editor of Wired's Danger Room blog, Hall said.

Still think this blogging thing is just a fad?

Mashable, the social media news blog which vies with TechCrunch for top tech site in the world, is not only hiring full-time writers, they're so confident that they can attract top talent that applicants are required to have written for a Technorati Top 100 blog.

This comes in the wake of the news that Mashable founder Pete Cashmore is considered one of the 100 most influential people in tech.

Want to learn more about Mashable? Check out mediabistro's recent Q&A: "So What Do You Do, Pete Cashmore, Mashable Founder and CEO?"

Normally, we love AllFacebook. It's one of the smartest and most diligent sites covering everybody's favorite social network. But Thursday was not its finest moment.

Specifically, they ragged on George Clooney for not investing the time and effort to build a Facebook presence. As you might have heard, the notoriously private-life-guarding Clooney recently declared that he "would rather have a prostate exam on live television by a guy with very cold hands than have a Facebook page."

And now AllFacebook is calling the sexiest man alive also "one of the dumbest marketers."

There are millions of women would love the opportunity to pick Clooney's brain... but rather than even tempting these women with the possibility of conversing with him, he has chosen to avoid Facebook all together.... Contrast Clooney's strategy with Vin Diesel, who is now the third most popular person on Facebook with over 6.2 million fans.... Thanks to engaging fans, Vin Diesel has been able to surpass George Clooney in the volume of searches on Google over the past few months.

OK, yes, true. But come on AllFacebook. Why is Diesel doing all this "engaging of his fans"? So he can go home and tally up his Facebook friends and Google searches? Of course not. To get better roles, have more options, be able to pursue projects he cares about. Which... Clooney can already do.

It's probably easy when you're steeped in Facebook branding expertise to forget that social networking metrics shouldn't be an end in themselves. As tech thought leader Robert Scoble pointed out at TechCrunch50 on Tuesday, it's not about raw numbers of followers. It's ultimately about influence.

It's OK, AllFacebook. Our heads get a little fuzzy when we start thinking about Clooney too. Now back to your usual stellar coverage.

Photo credit: csztova (cc Attribution 2.0 Generic)

For a while there, we were seeing a MSM-to-new media trend. Today comes news of a new media-to-MSM flight.

CrunchGear news editor Peter Ha is headed to TIME.com as their technology editor, covering "everything from gadgets to video games to technology news to science fiction," according to a statement from TIME.com.

"Peter's enthusiasm for all things nerd make him a great new voice for TIME.com," said TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel in the statement.

New York-based Ha, who started with CrunchGear three years ago, said in a post on the site that today is his last day there. "I'll be joining Time.com to launch something the likes of which you've never seen before," he wrote.

Photo: CrunchGear

In the midst of the news about further impending layoffs at the San Francisco Chronicle came another interesting tidbit today: Inside Network, the Palo Alto-based parent of niche site Inside Facebook site, had just snapped up VentureBeat's Eric Eldon.

Could there be a more apt metaphor for what's happening in the media in general? For the fact that the traditional news sources are imploding, while the new upstarts are growing, however modestly?

So we picked up the phone and asked Inside Facebook founder Justin Smith (pictured), an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by avocation, for his thoughts:

"It was very obvious in the '90s that the Internet was changing the economics of information distribution," Smith said. "Over the last few years, that has hit home."

"But while the technology is changing, the fundamental need for information and the social forces that drive media will remain. It's just the economics that have changed.

"It's now very much an amateur sport. There's a very gray area between what is journalism and what is blogging. You could argue all day about standards and philosophy, but the reality is that CNN is quoting Twitter. That's just the way the future will work."

More on Inside Facebook and the decision to hire Eldon, after the jump.

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There's been a lot of teeth-gnashing about whether TechCrunch was right or wrong to publish confidential corporate information from documents that had been stolen from Twitter by a hacker. But the fact that TechCrunch decided to go forward with the story gives us a fascinating piece of journalism—and one that's likely to have huge reverberations across the IT world.

In a story posted on TechCrunch today, titled "The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack," and based on conversations with the hacker himself, TechCrunch contributor Nik Cubrilovic spells out how the hacker got a hold of the documents. There are too many to boil down neatly and still provide an accurate picture of what happened,* but the key takeaway is that none of it was rocket science. It really only involved a couple key elements:

Willow Glen 2.0 won the San Jose Mercury News' "Best of Silicon Valley 2009" Reader's Choice award for best Silicon Valley blog.

