San Francisco May Regulate Blogging!!!!

[freeandfun1]

Has anybody else heard anything about this??

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/501

By Michael Bassik, 03/31/2005 - 3:15pm

Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.

Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.

The entire Board is set to vote on the measure on April 5th, 2005. I wonder if they'll be forced to register their own blogs!

The legislation was written by Supervisor Sophie Maxwell.

 

[5stringJeff]

I'd move out of SF if I were a blogger.

Hell, I'd move out just on principle!

 

[Nienna]

they don't want to regulate pedophiliac activity online, but they want to monitor political activity.... do you think they like their power more than their people?

 

[Annie]

Links at site, quite unbelievable:

http://www.chrisnolan.com/archives/000740.html

They came, they saw and they passed two piece of legislation.
Never a group to say "enough," the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed its ethics and campaign finance legislation, twice today. One bill, has all the faults the blogosphere has derided. The other doesn’t. One – the faulty one – will move toward passage and be voted on again next week. The cleaned-up version will move toward passage, too. Only it has to go to the city's Ethics Commission for review.

The idea is that the new cleaner version – that specifically exempts Internet-based communication including web logs, posting to sites and listserve mailings sent to folks who solicit that contact – will clear Ethics then catch up to the flawed bill. The newer bill will then be substituted for the flawed proposal. Goofy, but, hey, I wasn't kidding about the sausage.

The reason for the tag-teaming has to do with the procedural rules governing how the city enact legislation. If the board didn't pass its new ethics legislation today, members worried that the new rules wouldn’t go into effect in time for this fall's election. So they've sent one, amended version, to their Ethics commission for a look – which is required by law – and are hoping it comes back to them in time to be substituted for the flawed bill.
And you thought writing code was hard. Ha!

But here's the important part, at least for the short-run: Pretty much everyone on the board agreed that on-line sites like this were and are exempt. The revised version of the bill makes this crystal clear. But in speech after speech, almost all of the 11 members of the board said they didn't intend to regulate web logs or – like they would try – stand alone journalists.

 

[William Joyce]

Anything dominated by whites must be banned, according to the New World Order.

http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17608

 

[Annie]

Anything dominated by whites must be banned, according to the New World Order.

http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17608

who or what the heck is Technoratilist? There is a list, but not under this name:

http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html

Doubt that is the one the article is referring to. There are no links WJ?

 

[William Joyce]

Here is the article:

Blogging Beyond the Men's Club

Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?
By Steven Levy
Senior Editor
Newsweek/ March 21 issue –

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the
media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best ... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere ... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."

After the comment was posted, a couple of the women at the conference bloggers MacKinnon and Halley Suitt looked around and saw that there weren't many other women in attendance. Nor were the faces yapping about the failings of Big Media representative of the human quiltwork one would see in the streets of Cambridge or New York City, let alone overseas. They were, however, representative of the top 100 blogs according to the Web site Technoratilist dominated by bigmouths of the white-male variety.

Does the blogosphere have a diversity problem?

Viewed one way, the issue seems a bit absurd. These self-generated personal Web sites are supposed to be the ultimate grass-roots phenomenon. The perks of alpha bloggers voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, White House press passes are, in theory, bequeathed by a market-driven merit system. The idea is that the smartest, the wittiest and the most industrious in finding good stuff will simply rise to the top, by virtue of a self-organizing selection process.

So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous? It appears that some clubbiness is involved. Suitt puts it more bluntly: "It's white people linking to other white people!" (A link from a popular blog is this medium's equivalent to a Super Bowl ad.) Suitt attributes her own high status in the blogging world to her conscious decision to "promote myself among those on the A list."

Coincidentally, this issue arises just as a related controversy is raising
eyebrows in mainstream media. Law professor Susan Estrich has been hammering Michael Kinsley, the editorial-page editor of the Los Angeles Times, for not running a sufficient number of op-ed pieces by women and minorities. Though the e-mail exchange between the two deteriorated into a spitting match, both agreed that extra care is required to make sure public discussion reflects the actual population.

The top-down mainstream media have to some degree found the will and the means to administer such care. But is there a way to promote diversity online, given the built-in decentralization of the blog world? Jenkins, whose comment started the discussion, says that any approach is fine except inaction. "You can't wait for it to just happen," he says. Appropriately enough, the best ideas rely on individual choices. MacKinnon is involved in a project called Global Voices, to highlight bloggers from around the world. And at the Harvard conference, Suitt challenged people to each find 10 bloggers who weren't male, white or English-speaking - and link to them. "Don't you think," she says, "that out of 8 million blogs, there could be 50 new voices worth hearing?" Definitely. Now let's see if the blogosphere can self-organize itself to find them.

Wow! A guy named Levy doesn't like white males. Be still, my beating heart.