We have to admit the wave of disclosures hasn't been as massive as we anticipated yesterday, particularly if you exclude sarcastic disclosures like this marketing blog's list of all the free samples, zombie newspaper subscriptions and government handouts it received over the years.

It looks like some blogs got their disclosures out of the way earlier in the year, when the FTC rules first made news; the others, we presume, either aren't aware of the regulations or believe the federal government will be no more diligent regulating bloggers than it was regulating financial institutions. A reasonable bet.

The blogs that did disclose their freebies tended to lack the sort of deals — Sony, SeaWorld, etc. — professional fameballer Julia Allison laid on the line yesterday. Which is, frankly, a good thing; hopefully the blogosphere will remain this under-sold-out for years to come. Click the pictures below for some examples:

Music blog Guilt Free Pleasures: After its mom, "who reads Gawker religiously" according to an email it sent us, saw our post yesterday and pestered it, Guilt Free Pleasures disclosed that it got "most if not all" of its music for free from record labels and publicists and that it takes free concert tickets. But "our opinions have not been swayed by the fact that we are receiving this music for free." Oh whatever; we know you're planning to build a gilded mansion with those spare craptastic CDs, GFP. (Also, call your mother, already.)

High-profile Valley blogger and former PR executive Louis Gray: Reminded readers he is now a consultant for Paladin Advisors Group, with clients like ReadBurner, SocialToo and BuzzGain, as disclosed in previous posts. Gray then noted that there is no easy way to attach disclosures to "likes" on blog systems and social networks, or shares on Google Reader. Thanks for giving us something fresh and unexpected to worry about. Thanks a lot.

Christine Koh of mommy blog Boston Mamas: Wrote about that the practices of some fellow mommy bloggers "depressed" her; reiterated her longtime commitment "to transparency and 100% advertorial-free editorial — but said she wouldn't be disclosing her material ties on a per-post basis as the FTC recommends because "I operate Boston Mamas more like a magazine" and have a clearly detailed editorial code.

The disclosure, buried on the "Contacts" page, foreswears advertorial but says Koh accepts free review units, "junkets" and "swag," including gift cards, which she insists do not influence her coverage. So theoretically she could accept a free trip to Monaco, a trillion dollar gift card and a necklace of opulent jewels to review, all from the same vendor, and then never disclose this fact to her readers in the post. In fact, that very scenario occurs weekly for Koh, probably.

NonSociety blogger Jordan Reid: Like her corporate overlord/protocelebrity mentor Julia Allison, Reid wants to stay out of trouble with the FTC. So she promised to let readers know when her parents buy her an awesome dinner at a four-star restaurant; promised to not completely fabricate posts; and to overshare absolutely "everything" that happens to her with "total and complete transparency." None of that really has anything to do with the FTC regulations, Jordan, but it's, uh, good to know, and we're sure your boss over there is proud.

Bloggers have to stop thinking of themselves as white-collar creatives and more like rank-and-file workers. After all—that's how they're paid!

Some bloggers get paid per-post, like pieceworkers in a 19th-century factory. Some get paid for pageviews, which is even more idiotic from a worker's perspective. It means you're not paid for your labor (except your monthly minimum) but paid instead on a sort of gamble—how well your product will perform when it's thrown into the open marketplace.

(The pros and cons of that system have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. There are definitely flaws, but hey, at least I'm receiving money for my blogging.)

It's easy and idealistic to say, but seriously: stop writing for free. This means you, if you're one of the many Huffington Post bloggers who don't get paid. Have something to say? Write an op-ed or a letter to the editor. There are some times in a young writer's career where you have to make the decision to write for free. I've done it; you've done it. The trick is knowing when to stop.

Just about anyone can argue with my line of reasoning—"it's more complicated than that," etc., and on some level it probably is. But on the actual working-to-live level it's not. It's not more complicated than that. If you're blogging for someone other than yourself (not as a commenter, not as a personal blogger; those are labors of love and don't count) you deserve to be paid.

If you're an employee or an independent contractor or a freelancer and some entity or website is making money off your labor, you deserve to be paid. It doesn't matter how solvent the company is—they're still selling ads and making revenue.

It's not only for your own good that you should demand to be paid, either. People working for free (or for depressed wages) drive down the pay for bloggers who do get paid for their work.

