by Shelly Brisbin

During his closing keynote speech at BlogWorld Expo, Mark Cuban told the story of how he started Blog Maverick, his personal blog. He explained that he had been interviewed by The Dallas Morning News and misled about the content of the story the paper intended to write. To set the record straight, he created a blog and published the chain of emails between himself and the News reporter. And so was born an outspoken blogger who takes on peo­ple (and media outlets) that give him a hard time, promotes his business interests, and comments on the tech industry.

For Cuban, and for the reputation of billionaire-sports-team owners in general, Blog Maverick (www.blogmaverick.com) has been a very good thing. Cuban gets to share his ideas with no filters or editors. He has a ready-made platform for promoting new ventures and fielding criticism, and more people around the world know his name. They call that personal branding. Based on the blog’s generally down-to-earth style, I would guess that Blog Maverick has also helped Cuban, who allows and receives lots of comments, staying in touch with people in walks of life from which he is far removed.

Readers benefit, too: would-be Cuban-imitators and other fans have a window into how the man thinks, what gets his goat, and how he man­ages a far-flung empire of businesses and personal interests.

Great! Awesome! Terrific! It’s cool that Mark Cuban is a prolific blogger; that he writes in an interesting style, varies his content enough to inter­est basketball fans and tech-industry followers. And it’s likely that a lot of people who don’t count billionaire sports-team-owner types among their friends are getting a vicarious window into a different world. For Cuban himself, and those who admire him, it’s great that he has created a forum where he can articulately spar with his critics. It’s also just plain entertain­ing. Finally, his example has probably influenced other “big shots” to blog, and to do so honestly.

For some in the blogosphere, though, it is the Blog Maverick cre­ation story that delights; the idea that one guy who had been wronged by a media outlet could expose a reporter’s treachery and turn that action into an important blog that survives long after the entrepreneur’s dust-up with his local paper. With no significant financial or technical barriers to publishing, bloggers can control their own messages, whether personal or business-related.

That’s great for the blogger, and for the blogging fans who harbor suspicion of the press on principle. But what does a blogging culture that prizes branding and message control over the old-fashioned values of fairness and fact-based storytelling actually provide the reader?

Now before you get riled up: I’m not accusing Mark Cuban or other opinion-based bloggers of untruthful­ness, nor am I questioning their place in the blog pantheon. These guys and gals have invented something entirely new in media, and forced those who previously had a monopoly on infor­mation dissemination to do their jobs better, and compete for attention. These are good things. I’m simply suggesting that a medium whose my­thology is so heavily dependent upon taking down the mainstream media runs the risk of becoming as myopic as it believes its predecessors to be.

Newspaper subscription rates are down because people want to con­sume information digitally and, un­fortunately, via video more than text. They aren’t suffering because people are tired of factual reporting of the news. Even bloggers quote and link to newspaper stories prodigiously, never seeming to be aware of the irony that the background information, or even the investigative sleuthing they use to bolster their arguments, have their source in the mainstream media, where reporters still have the resources (sometimes) to apply shoe leather to a story.

As social networks, online video, and other new media attractions cause bloggers to ponder where the medium is headed, I sincerely hope that the good things about old media — fact-based reporting, diversity of content, commitment to ethical standards — will take their natural place along­side the blogging virtues of interactiv­ity and transparency in the hearts and minds of new media practitioners. If they do, our readers will thank us.

by Larry Genkin

USA Today (the largest circulation newspaper in the US) is about to get behind blogging and pod­casting in a big way. In collaboration with Blogger & Podcaster magazine USA Today has just started publishing the Blogger & Podcaster Guide (think TV Guide™ for blogs and podcasts) from the front page of usatoday.com, and in print.

This will give Blogger & Podcaster access to 16.1 million readers, many of whom have heard of blogs or podcasts, but don’t really know how to find them. This is the great mass of people — very different from the early adopters — who’ve never even heard of Technorati, Podcast Pickle, Google Blog Search, et al.

