Case in point is an ABA eReport article that discusses a New York State proposal that would designate legal blogs as advertising, thus subjecting them to state scrutiny and regulation:

"The storm was set off by a proposal that ‘computer-accessed communications’ such as blogs be included in New York’s definition of legal advertising, and therefore require state scrutiny. The proposal, by a committee created by the state’s Administrative Board of Courts, also suggests the state code of professional responsibility extend court jurisdiction to out-of-state legal advertising that appears in New York….

And if blog posts must be approved, what’s the point? ‘This seems to be another in a series of recent regulatory efforts by state bar regulators that seem woefully out of touch with the Internet era,’ wrote Dennis Kennedy, a St. Louis lawyer who posts at Between Lawyers." [Read Kennedy's post If Lawyers Can Advertise in New York, They Can Advertise Anywhere...But They Probably Can't.]

Equally bothersome, however, is when individuals expose themselves to legal liability by doing something that appears to be intentionally stupid. I’m referring to examples provided in the USA Today article Courts are asked to crack down on bloggers, websites (via Chris Heuer), such as posting false STD information about someone on Don’tDateHimGirl.com or setting up a fake MySpace.com page that contains obscene content. Not very smart — and that’s an understatement.

Josh Hallet, who is hosting Friday’s BlogOrlando conference, emailed the session leaders a reminder that our role isn’t to spoon feed the audience with information, but to lead and facilitate the discussion. Phew, that makes it a lot more interesting!

And since the Legal Issues session is scheduled for right after lunch, I hope no one’ll be in a food coma when they come back   Why? Well, because this session gives us an opportunity to cover some important areas, such as whether bloggers are considered journalists and if so, what legal protections they may have; libel & slander (and the role of satire); how to protect against liability regarding blog comments left by other people, and so on. And if we have time, we can also talk about what conflict management approaches, short of using cease and desist letters or initiating other legal action, may be open to bloggers.

In other words, this session will hopefully provide basic information that ultimately will help us avoid some mine fields and allow us to focus on what we really enjoy doing — communicating and interacting with our readers and others in the community. 

Here’s a brief list of some helpful sites to know about:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
• Media Bloggers Association
• The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
• The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
• Stanford Law School for Internet and Society

And these lists of blogs, compiled by 3L Epiphany, are also good information sources and commentary to keep on hand:

• Media Law blogs
• Internet Law blogs
• General Intellectual Property Law blogs
• Technology and the Law blogs

I recently started bookmarking legal-related information pertinent to blogs, podcasts and vlogging on del.icio.us. While the list definitely isn’t comprehensive, maybe you’ll find something of interest to you, so feel free to have a look.   

See you Friday!

Yeah, there are only so many hours in the day… or, as I’ve been guilty of doing, only so many hours of sleep you can sanely forfeit.

Still, I’ve found that my involvement with Second Life so far has been very beneficial.

And now there’s another Second Life-based event that I’m looking forward to, Harvard Law School’s CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, which is about "the creation and delivery of persuasive argument in the new integrated media space constituted by the Internet and other new technologies. Our premise is that ‘First World’ and corporate domination of entertainment media, laws, and news can be balanced by the voices of individuals, groups and universities who use new media intelligently."

The course is open to Harvard Law students and Harvard Extension School students, but also to anyone with an Internet connection. Check out the course details for at-large participants. 

Alright, I’m on board.

The exhibits offer insight into one of the most important legal cases of modern history, and their emotional impact can’t be overestimated (the exhibits include actual 9/11 video footage and recorded calls, a collection of photos of the victims, as well as graphic photos of bodies found inside the Pentagon after Flight 77 crashed into it).   

As explained in the overview, the exhibits are organized first by the party seeking their admission (Prosecution Trial Exhibits are available here and Defense Trial Exhibits are available here), second by the phase of the trial in which they were introduced (Phase One concerned Moussaoui’s eligibility for the death penalty, and Phase Two concerned whether he would be sentenced to death or to life in prison without the possibility of release), and third, by exhibit number.

(Photo of Prosecution Exhibit No. FO08301 available here.)