Ryan Kuder, a former Yahoo! marketing manager who now is an independent social media and marketing strategist, created the site two years ago so the residents of his San Jose neighborhood could get to know each other and "talk about whatever kind of neighborhoody things they want[ed]." Kuder says the site has about 750 members and about 4,000 monthly visits.

Writes the Merc:

Part town crier, part community bulletin board, part virtual kaffeeklatch—Willow Glen 2.0 is providing an age-old service in the digital age. Find out when the next e-waste drop-off is, post a request for volunteers or comment on the local neighborhood renovation. Neighbors can follow posts in real time, or subscribe to a daily summary. It may not be at the kitchen table or over the fence, but it's an effective way of keeping folks connected.

The AP is reporting that the Federal Trade Commission is planning to enact rules later this year that require bloggers to disclose whether they are getting paid or receiving freebies in return for reviewing products and services.

A whole industry has arisen in recent years around getting "word-of-mouth" marketing from popular bloggers. The FTC now says it's time for the federal government to update their truth-in-advertising rules and protect consumers by getting such bloggers to 'fess up when they receive compensation in return for their bon mots.

Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC's division of advertising practices, told the AP: "Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and ... they have an economic motive for what they're saying, that's information a consumer should know."

The proposed guidelines, part of the existing "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising," won't be limited to reviews. Bloggers who include links from which they get commissions, like links to Amazon, will also have to disclose that compensation.

PCMag.com reports that the FTC says the revised guidelines, while specifying bloggers, are not actually new rules. "They simply apply established law to paid bloggers," the agency said in a statement, according to PCMag.com.

The questions bloggers are buzzing about, after the jump.

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On Tuesday, BayNewser informed you of what by most accounts is the misguided blogging endeavor of the brothers Getty on the City Brights section of SFGate, called What the Butler Didn't See. The woes-of-the-wealthy theme apparently hasn't struck its intended chord with the public (or at least the blogosphere), which had a few hours of fun ripping into Peter and Billy after their column debuted. The fact that their blog's "leave a comment" function was disabled didn't help matters any.

But then the Gettys hit back. Pretty much to the amusement of everyone.

Writing vitriolic comments to critical blogs like Gawker, SFist and SFAppeal, Peter Getty has lashed back on what he considers to be substandard and ill-informed reporting.

The reaction probably wasn't what he wanted.

From Gawker: "OOOOOOOOOOO. Ooo. Getty heir Peter Getty is going to bring the pain of an icy, cutting blog post directly into our area code! This will end well. Very well. Mr. Getty, we salute you for choosing to magnify this meaningless bicoastal internet class rage outpouring by a factor of one hundred. Never let it be said that you have something better to do than feud with underemployed "professional" bloggers, who decidedly do not have anything better to do. We are already composing a profanity-laced, grammatically incorrect and philosophically incoherent response in our head, clouded though it may be by the foul air of plebeian geography. . . . May our relationship be long and fruitful. I really think it will be."

From SFist (tongue planted firmly in cheek): "Without the Gettys and their provincial fame, San Francisco would be Portland 2.0. And we wouldn't have Vanessa. Also, the world would be worse off without a cat lover. So, you know, there's that."

From SFAppeal: "Thank god, someone reads this site besides all the people we email with notes saying 'you might find this story of interest.' Proof: Peter Getty, of the Peter and Billy Getty City Brights blogging duo, did what we could not do to them, and left us a comment."

Having received nothing from even a single Getty, we here at BayNewser feel a bit slighted. But heck, we just launched in May. Maybe by July we'll get some love.

Updated: Ryan Tate just posted a profile of Peter Getty on Valleywag, complete with marginally embarrassing photographs.

On Saturday, we told you about the New York Times' piece about tech blogs—including TechCrunch—and the ways they go about reporting rumors.

Yesterday, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington hit back, accusing the New York Times of manipulating quotes to fit a pre-determined agenda.

"About 30 seconds of dialog, remixed to change the meaning and context entirely, made it into the article as quotations," Arrington wrote in a post on TechCrunch.

Arrington was referring to what he called the Times piece's "money quote:"

"Getting it right is expensive," [Arrington] says. "Getting it first is cheap."

Arrington's response:

Note the break between "Getting it right is expensive" and "Getting it first is cheap." The break is there because there were paragraphs of dialog between them. [Times writer] Damon [Darlin] saw a way to slap them together to make us look bad. He did that because it fit his original thesis, which he had formed prior to talking to us.

"Not only does writer Damon Darlin get a lot wrong," Arrington writes elsewhere in his response, "he just absolutely failed to write the real and far more interesting story that was staring him in the face."

After the jump, what that "more interesting story" is.

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