Blogging for free, no matter what the circumstances, is not being a good, loyal employee. It isn't a way to hang on to your job. It isn't some sort of heroic act.

Remember, free-bloggers: someone is making money off your work and your content. It's just isn't you.

Robert Cox, President of the M.B.A., we admire your response—it's very bloggy!—but Ryan put that story up at 12 a.m.! Did you really want a call in the middle of the night asking you to confirm whether or not your organization was opaque and your legitimacy self-defined?

Cox's pissy blog post is totally great, actually, from calling Ryan "some kid" to calling us all lazy. (Once again, blogging—if it's not stolen and reposted from the AP, we don't pay attention!) "I am sure," Cox writes, "this is not nearly as exciting as covering the latest sex scandal in Washington [...? –ed] so that a Gawker blogger would be unaware of our efforts is hardly a surprise."

Sorry Robert! We're too busy covering that famous Washington sex scandal everyone is talking about to call people before we make fun of them. We hope those negotiations with the Associated Press go well, and we look forward to flat-out ignoring whatever rules you guys come up with.

• "I have dream blogged. I have surfed the Internet in my dreams sometimes."
• "If I start hearing imaginary incoming message chimes on my computer when I am out in the backyard, it tells me I have spent too much time online."
• "I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you're drunk."
• Some addicts take their laptops to the bathroom.
• Some text while driving.
• Others check their email during dinner.

[UPDATE: DoubleClick VP Jonathan Bellack explains in the comments how his ad company will make Gawker loads of money next time.]

Apple Day is a loss-leader. Amazingly, the forecasting systems built into DART [Doubleclick's ad serving system] calculate available inventory by looking at trends, and weekly patterns. They can't take account of the fact that, a year ago, there was a spike at the same time. I guess trafficking experts can make a bit of an allowance. Assume that January is going to be above the DART forecast, and allow for more sales that could normally be satisfied.

Anyway, bottom line. We will do a multiple of normal traffic. Maybe 3-4x as much. Higher bandwidth costs. But no compensating advertising. Still, need to do it because these are the events that define how well the site is competing...As the Superbowl is to TV, and elections are to cable news, so Jobsnote is to the web. It's like a supernova of web traffic, that can briefly outshine all the other stars in the galaxy put together.

To clarify: Advertisers buy bulk sets of impressions: One hundred thousand views, for example. In that bulk manner, ad teams sell up to 80% of their normal monthly inventory (usually a lot less, part of why you see "Gawker Artist" banners on this network and cheap Google ads on others). You forecast traffic based on the previous months and not on the same month one year ago, since a healthy blog grows a lot in a year. Doubleclick's ad system apparently isn't sophisticated enough to also factor in an annual January spike. Thus you have a bunch of extra pageviews today, and no extra sold ads to fill them with.

There are a number of unwritten rules to blogging. One of the more common — and more grievous — violations is "hotlinking." This is when a blogger uses HTML code to display an image hosted on someone else's website. Though you haven't copied the image, some lawyers say displaying the image on another Web page could still be considered using the image without permission. More annoyingly, the image loads directly from the original server, using their bandwidth, not yours.

Now, in the age of cheap bandwidth and free picture hosting, this isn't as big a deal as it used to be, but it is a bit of a slap in the face to the person whose image is used. In a post about reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of Dvorak's editors hotlinked an image from a post by Mike Harding of Montara Energy ventures.

One way to rectify the situation is to email the hotlinker and ask him to stop. However, some people like to take this one step further. Because the photo is being loaded directly from the victim's site, he can easily change the image to something else, generally something offensive and Not Safe For Work ^TM as a punishment. Luckily for Dvorak though, as you can see above, Mike Harding merely put a notice in the image that it was being stolen.

Since then, however, Dvorak's post has changed the image so that it is now being hosted locally, but without any apology or explanation for their screwup. As Harding says in his post on the matter to Dvorak: "You're in the biz, you know better than this."

My favorite hotlinking story involves John McCain's MySpace page. Some intern in the McCain campaign took, without attribution, the MySpace profile design of Newsvine's Mike Davidson, including a hotlinked image from Davidson's account. Davidson replaced the image and suddenly McCain proclaimed his support for gay marriage, "particularly ... between passionate females." Sweet!