So audio is HUGE. It’s everywhere, and how one sounds is growing more and more important nowadays (although, yes, in a competition between the two, it’ll never trump how one looks).

So why is it that way too many women sound like Bambi (yeah, I know Bambi was a guy, but I’m using the term as Urban Dictionary’s definition #2 does)? We’re not talking about the women whose, um, particular line of work ( video or otherwise) actively encourages that. We’re talking about women who, probably unintentionally and unknowingly, sound flighty, sound like they took a swig or two of helium, or sound like they’re going to burst out in a fit of giggles any second.

Yeah, and unfortunately some of these girls and women are online personalities.

It’s not a matter of having a high pitch (having heard my own recorded voice, its definitely higher than I’d thought). You’re either born with that or you’re not — although vocal training can go a long way in helping out. No, it’s a question of modulation: pitch, tone and volume.

And while it doesn’t really matter what one sounds like when talking with friends or in non-networking social settings — in which case, Bambi away, which everyone’s probably done on occasion — when speaking in a professional capacity such as on the phone with clients, in presentations, at meetings, or while pitching journalists, it definitely matters.

Want an example of someone with a pleasing and still decidedly feminine voice? Check out Donna Papacosta who hosts the Trafcom News Podcast.

(Image of Microphonie from Gudmundsson)

Fortunately, there are tools available to help adults manage the logistics of two or more households and schedules.

The KidsNCommon site (fee-based, free for 30 days), for example, helps parents establish a "community" within which an invited person — the other parent, a relative, a friend, or even the child — gets access to customized information. This information can include the Parenting Plan (a good resource on parenting plans is ParentingPlan.net), the Documents page, the Bills page (with tabs for Shared Expenses, Child Support, Spousal Support, Bank Accounts and Service Vendors), and the all-important Calendar page. The Calendar allows invited community members to see upcoming events organized according to categories such as Payment Reminder, Work, School Event, Extra Curricular, Recreation, Travel, Vacation, Holiday, Co-Parenting Meeting and Legal — with optional email reminders sent out as well.   

KidsNCommon offers other services and benefits as well. For example, community members get their own email address, such as suzysmith@kidsncommon.com, that helps everyone stay in touch and receive schedule reminders. The site also offers information on topics such as child health, dealing with the psychology of divorce, and balancing families, careers and other relationships.   

ShareKids.com (fee-based) is another site that offers an easy online location to share information and manage schedules, keep track of shared expenses, create photo galleries, and even create private chat rooms.

Sharekid.com also links to other valuable resources such as the Family Mediation Inc.’s downloadable (and, at under $20, affordable) Child Custody Parenting Plans book with forms, and the international non-profit Bonus Families that coined the beautiful term "bonus" to describe "a stepfamily or a single parent living with their children and another adult partner" (I highly recommend this site).

In addition to the importance of streamlining communication and schedules for the sake of the children, maintaining and fostering strong parent-child bonds is crucial to helping kids adjust to their new family status, particularly in cases where physical or legal custody is awarded to only one parent.

Virtual visitation can be an important part of helping the non-custodial parent maintain close ties with his or her children, whether the parent lives nearby and can’t see the child every day, or lives further away, precluding frequent in-person time together.

InternetVisitation.org describes virtual visitation as "using tools such as personal video conferencing, a webcam, email, instant messaging (IM) and other wired or wireless technologies over the Internet or other communication media to supplement in-person visits and telephone contacts between two people."

The site offers practical how-to information on what’s needed to set up a call and a related forum discussing such things as VoIP, Skype, Vonage, video calls and video call accessories. Internet Visitation also lists the latest legislative developments; to date Utah, Wisconsin and Missouri have passed virtual visitation laws, with fifteen other states showing activity.      

Finally, there’s also a must-read blog, Virtual Families and Friends.com, written by "virtual dad" Jim Buie and co-authored by his son, Matthew Buie-Nervik. An absolute gold mine of information.