This partnership came about because a good friend of mine at USA Today was looking for ways to open up new revenue streams that would replace (and hope­fully exceed) declining print advertising.

During our conversations I explained that: (1) There are over 100 million blog­gers and podcasters; (2) Serious bloggers and podcasters will be motivated to increase their audiences by tapping into USA Today’s massive readership; (3) Most couldn’t afford to pay anywhere near even the lowest rates USA Today offers to its largest customers.

The solution we came up with is a pay-to-play guide, where listings cost $49.95 a month, a fraction of the price USA Today typically charges. Normally,

a few thousand dollars is the price of entry for the smallest of promotions. At usatoday.com, the Blogger & Podcaster Guide will appear on the front page and be embedded within relevant content.

Every experienced industry exec I’ve spoken with agrees that being able to reach this audience for less than $50 per month is a substantial value, especially considering you can blow through 50 bucks in click-through advertising in a nanosecond. I had to laugh when I was speaking with Michael Geoghegan at Podcast and New Media Expo (where we offered a one-month trial for $24.95). At the Podcast Pickle party he remarked, “So let me get this straight. For under twenty-five hundred bucks a month I can promote on usatoday.com?” In all fairness, I’m not sure if the mispercep­tion came from the program value or the beer we were drinking at the time.

But there is a catch. This is a big risk for USA Today.

The newspaper risks pissing off advertisers in other segments who pay higher rates than Blogger & Podcaster Guide advertisers. It’s risking $42,700 a week to run our guide in print. It’s risk­ing a 24/7 franchise spot on the front page of usatoday.com. It’s risking con­textual ad inventory adjacent to many online stories, where relevant links into our guide will be promoted.

USA Today is hoping that bloggers and podcasters will get behind this effort and that volume will make this a viable venture for the newspaper. USA Today is giving us some rope, but we’ve got to take it, or collectively we’re going to lose out on the best opportunities to date to expose and involve a mainstream audience with blogs and podcasts.

How It Works

Creating a successful Blogger & Podcaster Guide requires four elements:

1. Readers can easily find content they’re interested In: The reason a guide like this is even necessary is that the average person trying to find a blog or podcast would cur­rently approach this task by going to Google, typing in a topic, and getting 237,873,011 results they’d need to sort through. The Blogger & Podcaster Guide is designed to be simple, clean, and nonintimidat­ing to a mainstream reader.

2. Quality content must bubble to the top. If readers can find the blogs and podcasts on the topics they’re interested in, but they don’t find the content useful, they probably will not return to the Blogger & Podcaster Guide over and over again. To make quality content more transparent, we’ve added features like ratings (thanks Netflix!) and comments. Readers will be able to help their peers find the content that has been valuable to them. There are also direct links to your Web sites, and for podcasts, users will be able to listen and watch the latest episode so they can judge for themselves.

3. Quantifiable results for bloggers and podcasters. To justify spending even $49.95 per month, it’s critical for you to be able to see and test how well your listings are working. To start, since we offer easy RSS subscription options (including iTunes) from your listing, you’ll know how many new subscribers you’ve added. We’re also working on a comprehensive stats package that will provide you with in­formation including podcast listens, page views, subscriptions, ratings, and click-throughs. You’ll have the ability to change every aspect of your listing so you can test which key­words and copy perform best. Finally, we believe you can count on substan­tial Google “juice.” This site should score high with search engines, making your link from the Blogger & Podcaster Guide helpful in boosting your organic search results.

4. Critical Mass. We’re off to a good start (350 listings in the first 72 hours, with promotion coming only from blog posts), but for the guide to have lasting utility for the end-user, we need critical mass. (I’d like to offer personal thanks to Wizzard Media for supporting this effort at launch by purchasing listings for many of its shows.) Our category hierarchy is designed to scale by splitting into subcategories as the volume of list­ings increases. This will make it even easier for readers to find content that is directly relevant to them. By coming into the guide you’re not only helping market your blog or show, you’re helping your peers as well. This is not a zero sum game. What’s good for us individually is even better for us collectively.