Reuters headlined Sina's claim that Xu had garnered 100 million pageviews in 600 days. But that doesn't sound at all impressive once you do some basic math — a challenge for reporters, I know. Once you figure out that that translates to 166,000 pageviews a day, it's hard to believe she's the world's most-read blogger. Even now, as her traffic has picked up, she's only doing 250,000 pageviews a day. Xu may well be, thanks to the support of her countrymen, the most-linked blogger, according to Technorati. But links aren't pageviews.

Here's an easy comparison: Perez Hilton, the gossip blogger, may inflate his numbers, but by even the most conservative measures, he gets 33 million pageviews a month, or more than a million a day. That's four times the traffic of the "most-read blogger in the world."

To cash in on next year's bubble, you'll need to raise your profile and slash time spent not selling out. SVUG's four-week archive already holds three links to start with. We've rewritten them shorter below, to get you out of the office in time for the last weekend of 2006. Pop each site open in a new window and sign up at all three now. Your resolution for 2007: Instead of the gym, hit each one daily.

• Google Reader — If you don't use RSS to speed-read your favorite websites, this is the way to start. The Reader displays all articles from each site on one super-fast page. Plus it looks like you're checking mail instead of goofing off. SVUG #12 lists four insider feeds to read.
• linkedIn — Fill out the easy job-hunter's form on the network where members hit on you professionally, not personally. See SVUG #3 for quick-start instructions.
• WordPress — Yes, you're getting a blog, but only so hiring managers can find and contact you. You'll seem more Webby than other prospects, without actually wasting time online. SVUG #7 explains how not to get fired for blogging.

Speaking of which, SVUG's resolution for 2007 is to not talk about blogging. So here's a final bullet dump of everything I know about how to make it work for you as a Valley tech professional:

• Whatever software you use, stick to the defaults and focus on posting, not customizing.


• Unless you're blogging anonymously, use your full name in your blog's title or subtitle.


• Too busy to write? Post a news link about your neighborhood or business sector every few days. I've creaked by that way for years.


• When in doubt, avoid personal commentary. Follow each link with a non-committal "Heh," or "Indeed."

Don't be fooled by these guys' low-flying Alexa charts. Anyone who's anybody in the Valley reads them — or pretends to. So should you.

Mark Cuban, Blog Maverick

• Day job: Owner, Dallas Mavericks basketball team.


• Claim to fame: Web 1.0 billionaire from now-forgotten Broadcast.com.


• Blogs incessantly about: The Internet biz, NBA inside basketball, lying-sack-of-shit reporters.


• Best-known post: "I still think Google is crazy."


• Fail-safe banter about Cuban: "If all reporters are liars, why doesn't he just stop talking to them?"

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail

• Day job: Editor in Chief, Wired magazine.


• Claim to fame: Author of The Long Tail, which posits that because of digital distribution, there's more money to be made selling an infinite number of non-hits than a handful of megahits.


• Blogs incessantly about: Because of digital distribution, there's more money to be made from, say, photofinishing an infinite number of ...


• Best-known post: "What would radical transparency mean" for his own magazine?


• Fail-safe banter about Anderson: "He's brilliant, but just once I'd like to see him go nuts on somebody."

Fred Wilson, A VC

• Day job: Partner in Union Square Ventures, investor in del.icio.us and Feedburner.


• Claim to fame: Made a killing on dot-coms. His house is worth more than your company.


• Blogs incessantly about: The quotidian concerns of a wildly successful investor.


• Best-known post: "Is the traditonal Venture Capital model broken?"


• Fail-safe banter about Wilson: "I'm convinced he's mocking us, 'Here's how to get as rich as me, but you'll never pull it off.'"

Dave Winer, Scripting News

• Day job: Scripting News.


• Claim to fame: Unofficial alpha noodge for Web standards including RSS, podcasting, stuff we forgot.


• Blogs incessantly about: How he never gets enough credit.


• Best-known post: September 11, 2001 when his site didn't crash along with the entire mainstream media.


• Fail-safe banter about Winer: "I can't stand him. Especially when he's right."