(Image of artwork from Kids’ Turn)

Used to be that putting an ad in the personals was the way to go, but that’s so old school; now the print ads have an online version. For those who want more structure and focus, the leading Internet dating sites like eHarmony.com, Chemistry.com and PerfectMatch.com are the way to go. 

But for DIYers or those that like the search-and-seek game, there are the hot and popular social networking sites that let people reveal their own status. Flickr lets users input their gender (female, male, other and rather not say) and singleness (single, taken, open and rather not say). And MySpace.com, the current darling, lets users list things like status, orientation and body type.

Now there are two sites that help track MySpacer’s availability: David Weekly’s SingleStat.us ("find out when your friends become single!") and Jared Chandler’s DatingAnyone.com ("The Myspace Dating Status Monitor").

According to the site, SingleStat.us was created over three days in 2004, while DatingAnyone.com, as mentioned in this TechCrunch comment, was created during exam finals last month. And Jared already "snagged MyspaceStat.us and DatingStat.us just for kicks."

Let the fun begin.

(&hearts image from makowol)

The students, representing all four years of medical school, offer a Dose of Reality, namely "what it’s really like at the University of Michigan Medical School. [They] give you an intimate look at their med school lives—their insights, ‘ah-ha’ moments, frustrations and excitement."

According to American Medical News (online subscription required; quote from April 17, 2006 article, Med school’s Web site adds student blogs): 

"Plenty of medical students have independent blogs, but 12 students…have blogs on the medical school web site, an event the university says is a first among medical schools…

The blogs are part of an overall strategy to use the Internet as a recruitment too. Officials hope that an unfiltered picture of life at the school will increase the applicants….

Dan Remick, MD, assistant dean for admissions and director of the blog project, said prospective medical students want information that hasn’t been run through administration filters or censored in any way."

The article also states that the medical school offers monthly Internet chats for applicants and those who have been accepted but haven’t decided whether to attend. The combined efforts resulted in an increase of 20% admissions acceptances for the 2005-06 class.

The Dose of Reality site currently hosts these students’ blogs:

• M1 Amanda Elliott
• M1 Andrea Knittel
• M1 Karen Lo
• M1 Jon Streit
• M2 Ben Bryner
• M2 Janani Krishnaswami
• M2 Jason Cheng
• M2 Tim Bodnar
• M2 Shelby Stewart
• M3 Tanyaporn Wansom
• M3 Elliott Gozansky
• M4 Okeoma Mmeje

The blogs’ greatest appeal is that the students don’t gloss over their medical school experiences. For example, in a May 3rd post, first-year student Andrea Knittel writes:

"As the bearer and compulsive checker of a fibroadenoma (a benign fibrous lump of breast tissue identified only a week after I learned what the word meant in our first pathology sequence), I know what waiting for a diagnosis is like.  It’s a time filled with worry, what-ifs, and pre-emptive decision making.  It’s hard, and even harder to describe.  At the same time, I can only imagine that the pain of waiting for a diagnosis and wondering what was going is nothing compared with the pain of breast cancer treatment both emotionally and physically.  It’s the kind of pain that you probably can’t treat with medicines…" 

Meanwhile, fourth-year student Okeoma Mmeje writes this on March 24 (warning: post covers the topics of abortion and rape) :

"My team always takes call on Thursday and my second day on service we were on call. I worked with the intern and resident assigned to gynecology emergency and there were so many interesting cases, particulary ectopic pregnancies and incomplete abortions. The first case was of a 24 year old woman that presented in a semi-conscious state with peritoneal signs. An ultrasound done at an outside hospital revelaed that she had an ectopic pregnancy. We did a lapartomy and took out her right fallopian tube. She lost 2300 mL of blood during the case. I don’t think she had much time left before the outcome of the case would have been fatal…. Next, we evaluated a 12 year old girl that came with her grandmother after being raped. She said she was raped the day before by a man who forced her to go with him to the beach. The resident completed the police reprt and took samples. On physical exam, there were signs suggesting that she had a forced sexual encounter. The hymen was rugged in appearance and lacerations were also present. Now, it’s left in the hands of the police to prosecute the offender. According to the girl, her friends knew the guy so they would be able to find him. What’s really sad about this case is that the girl has some type of developmental delay, which I thought was due to cerebral palsy.