The First Month Is on Me

To help reach critical mass and to give you a chance to tap into USA Today’s massive audience, I want to offer you a free month in the Blogger & Podcaster Guide’s online edition.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to www.bloggerandpodcaster.com/usatoday.

2. Select “New User” and go through the six-step registration process.

3. In Step 2, be sure to enter “BP” in the Coupon Code box under Option.

4. Then click Option 4. If you don’t enter this code, you’ll be charged the regu­lar price.

It takes only five minutes to sign up, if you have a 400-character description, logo/album art, RSS feed address, and up to 10 keywords ready in advance.

While we hope to make a few dollars from this venture (which will certainly help offset our startup costs) making USA Today happy is the key. If we can make Blogger & Podcaster Guide worth its while, USA Today (and probably its laggard MSM brethren) will get behind our industry. This will be a beautiful thing for us all. So take advantage of the free month, and if it works for you, know that your contin­ued support will be doing more than just helping your blog or podcast.

LARRY GENKIN is the founder and publisher of Blogger & Podcaster Magazine.

by Paul Colligan

Most people take their podcast content, attach it to a single RSS feed, and hope for profits from ad insertion or lead generation. It’s the model that 99 percent of podcast­ers follow. While some will do well by it, they’re all leaving serious money on the table. I mentioned “expansion” in this column in the last issue, and I’ll provide some concrete options here.

Watch a movie on PBS and you’ll notice something funny at the end of the program: They’ll offer the option to pur­chase the show that people just watched for free. Yes, friends, some people will pay for what they could get for free.

Take a look at www.Kunaki.com. This great company will produce CDs and DVDs in full four-color glory for just $1.60 per unit (and with no minimum order). Go ahead and make CDs or DVDs of your podcast content and sell them to your audience. You’ll be surprised how many will buy. Consider options like “extended editions” or “director’s com­mentaries.” You’ll be amazed at the op­tions you might come up with. Does this work? Go ahead: look up “Ask A Ninja” at Netflix or Google and see how many people are paying $1.99 for episodes they can get for free.

Want to get out of the business of filling landfills with plastic? Why not just charge for your content directly and pocket the money you would have put into the pressings? At the Podcast Part­nership, we built PremiumCast.com to let podcasters sell their content directly to their consumers. And we aren’t the only ones out there. Products like Show Taxi (www.showtaxi.com) and Subscribe Cast (www.subscribecast.com) do the same thing. Does this model work? Ask Cornelius Fitcher of the Project Manage­ment Prepcast: he sells access to his podcast at $40 per person (many times – each and every day of the week).

How about taking your content and getting it transcribed and placed into book form? With print-on-demand services like www.LuLu.com (or, heck, the local Kinkos), there’s no reason why a year of episodes couldn’t be the content for a top-selling book.

Did I mention that my book The Busi­ness Podcasting Bible came from tran­scripts of a series of teleseminars I did with my coauthor, Alex Mandossian? Why not think about content expansion with the very act of content creation? With services like www.PhoneAndWebcast.com you can stream a telephone call to 2,000 users at the same time (while keeping them all at your site). If you don’t need to own the entire branding process, services like www.Talkshoe.com and www.NowLive.com will let you host a show with nothing more than a telephone.

Some people like the idea of being there “live.” You gotta record your content at some point; why not invite others to attend?

So now you can perform an event for a live audience, let people participate at the time and place of their choosing via pod­cast, charge for the content via a CD or premium content delivery, and sell a book or manual made from the transcripts.

See where I’m going here? See how you’ve just expanded one media option into multiple choices? Can you see the options for profit here? Now that you have a teleseminar, podcast, physical and premium content, and printed-word media empire, consider expansion again.

Maybe you can charge a fee for access to the live recording. Some people want to be there when the “magic” happens, and at the very least, participate in the product creation process. PhoneAndWebcast.com not only lets you stream to 2,000 people at once – you also have 200 phone lines that you can use. Consider the options.

