Bloggers' 60 minutes with Bill Gates

Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion recounts the 60 minutes that Bill Gates spent with Steve, Michael Arrington, Tatek Celik, Chris Pirillo, Jeremy Zawodny, Niall Kennedy and other bloggers I recognize from the photo above.

Q: What's on your Christmas list?
Gates: I am always hard to buy for.

Here's Arrington's take. And Molly E. Holzschlag's take.

Map mashups to locate console games

I really like Google map mashups -- they're smart, useful, surprising, and almost always originate at the grassroots level. The latest to cross my desk are two services for locating PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii game consoles:

• PS2seeker and
• Bidnearby

Both free services scour inventory listings from eBay, Craigslist and nearby stores and plot the results on a color-coded Google map. When I typed out the url, the services immediately took me to my home town and a 50-mile radius or so. (Bidnearby said: "We've approximated your location to ..." It guessed right.) Very slick.

Best blogs of 2006 that you aren’t reading

Muhammad Saleem at Rojo:

Most people, when looking for good blogs to read just pick them out of the Technorati top 100, and so a lot of non-top-100 blogs get left out of the mix. Fimoculous takes a look at some of these great blogs that don’t get the attention they deserve. This is not a definitive list in any way, and the author actually encourages you to add blogs that you think should be on the list.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize any of the names, the list is designed to be that way. I only recognized 5 out of the 30.

University presidents who blog

NY Times: Veterans of campus public relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; “an insane thing to do,” is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.

Judging the world's best blogs

Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog:

Judging the Best Weblogs in the World at The BOBs (Ourmedia was a finalist last year)

Pentagon PR Blogger Explains Military’s New Media Challenge

State of the blogosphere

Technorati's David Sifry on the State of the Blogosphere. About 100,000 new weblogs are being created each day. And the globalization of the blogosphere continues. "Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized."

A new scholarship for bloggers

Scholarships Around the US announces a scholarship for college students who blog.

Bloggers not immune to libel suits

An entry on the Media Trainers site points out that freedom of speech isn't unrestricted in the blogosphere: Checks and balances on bloggers.

Recently, a client in Georgia blogged about his attorney after firing him over a dispute about how to defend him during on a drunken-driving charge. The lawyer wouldn’t refund his fee so the client took his anger out online. The attorney took him to court and his client-turned-blogger became the first blogger to ever lose a libel suit. He was ordered to pay $50,000.

11 tips for better blogging

Vincent Maher: 11 tips for better blogging. Amy Gahran at E-Media Tidbits adds a 12th.

Know your rights, bloggers!

Speaking of the Daily Kos, read Know Your Rights, Bloggers! -- and the related Net Democracy Guide by the Center for Democracy & Technology -- for an authoritative guide to what you're allowed to do (or not) while blogging about politics in the U.S.