The remaining cases we saw were all incomplete abortions… Many young girls and women can’t afford to go to a private clinic and get an abortion so they start the process at home…, then when they start bleeding and cramping they come to the hospital to complete the abortion. When the patients present with an incomplete abortion, a MVA (manual vacuum aspiration) is done to remove the remaining uterine contents. This was quite painful to watch because it’s done with no anesthesia. They offered  me an opportunity to do one of the MVAs, but I couldn’t do it knowing that the patient wasn’t anesthetized. The patients already go through enough pain.."

Does the use of this type of recruiting mean that traditional/professional-led PR is becoming less relevant? Not necessarily. But it does represent the growing influence and appeal that insiders — in this case actual students sharing in their own words their real-life experiences — continue to have with particular audiences. The fact that the University of Michigan recognizes this reflects its true understanding of public relations and marketing.   

Rick shared some of these views during an interview conducted on March 14.

——————————————————————–

AW: I read on your blog that Newsweek in now using FeedBurner. Can you tell us what this means for the company and for the media in general?

Klau: At a high level, Newsweek is one of several large publishers that have chosen to use FeedBurner for feed management. One of the things in particular that was interesting to Newsweek was the ability to augment content in their feed with dynamic links back to their site and to other web services such as Technorati and del.icio.us, which provide easier and more effective ways for their readers to interact with Newsweek content. So, for example, when Newsweek publishes an article, as blogs and other websites link to that content, that creates a bit of a conversation.

By using FeedFlare to interact with services like Technorati, Newsweek is able to expose to readers where that conversation is going and how they are participating in it. Newsweek has been pretty forward-thinking in how to engage the larger Internet community as they produce more content, and I think that using FeedBurner is just an extension of that for them.

It’s exciting. They’re participating in the ad networks, so there’s opportunities for us and Newsweek to work together to make feeds a bigger and more strategic part of their content strategy in general.

AW: You were saying that Newsweek is very forward-thinking. Obviously there are some mainstream media outlets that haven’t gotten to the same point yet. Do you think that entities like Newsweek help get the ball rolling?

Klau: I sure hope so. I was talking to somebody last summer and made the distinction that the first half of 2005 was a lot of publications thinking about whether they would embrace feeds, and the second half of 2005 was them trying to figure out how to do it.

Now we really see most publications and most publishers thinking more broadly about how to make feeds a part of their content strategy, and understanding that there’s an audience that’s going to be consuming their content by way of feed – and then trying to figure out how many of those people are going to come back to the website, how many of those simply consume the content in the feed by itself.

It’s important for publishers to understand the dynamics of the feed audience versus the web audience, and try and connect the dots between the two. We certainly would like to think that we’re in the middle of that discussion in working with a number of exciting publishers, folks like USAToday and Reuters and others where the thinking is pretty big about where this goes. We’re very excited to be a part of that.

AW: Given your position at FeedBurner, you have a unique opportunity to observe how stories, controversies and conflicts play out online. Can you provide an example of one and what the life cycle of a controversy would be?

Klau: We certainly have an opportunity [to observe], given the somewhat unique nature of how FeedBurner’s positioned; we have almost 150,000 publishers using us, in many cases publishers means a blogger, a podcaster. When you are a service that those people rely on, they tend to take it pretty seriously and they also tend to talk about experiences – good, bad or otherwise.

Late last summer we had an interesting mini-issue come up as a result of some confusion on the part of one of our then-users, Leo Laporte, who runs a very popular podcast called This Week in Tech. It was interesting to watch as Leo posted on his site some concern about information that he believed FeedBurner had made public, when in fact, as it later became obvious, it was Leo himself who had made it public. Nevertheless, Leo runs a highly-trafficked website and had hundreds of people commenting on his site who were of the impression that FeedBurner had somehow done something wrong.