A few issues back I talked about Ad­Sense and blogs (see Blogger & Podcaster, June 2007, page 13). Do that right and the checks from the San Francisco Bay Area can be more significant than any­thing you’d get from an ad insertion order that others work so hard for. Where can you get great content to put around Ad­Sense ads? Consider getting transcripts of the same podcast content you already got people to pay for. Heck, pay for the transcripts with the money earned from selling the content on CD. Finance one profitable channel with another.

People consume content in many different ways – a live teleseminar, a streaming webcast, a time-shifted podcast, a physical CD or DVD, a book or magazine, or a Web site with ads.

With an audience as diverse at that, you might consider live events or high-level training. I’m talking about big-ticket items here.

Next year my Podcast Secrets class (www.Podcast-Secrets.com) will see hun­dreds of people paying very, very good money to learn how to use their pod­casts to reach the very audiences (and profits) they’ve dreamed of. They’ll sign up because my content has expanded to all of these different media formats.

And it’s all done on purpose.

And that is what media consumption expansion is all about.

Paul Colligan (www.PaulColligan.com) can be reached at paul@blog­gerandpodcaster.com.

by Shel Israel

There are an estimated 1.3 billion people in China. I got to speak to only one of them when I was con­ducting my SAP Global Survey. As I wrote last month, I have interviewed 45 people in 24 countries about social media in their cultures. But I found Isaac Mao — a serial entrepreneur, software architect, researcher, social media pioneer, venture capitalist, and free-speech advocate — to be both the most enlightening and most inspiring of all the interviews I conducted.

I interviewed Isaac the first time back in 2005 in research for Naked Conversa­tions. Government was already nervous about bloggers back then. In fact, at about that time, he realized they were monitoring his calls. He could hear them breathing when he talked on the phone.

A short while later, a car started fol­lowing him around Shanghai. He knew it was a government car. Government cars over there, like here, pretty much look alike. This irked Isaac. One day, he made an abrupt U-turn. He bee-lined toward the car and rapped on its window. The window rolled down and he demanded to know why he was being followed. The window rolled up and the car sped off.

Next came the two government men knocking on his door asking to come in for a chat. They told Isaac that while they had no evidence he was doing anything illegal, they did want more information on anyone Isaac knew, who were conducting activities “risky to our government.”

Isaac stood his ground. “I don’t know anyone like that. That is not my inter­est. I don’t want to improve our govern­ment. I just don’t want you to harass me,” he told them. They said they would back off, but politely suggested he not leave the country. He had been sched­uled to speak at Les Blogs 2 in Paris in December 2005, but decided that it would be prudent to comply.

That was then. The story was far dif­ferent when I met Isaac in a San Francisco café in September 2007. The Isaac Mao I met was confident that he need not fear his government. Not that his government wasn’t still capable of doing fearsome things, but because the numbers were on his side and because Chinese bloggers have consistently demonstrated they are faster and smarter than the government enforcement bureaucrats.

Besides, Isaac is good for busi­ness, and China, according to Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, needs to create 17 million jobs a year to stay even. Isaac is a spearhead in China’s ef­fort to join the global tech community, something China wants desperately. Also, his VC activity brings foreign dol­lars into China, creating jobs for young, bright Chinese. He may cause officials some discomfort, but one would think China wants Isaac to keep on doing what he is doing.

The numbers are with Isaac and the bloggers: back in 2005, there were 1.2 million bloggers; two years later there are at least 20 million, Isaac told me. They are diverse in age, economics, and business, although there remains a pau­city of middle-age business bloggers.

Twitter is the rage and it makes government nervous, but because of the way it works, government simply can’t monitor it. The government keeps trying to curtail the free speech and mount­ing government criticism on blogs and in social media. You can go to Flickr in China, but instead of pictures, you’ll see only black squares. That’s because a while back a Chinese blogger posted something about Tiananmen Square and it embarrassed the government.

The government wants all bloggers to register their IP addresses and to publish with their full names, so they can be tracked. But nearly no blogger complies. The government sees all the content posted on Chinese servers.