• So, the new version of Blogger is finally out of beta! Yippee! But what about the dozens of other products, still stuck either in beta — even mainstays like Gmail — or in Google Labs? Just a few weeks ago, Valleywag readers said Joga Bonito will be the next to go. [BloggerBuzz]
• Michael Arrington is disappointed in the Wall Street Journal's "attack on blogs." Says the WSJ: "The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps." Ouch! [Crunchnotes]
• The most popular topics on Reddit? Politics and Internet & PC, apparently. [StatisticsFreak]
• Web 2.0 comes to the Catholic Church! Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley to start podcasting. [SFGate]
• The American Mac and PC were clearly better casted. [Apple via Zach Klein]

Plenty of companies encourage employees to blog about their work, either to outreach to the community or as informal tech support. But to co-workers who don't know you, blogging on the job still smacks of goofing off. It isn't what you post that will get you in trouble, but when you post. Look at it through the CEO's eyes: If your project is a week behind schedule, why are you weighing in at noon on the Yahoo re-org? Lunch is for working.

The unwritten rules for blogging from work are:

• Never post during normal office hours. It's not a crime to work on your entries during the day — more productive than surfing Fark — but schedule your posts to appear in the early evening, or better yet at breakfast the next morning. You'll seem like a busy professional, not a bored staffer.
• Don't comment on every breaking news item. Only post when you have something original to say about something related to your expertise or pet interests. Me-too posts about whatever's on CNN say trainspotter, not trendspotter.
• Behind schedule? Stop blogging! Your manager may approve of your nonstop posts, but your manager has a manager, too — one who may push her to fire Sir Blog-A-Lot. Drop back to a weekly "the team is working hard" post.

SVUG suggests this schedule for company bloggers, so you'll neither go stale nor seem to have too much time on your hands.

• One post per day maximum.
• One post per week minimum.
• Schedule posts for 7am or 7pm.
• When in doubt, wait it out. Better to seem too busy than too bloggy.

Just imagine rubbing shoulders with notables Robert Scoble, B.L. Ochman, and "blogpreneur" Jeremy Wright. I am overcome with chills of excitement — dare I say "blogcitement" — over this blogference full of blogstars.

I mean, not only do you get to meet these people, you get to hear them lecture on electrifying topics:

- Choosing and Developing Content
- Blog Metrics
- Business Applications and RSS
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Monetization
- Return on Investment

Core areas of knowledge for everyone in blogdom, and a completely appropriate set of topics for discussion on a cruise ship sailing from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Cozumel, Mexico.

Blogonomics cruise! Tons of fun! Bring the kids!

*cough* Include Valleywag's affiliate ID and earn $50 off Valleywag's cruise ticket. *cough*

Blog Cruise [Blogonomics]

18. Perhaps they should change the motto to "Don't be stupid."
New Google employee Mark Jen adds a post to his blog in which he says he spent his first day in an HR presentation about "nothing in particular." Apparently, Jen snoozed through the company's strict disclosure rules. In a subsequent post, he reveals that the company expects unprecedented revenues and profit growth in 2005, projections that Google has yet to share with Wall Street. Jen soon receives another presentation from HR: a pink slip.

Jen now works for Plaxo, an address-book service. He promises to be more careful on his new blog. More brilliant moves after the jump.

19. "Don't be stupid" keeps sounding better and better. In July, Google informs CNET that it will prohibit company employees from talking to its reporters for a full year. Why the boycott? In an article about Google's privacy practices, CNET reporter Elinor Mills demonstrated the kind of personal information that can be found online by googling CEO Eric Schmidt, revealing his $1.5 billion net worth, details of his attendance at a $10,000-a-plate fund-raiser for Al Gore, and — gasp! — his passion for flying airplanes. In September, facing criticism for hypocrisy and overreaction, Schmidt cuts short the silent treatment and grants Mills an interview.

26. And maybe the cops come three days later and find you stabbed to death on your kitchen floor.
"If there's a burglar in my home, maybe I send an e-mail or a text message to the police instead of making a call."
— Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, on his VOIP service's lack of 911 access.

40. Just google him. We hear it really ticks him off.
"F—-ing Eric Schmidt is a f—-ing pussy. I'm going to f—-ing bury that guy, I have done it before and I will do it again. I'm going to f—-ing kill Google."
— Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in response to the departure of Mark Lucovsky, a former Microsoft "distinguished engineer" who left last year to work at Google....punctuated by the tossing of a chair...

43. Good news, kids: You can flunk out of kindergarten and still grow up to become the CEO of a major tech company!
"We're grabbing that word and saying, of anybody, we own the word 'share.'"
—Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, discussing his company's open-source strategy.

101 Dumbest Moments in Business [Business 2.0]