So we found ourselves for the majority of that Saturday night – I happened to be on vacation with my family – and most of Sunday, online monitoring the ripple effect of people talking about this issue. We were trying to be very proactive and not point fingers (no one wins when you’re trying to blame something on somebody else), but wanted to simply make sure that people were commenting with all of the information. We were quite confident that if people were aware of all the information, they’d see that we hadn’t done anything wrong and that we were helping to resolve the issue with Leo.

The interesting byproduct was that, because tools like Technorati make it very easy to monitor conversations at they happen in real time, we were able to spend the next 36 hours really doing nothing but leaving comments on weblogs as people would make posts about what they were perceiving to be going on at This Week in Tech.

When Monday morning rolled around, instead of having this controversy percolate for 36 hours in a vacuum, we’d really poured a lot of water on what were about to be flames. So those who did comment on Monday morning – some of the people who were fortunate not to be near their computers over the weekend – instead of commenting on what appeared to be a big problem, were all commending FeedBurner for the fact that we were proactively engaging the community and responding to questions that had been raised.

Ironically, what started with somebody pointing the finger at FeedBurner and saying, you guys made a mistake, [changed to him] later essentially recant[ing] and Monday morning [having] a lot of people pointing at FeedBurner saying, look at what a great job that company did, they were very eager to engage and answer questions and acknowledge when lessons were learned and what could be done differently.

It was very interesting to watch that happen, in contrast to companies that ignore these conversations at their peril and then find that it bubbles up from a couple of weblogs to a lot of weblogs to a journalist who gets hold of it, and suddenly you’ve got a major media outlet covering a story that you didn’t douse when the flames were tiny.

AW: The point to take away from this is that you’ve got to proactively monitor what’s being said about you online and then jump in right away to correct any inaccuracies.

Klau: That’s right. That second issue is one I think a lot of companies, especially those that don’t live and breathe the online world, are particularly worried about. They’re happy to monitor the conversations so that they think they’re aware of what’s going on, but they’re reluctant to actually participate in the conversation. And that’s a decision that I think ends up leaving the company exposed. If you’re monitoring the conversation but don’t tell people you’re monitoring, and don’t answer questions when they’re raised, then the natural conclusion that people would make is that you’re not listening at all.

A perfect example of that was last year with Jeff Jarvis talking about his hellish experience with Dell. Dell later was asked about this escalating series of complaints that Jeff was leaving and that others were leaving through comments on his blog. Folks at Dell said, yes, we were aware of what was being said, but we have a general policy that we don’t leave comments on blogs. So no one was hearing Dell’s side of the story. And as a result, the conclusion people were making at the time is that Dell just must not be paying attention. I think they’ve taken steps in the last several months to try and correct that, but that’s a very good example of [what happens] if you don’t jump in, if you don’t speak up, if you don’t acknowledge hey, we’re here, we’re listening, let us know how we can answer your questions, people just aren’t going to know that you’re there.

AW: Do you see a reluctance to join in the conversation as being based on some legitimate concern that it will raise legal issues or legal liability somewhere down the line, or do you believe this reluctance is just based on undefined fear?

Klau: It’s probably all of the above. I was a speaker at a panel at a Forrester bootcamp last year where a group of us was convening to talk about social marketing and how you engage the community in conversations. It was interesting to note from people in the audience that very often the reason for lack of dialogue was a feeling that that particular person was not empowered to speak on behalf of the organizations, that you had a very structured, centralized PR focus within the company that said, any questions about the company are answered by the company spokesperson. As a result, everything needed to get funneled through that one person or that one group. So you might have a line manager who manages a particular product line and sees a discussion happen on blogs, and he’s suddenly not able to jump in and say, hey, this is who I am, this is what I do and how can I help? Instead, he’s then just sending an e-mail to somebody in marketing asking them to do something about this. That approach will just get committeed to death.

AW: A lot of public relations professionals are encouraging their clients to step into the mix and engage in those conversations, instead of having some written statement that they read to the media.

Klau: Like with anything, there’s going to be a period of transition where there are companies that feel very comfortable doing this because it’s a part of their culture and a part of their expectation. I think you’ll see other companies that just don’t feel comfortable having tens or dozens or even hundreds of people able to speak on the company’s behalf. That’s just a decentralization of the spokesperson role that is going to take a while for them to feel comfortable with.