But most Chinese bloggers now un­derstand how to simply post from MIME servers located elsewhere in the world. It is legal to do this and government can­not stop or censor it. Chinese people also know how to access Six Apart or CNN or Google from remote servers.

In China, Google voluntarily censors content, and Isaac thinks less of them for it. But it doesn’t matter. He gets to Google via a server based in Seattle, or Berlin, or wherever.

Back in 2005, Isaac was one of a very small handful of Chinese bloggers and therefore the government could watch him closely — or delude themselves into thinking that was the case. Now there are thousands of popular Chinese bloggers, producing tons of content on blogs and in IM and on Twitter and even Facebook.

Government efforts to command and control it are about as effective as trying to bail out a sinking boat with a lawn rake.

Shel Israel writes and consults on so­cial media issues for business audiences. He is coauthor with Robert Scoble of Naked Conversa­tions: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (Wiley, 2006). Send email to shel@bloggerandpodcaster.com.

by Tee Morris

While I was in Ontario, Califor­nia for the 2007 Podcast and New Media Expo, a fellow podcaster (code name: Peacekeeper) got wind of my disdain for another podo­sphere personality (code name: Dink). Dink had pulled a stunt at Dragon*Con 2007 that can only be described as self-serving and unprofessional, and he pulled this stunt at the expense of a good friend of mine. Peacekeeper was shocked. “Dink is a great guy,” she insist­ed; and later that evening, Peacekeeper took the initiative and brought me and Dink together to make “nice-nice” with each other. Words were exchanged, and these were words I don’t regret. They were honest, sincere, and said with conviction.

They were also being recorded. With­out my knowledge or consent.

Dink proceeded to take this private conversation to a podcast (code name: Amateur Hour) where they proceeded to give a snarky play-by-play commentary, both Dink and Amateur Hour enjoying a good time at my expense with their one-sided spin on this unexpected (and did I mention private?) chit-chat with me.

There are some things you just don’t do in podcasting, and recording another person without consent is definitely in the Top Two. We cannot ignore stan­dards that are currently in practice on the professional broadcasting level. Oth­erwise, we are no better than Dink and Amateur Hour, a group of geeks in the basement of the science building armed with recording equipment.

An argument of “But Tee, it’s a pod­casting expo. You should have expected to be recorded…” holds no ground here. Here’s why.

Recording without consent is un­ethical. For some, “true” podcasting is slice-of-life audio, completely raw and candid. It can be, but there are times when people want to talk off-the-record. If a friend confides his or her deepest, darkest secrets and you podcast them, it is a betrayal of trust. Show hosts who regard all dialog as potential show con­tent — even content recorded without consent — can make it harder for others to conduct interviews both inside (and outside) the podosphere.

Recording without consent carries consequences. No matter how juicy the audio, some things are better left unsaid. If you’re recording conversations without the other party’s consent, you open the door for damages against the people you are covertly recording. End results could be anything from profes­sional reputations tainted to personal relationships ruined. Words, particularly in audio, carry weight and repercussions in people’s lives. Open honesty is not always the best policy, especially if the honesty is intended for your ears only.

And I’ve saved the best for last…

Recording without consent is a crimi­nal offense. Dink and Amateur Hour were probably unaware that each state has its own law that prohibits recorded conversations without consent. Califor­nia law makes it clear: all parties record­ed must have prior knowledge and give permission. If the matter does make it to court, fines can be as low at $750 (eh, not so bad), to as high as $10,000 along with jail time up to five years (yeeikes!). Hire a lawyer clever enough to make this a slander case in which you sue based on an episode’s downloads, and you can start shopping for some serious studio upgrades.

So, let’s say you have an H2 within reach and (oops!) the record button is “accidentally” pressed. And let’s say you have captured some gripping audio, ready for a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment. Ask yourself if this kind of content is worth the risk, not just to your own podcast, but to the commu­nity on the whole? While the FCC does not govern podcasting in any way, state and federal laws still apply. If enough podcasters believe that what they do is above the law, this will catch the FCC’s attention and usher in an influence none of us wants.