AW: In the online world there’s been the creation of what I call the Cult of Personality, which has made mini-celebrities out of some people such as Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, Edelman’s Steve Rubel and Shel Israel, co-author with Scoble of Naked Conversations. What are your thoughts on this relatively new phenomenon, and how do you compare your role at FeedBurner as company evangelist with the other people I mentioned?

Klau: In answer to your first question, I think it’s a fantastic development that mirrors something I watched happen in the political realm, being involved in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Generally speaking, historically people see companies as entities and not really a collection of people working on their behalf. Or, you see Microsoft as Bill Gates and you see these companies that really only have one face to them. It becomes very easy to distance yourself from companies or campaigns, in the case of politics, where you don’t feel like you have a personal connection to that organization.

What I think Scoble has done a wonderful job of giving Microsoft a face and a personality, and that’s led to hundreds of other employees at Microsoft taking up a similar mantle with respect to their individual products and groups. What that’s done is not only humanize the organization to a certain extent, but it’s made it much easier for people who want to engage with Microsoft to feel like they have a way to do that. And it’s taken Microsoft from being a multi-billion dollar company to one guy’s weblog.

You may not agree with everything Robert says, or anybody else at Microsoft for that matter, but Robert’s phenomenal – I’ve never had a situation where I’ve sent Robert an e-mail and not gotten a reply within a day.

There have been several cases where he’s not been shy in disagreeing with Microsoft. One example I recall was quite dramatic, namely when Microsoft had long lobbied for legal protection of same-sex couples, such as wanting to make sure benefits like health insurance were available to all couples. Due to some lobbying from a far right group that had threatened to boycott Microsoft, Microsoft decided to essentially abstain from lobbying on that particular issue in the Washington state legislature. Robert hit the company with both barrels and said, this is not the company that I work for, we are a company that believes in equal rights for everyone and this is wrong. He didn’t pull any punches, he didn’t mince words. Some people were very surprised by his tone. But then, with permission of Steve Ballmer, he had an e-mail dialogue with Steve that resulted in Steve changing the company policy. I’m probably not the only one who watched that progression over the course of a week or so and thought, here’s a company that’s willing to admit it has made a mistake, it’s listening to its employees. From a recruiting perspective alone, that’s worth its weight in gold. And these are the kinds of conversations that people were simply not seeing before folks like Robert and others at other companies showed up.

In terms of my role at FeedBurner, we’re talking far different orders of magnitude. First of all, we’re a much smaller company. Second of all, I don’t have the sole claim to being a company spokesperson – our CEO does quite a bit of that, as do several others at the company – so I become one voice among many. If anything, what you see is people talking about the fact that FeedBurner proactively engages others when they ask questions on their blogs or post questions in forums. They don’t see any one of us as individually representative of the company, but instead they see a group that is very committed to the medium in which we work. So any one of us ends up serving as that spokesperson, depending on the day of the week or the particular subject. It’s something that we all have internalized and as a result, we all end up serving in that function.

AW: You mentioned the 2004 presidential campaign. Based on your involvement in various political campaigns, how do you view the relationship between MSM and other types of media with regard to political commentary? Do you view them as being independent, competitive, or inter-dependent?

Klau: In a lot of ways they’re probably inter-dependent. What I believe a lot of weblogs in the political world have done is make it easier for the grassroots and the individual supporters of a campaign or a particular candidate or subject to have information distributed to them. What you end up having is groups of people who feel stronger about [a particular] subject because they have more information. So it becomes a self-reinforcing thing within the groups. What that does then, to a certain extent, is polarize those groups because you become a little bit more steadfast in your beliefs or your claims of being right versus some other person. But it also serves as a very good sounding board that ends up reflecting coverage in the media.

You’ll see ideas take hold in blogs that will then, a day or a week later, show up in commentary about a particular race. You’ll also see bloggers who will, like a dog with a bone, get onto a story that many typical publications would not chase down because they have other things occupying their time. Sure enough, some of those turn into very, very big stories.

Josh Marshall was the first example of that. Josh has been a friend of mine for well over a decade, and back before blogs and politics were really seen as bread-and-butter, he was largely responsible for the whole debacle with Strom Thurmond and the takedown of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Lott had made a comment about how good things were in the old days, which was a veiled reference to segregation policies. Suddenly you had an issue that many people went wink-wink, nudge-nudge about, saying that’s just Trent Lott being Trent Lott. But Josh held on to it and kept at it and said, this is actually a fairly significant declaration from a senior official in the Republican party. Sure enough, a week later it started showing up on the New York Times and the Washington Post, and you had President Bush saying that Lott probably needed to step down.

I think there is certainly a cooperative relationship and also some competition. Some publications see bloggers as being less professional, which of course they are since they’re not paid nearly as much, if anything. But then I saw an interesting little snarky response by David Weinberger pointing out that the New York Times, on the day after Dana Reeve died, had in the same article misspelled her last name. If the mainstream media’s critique of bloggers is that they’re not edited and they don’t have a filter and they’re not upholding standards, the reality is that we see some of those same things happen in the mainstream media. What you find is that both groups end up serving a very valuable role in the ultimate goal of distributing information, giving people a voice so that good information makes it out.

AW: During the next presidential election and the party nominations before that, what do you think we can expect to see in terms of campaigning? Will we see more attempts to find sympathetic bloggers to get candidates’ messages out?

Klau: There’s no question that that will happen. We already saw it with the Republicans paying a couple of bloggers in the South Dakota race against Tom Daschle where those two bloggers in particular didn’t disclose that they were on salary to the campaign running against Daschle, yet were frequently breaking news about the race. And then the campaign was pitching to the media, look at what these bloggers are talking about, there’s this grassroots groundswell support against Daschle. It was a nice little, self-fulfilling operation. There’s no question Democrats will do the same.

I think from candidates’ perspective, we’re probably still another cycle away from seeing a dramatic change in seeing how they use technology. For all the successes that the Howard Dean campaign had, which I was fortunate to have been involved in, a lot of people still look at that campaign and say, well, he lost. He lost for some fairly pedestrian and conventional reasons, which were that the campaign ended up being not managed very well, which Dean has taken responsibility for. He had different factions within the campaign, and as the candidate he didn’t chose to address those at a time when it could have helped, and so the campaign ended up running aground. I don’t think the technology strategy can really be blamed for that, any more than it could have taken exclusive credit for what might have been his success. I think there were some very interesting dynamics in play that we’ll see take hold in other races, but probably not until the 2012 race. We’re still in a fairly traditional cycle where you’ll see traditional candidates like Hillary Clinton and Mark Warner.

Warner is actually doing some interesting things, having hired a guy named Jerome Armstrong who, along with Markos at Daily Kos, have been probably the two most active individuals in how to use the Internet in political campaigns. So it may be that we see some interesting stuff come out of the Warner campaign sooner than I expect.

AW: You mentioned Clinton and Warner. What about Barack Obama?

Klau: I’d love to see him run, as I’ve talked with you about in the past. I’m very fortunate to have met him and that I was able to help out in some small way with his 2004 campaign. He’s been pretty clear in interviews that 2008 is not a year he’ll be running for president, much to the chagrin of many people who would love to see him in the running sooner rather than later.

AW: You just talked about politics within the United States, but what are some of your thoughts on how social media impacts the image of the American government and American citizens abroad?

Klau: Going back to the comments I was making about Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel or others, I think the best thing that candidates – and certainly when you talk about the image of the American government abroad – and elected official can do is to humanize and give a face to the decisions that they make and the positions that they take, and communicate that. One of the things I think is terribly exciting to see, speaking of Barack Obama, is his podcast where every week he’s taking anywhere from 5-20 minutes to chat with people. It’s kind of a high-tech version of FDR’s fireside chats from so many years ago.