And from the one “punk’d by pod­casters,” you should also ask yourself if the offenders are worth going after. I have legal options. Is the time and trou­ble to file litigation worth it? Chances are pretty high I’ll be vilified on their podcast and they’ll make themselves martyrs. Even if I deem the potential fall­out an acceptable risk, such legal battles are difficult to win in a court of law. And if I win, will the payoff really happen? This matter would be tried in civil court, and victory there is no guarantee of a payoff. (Just ask OJ.) Is the trouble, time, and stress of pressing charges really worth it?

I’ve heard Dink’s music and Amateur Hour’s podcast. No, they are definitely not worth it.

Tee Morris is the creator of the Bil­libub Baddings and MOREVI podcasts and is the coauthor of Podcasting for Dummies. Find out more at www.teemorris.com. Send email to tee@bloggerandpodcaster.com.

by Rob Walch

Back in my 20s I used to date this girl — let’s call her Heather. I was living in Kansas and my family was all back on Long Island so thankfully my mom never got to meet the girls I dated. Heather and I were together long enough for me slip up and mention her to my mom, and like all nosy Italian mothers she asked lots of questions including what Heather did for a living. I said she was a dancer. My mom was excited because she used to be a dancer, and my sister was also at the time a dancer. Heck, my grandmother was a dancer when my grandfather met her. See my mother, my grandmother, and my sister had all been ballet dancers. But let’s just say that Heather was a slightly different type of dancer. So what does this have to do with podcasting? Well, I’m now starting to think the term “new media” has the same breadth of meaning that the term “dancer” has.

Today I see a vocal minority in the podcasting space trying very, very hard to generalize themselves as “new media” and shed the term podcast. I’m not saying podcasting is not part of new media — it clearly is — but then, so too is YouTube with the dramatic prairie dog and the leave Britney alone “guy”. It seems to me that podcasting is a niche in the new media space — but one that holds much greater value than most others. If you were an advertiser, who would you want to use to get your mes­sage out or do a call to action: the prai­rie dog or the host of a show that is pro­duced on a regular basis and has a very loyal audience? For some reason many of these people fighting for the new media moniker seem to think it is best for us to be generalized down and as­sociated with the YouTube and myspace crowd and other fringes of new media. Have you ever really looked at what is on YouTube? I mean really looked. Most of it is either stolen content, one-hit wonders, or videos with deceptive tags and thumbnails. There are only a very, very small number or real good repeat­able content (Hot for Words, Chad Vader, LisaNova, Will It Blend) — the type of repeatable content that flourishes over in podcast land — you know, the type that builds up a loyal audience, the type advertisers covet.

I recently exchanged some emails with Leesa Barnes, author of Podcasting for Profit. [Ed. Note: See our third excerpt from this book, “Joining Forces,” on page 32.] And for the life of us we could not figure out why so many people were working so hard to generalize what they do and try and get themselves thrown in with the laughing baby and the history of dance. Leesa made a great point: She said you don’t see bloggers running away from the name blog. I know some people have proclaimed that podcast­ing, or at least the name, is dead. Really? Based on what? In November Microsoft launched the revamped Zune Market Place with “podcast” support. Seems to me the two biggest companies in the computer OS world have both planted a stake in the ground and accepted the name podcast. If it was dead, then the phoenix has risen from its ashes. But I digress. For more on the name issue of podcasting, please read my August 2007 article in Blogger & Podcaster magazine.

Here’s what I think is happening — some people are upset, worried, jealous of the “success” of YouTube and other video-sharing sites and they need someone or something to blame for video streaming taking off faster than podcasting. So they jump on the band­wagon of the next big thing, and seem to think calling ourselves podcasters is somehow holding us back. But how many YouTubecons, Expos, or camps have you heard of or been to? There is a community here in podcasting (be it audio, video, or both). And you see that at events like the Podcast Expo (sorry, that’s the name to me), the original PodcasterCon in North Carolina, and the PodCamps everywhere. The people put­ting up their videos of getting smacked in the crotch by a rogue skateboard just don’t have a connection to other producers or their audiences like we do in the podcasting community.