What that means is that anyone around the world who wants to hear from Obama will get information delivered to them in his voice about issues of the day. Last week he was talking about energy policy and the fact that, using the example of Brazil, five years ago 3% of their cars had alternative fuel capabilities and just 5 years later, 70% of their cars do. And that was just because the Brazilian government made a commitment to say, this is a priority, we need to be independent of foreign oil, we can’t sacrifice our security. Those were figures I wasn’t aware of, and yet here I am hearing this in a non-confrontational, very conversational way from Senator Obama.

When he traveled through the Middle East a couple of months ago, he called in from the airport in Jordan. What you heard was essentially a voice mail left by Senator Obama with very current, raw impressions saying, here’s what I saw in Kuwait, here’s what I saw in Iraq and here’s what I saw in Israel. Those are the kinds of things that, when the candidate’s or official’s message is filtered through the press, you only ever hear a sound bite of, you only see one quote in the paper, you only see a 5 or 10 seconds snippet on TV.

But when you’re hearing all of 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of that individual on a regular basis, you’re going to get a much better sense of how that person thinks about things and how they approach issues. They’re going to seem much more approachable to their constituents or people around the world – and that can only have a positive impact. And that’s not just true of Democrats. I’m certainly partisan in this matter, but the same is true on the other side of the aisle. There are Republicans who are absolutely committed to government succeeding and taking its responsibility seriously. I may disagree with how they come down on certain issues, but if I see that they come at the issues with integrity and having thought through them well, that’s a net positive for the process. That’s going to give me as an individual more confidence that the government is going to do its job than having people screaming at each other all day long.

Whether that’s a podcast or a weblog or whether that’s just sending e-mails, I don’t think the technology necessarily has to be that sophisticated. It’s a commitment to personalizing the message that we’ve moved away from, and it’s nice to see the technology allowing us to move back to that.

AW: You’ve become increasingly involved in politics over the last several years at the local, state and national levels. Let’s say you were running for office. What approach would you use, especially as it relates to online media, to get your message out to the public?

Klau: It’s a big if whether I’d run for office – you’d have to clear that through my wife first! Certainly people need to hear how you approach problems, how you think through solutions. Too often the political process ends up about who can scream louder than the other guy, or who can appeal to the most motivated of voters, who are typically the most polarized of the groups. It’s all about engaging with people who have honest day-to-day issues that they want to know someone else is watching their back about.

In the town I live in here in Illinois, we have a primary that’s a week away. We have a referendum on the ballot about funding a third high school in our school district, and I’ve never see the community this politically active. We’re seeing half a dozen letters to the editor a day, we’re seeing people walk door-to-door, and it’s honestly about people feeling like they have some stake that needs to be addressed.

How would I use technology? It’s not about using technology for technology’s sake, it’s about letting people know that there are important issues in play, that there are important decisions that are going to be made that are going to affect them, and letting them know how the candidate would approach them. We’ve become so disconnected from the process that it becomes really hard to see on a day-to-day basis what Congress does that affects us, and how we as voters have any real say in the process. Any way you can reconnect people to the process and the candidate is important.

AW: So we’re going to see you at FeedBurner for a long time?

Klau: That’s the plan! I’m having too much fun to think about anything else than making sure publishers can get a lot out of their feeds. This is as exciting a start-up as I’ve ever been at. We’re just growing too quick to think about anything other than how we can win [at what we do].

King will be the first author to promote his work this way, an ironic marketing method considering Cell is about a signal called The Pulse that is sent through cell phones and turns users into "something less than human."   

According to the Journal, thousands of cellphone subscribers in the coveted 18 to 54 years-old demographic group will receive a text-ad that reads:

"The next call you take may be your last…..Join the Stephen King VIP Club at www.cellthebook.com"

After signing up for the VIP Club, members get the chance to purchase special cell phone wallpaper or two different talk tones for $1.99 (available to AT&T, Cingular and Sprint customers).

One talk tone says "Beware, the next call you take may be your last," while the other says "It’s ok, it’s a ‘Normie’ calling," with Normie referring to the few people who haven’t been affected by The Pulse.

You can listen to the talk tones here and The Pulse here.