If you performed for the NY Ballet, would you call yourself a dancer, or would you say you were a ballerina? If you produce repeatable content people can subscribe to and/or have download­ed automatically to their computers, would you say you were a new-media producer or a podcaster?

I know what I am: I am a podcaster and I am damned proud of it.

Rob Walch is VP of Podcaster Relations for Wizzard Media, host of podCast411, and coauthor (with Mur Lafferty) of Tricks of the Podcast­ing Masters (Que, 2006). Contact him at rob@bloggerandpodcaster.com.

by Miles Durfee

The United States National Anthem ends with the famous phrase, “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” However, at the time of the deadline for this article, the land of the free didn’t necessarily extend to taxing Internet access in the United States of America. The Internet Access Tax Ban (an amendment to H.R. 3678, the Internet Tax Freedom Act) was set to expire on November 1, 2007. Without Congressional passage and signing into law by the president, prior to that date, state and local governments would have been given authority to approve new taxes on Internet connections and some Internet purchases of products and services.

With the House of Representatives’ passage of a four-year extension, approved 405 to 2 in October, it is likely that by the time you read this the Senate will have taken similar action and that another four-year extension will have been signed into law by the President. This is the third time the tax ban will have been extended for four years. Congress previously had extended the tax moratorium in 2001 and in 2004.

While a permanent ban has been introduced in Congress and is supported by the President, apparently the US is only the land of the free in four-year increments. It appears that the most active groups working against a permanent ban are state and local governments and the telephone companies. For governments, a permanent ban would restrict their ability to add a new tax-revenue option in times when it becomes necessary to resolve potential budget shortfalls. It’s also easy to understand why phone companies and other providers are watching the definition of Internet access very closely, to ensure that competitors like Voice over Internet (VoIP) providers don’t have the ability to charge consumers lower rates because taxes are not included in their services, when they are included in traditional telephone company services. The International Blogging and New Media Association (IBNMA) believes that the reasons to support a permanent ban far outweigh the reasons not to support it. IBNMA will continue to advocate for the approval of a permanent tax ban on Internet access during the likely four-year extension.

Another issue that some believe is tied to our freedom is the right to access to broadband services. For many years Internet service providers (ISPs) have reported to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) based on five-digit zip codes. If any person had broadband access in a particular five-digit zip-code location, the area was considered covered by broadband. Access to broadband is becoming more and more important as new media becomes a combination of video, podcasts, Web calendars, maps, and blogs: one integrated communication tool for Internet users. Without reliable connections, or even basic service in some parts of the country, the flow of information could stagnate and hinder the natural advance of new-media opportunities.

Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, has introduced legislation that would direct the FCC to require service-provider information regarding broadband penetration down to the zip-code-plus-four location and to define second-generation broadband as services that “reflect a data rate that is not less than the data rate required to reliably transmit full-motion, high-definition video.” (Refer to the Broadband Data Improvement Act, S. 1492, for more information.) These two provisions are vital to continued access to better broadband services, which will allow the public to quickly get better information. While the ability to transmit reliable high-definition video may seem to be a goal for individuals who use the Internet for entertainment (rather than an integrated information tool), the real need for second-generation bandwidth will make possible a complete new wave of Internet services and products. This wave will not only drive the new-media industry, but will also better inform the populace and improve every individual’s quality of life.

Some would argue that S. 1492 is just a way to get sensitive, competitive information about service providers’ broadband capabilities. I contend that only through accurate reporting of broadband, and second-generation broadband gaps in certain geographic areas, will we be able improve access in parts of the country that now are being underserved. IBNMA supports S. 1492 and I encourage you to look closely at this legislation, as well as Representative Edward Markey’s (D-MA) legislation H.R. 3919, which similarly directs the FCC to require broadband service providers to provide information down to the zip-plus-four location level, but does not redefine broadband or second-generation broadband.

Miles Durfeeis president of the International Blog­ging & New Media Association. Send email to miles@bloggerandpodcaster.com.