Lately I’ve been suggesting 11 points to take a little extra time in the posting process on a blog. We’ve looked at everything from choosing topics, to crafting titles, to calls to action, to promoting your posts.

The point of this series is simply that when you take a little extra time at each of these points in the process you add depth and increase the effectiveness of your blog post.

Today I want to share one last point to ‘pause’ - it is as important as each other point in the process (if not more so) and can take a ‘good post’ into ‘great post’ territory.

It’s all about the Art of Conversation

Image by b_d_solis

It is easy to see the point of hitting ‘publish’ on your blog post as the ‘end’ of the process of posting - however more often than not the real action and fruit of a blog post happens once it’s ‘live’ and being interacted with by readers and other bloggers. To hit publish and move on to the next post at this point is an opportunity gone begging.

2 Benefits of Fostering Conversation on Your Blog

For me the main two benefits of a blog with great conversation are simply:

• it adds depth to posts - my belief is that together we know a lot more than any one of us. As wise as you might be as a blogger - when your readership adds their knowledge to your posts in the comments section - it’ll generally become a better resource to future readers.
• it builds community and reader loyalty - increasingly people are going online not only to find ‘information’ but to find community and places to ‘belong’. A blog which regularly has good conversation where people’s ideas are heard and valued is a place that people will want to return.

13 Tips for Growing the Conversation On Your Blog

Let me start by saying that this post is not about ‘how to get comments on your blog’. I’ve written previously about 10 techniques to get more comments and would recommend that post as a primer for this one.

What I do want to focus on in this post goes beyond getting comments and how to grow ‘conversations’ (something that I think is a little deeper). There is some overlap - but I hope this post goes beyond that previous one.

1. Set Time Aside for Conversation

The biggest conversation killer in my own life is simply that I’m too busy. This is true in ‘real life’ as well as blogging. If you don’t set aside time to have conversation it is highly unlikely to ever happen because it takes time.

Again - I’m not talking here about leaving comments (leaving a comment can take a second or two) - but actually engaging in conversation means listening to what others are saying and thoughtfully responding in a way that goes deeper, adds value and says something meaningful - this takes time and if you don’t prioritize it you’re not likely to fit it in.

2. Ask Questions

As mentioned in my post on how to get comments, ‘asking questions’ is a powerful technique for starting off a conversation. If you want people to respond to your posts include questions within them - it’s key to get the comment thread started, however it’s also a great technique for keeping the conversation going.

One way to add depth to a conversation and to draw out more from those commenting is to take their comments and ask questions of them that elicit a second response. Rather than just responding to someone’s comment with a ‘great point’ type comment - why not go a little deeper with a question that draws them into extending their idea.

3. Answer Questions

Not only is asking questions powerful - but so is answering those that readers ask. This can be challenging when you get a lot of comments on your blog (I’ve had to hire someone to help me manage this lately) but it makes your posts more meaningful and helpful to readers who come away wondering about some aspect of what you’ve written.

4. Track Offshoots of Conversation

The beauty of blogging is that posts that one blogger publishes can inspire other bloggers to write posts on a similar topic on their own blog. While the comments section of your blog might be the place that most of your readers interact with your ideas - a good post might inspire multiple conversations in all kinds of places in the blogosphere.

It is important to be aware of these offshoot conversations and to participate in them. Start a vanity folder in your news aggregator to help track them and when you find them visit the blog and add value to the conversation there. Don’t feel you need to drag people back to your blog - but add value on that blog. In doing so you will build a relationship with the blogger who has posted about your idea but also potentially could find yourself a few new connections (and even new readers) among their readership.

5. Add Value and Depth

I’ve talked many times about writing blog posts that are useful and unique (the secret to great content) - however it struck me recently that the same advice actually applies to comments. If the comments that YOU leave (either on your own blog or others) are not actually useful (if they don’t add value and/or depth to the conversation) and if they are not simply echoes of what others are saying (ie unique) then there is little point in leaving them.

One of the best ways to kill a conversation is to respond to something that someone else has written with a generic comment like ‘great point’. Before you comment, consider what you’re writing. Does it add something to the conversation? Will it elicit a response from others? Is it unique from what others are saying? If the answer to these questions is ‘no’ - work on your comment until it does.

6. Listen, Listen, Listen

As a blogger who has just published a post you’ve been doing most of the talking and your readers have been doing the listening - so when it comes to the comments section of your blog turn the tables and become the listener and let others do the talking.

Conversation is a two way street and if you take the ‘monologue’ approach into comments then you’re unlikely to develop a culture of conversation on your blog.

7. Play Devils Advocate (with Care)

One way to stimulate conversation is to throw into the conversation an unexpected and opposing point of view. Playing Devils Advocate (when done well) can be a powerful tool to draw out responses in your readers and extend a conversation into a place that it might not have naturally gone.

The key with this approach is to do so with care. Writing something controversial just for the sake of it and in a hostile tone can actually kill a conversation (or take it into the realm of a flame war). A better approach might be to make it clear what you’re doing with an ‘I agree with you - however some might argue….’ type comment.

8. Promote the Conversation

I find that when a good conversation emerges on a post it can actually be very effective to promote the ‘conversation’ (as opposed to the post itself) in some way. For example I occasionally will use Twitter to alert readers to a comment thread with a tweet that says ‘there’s a great conversation emerging at www.xxxx….’ - these tweets tend to get a fairly good level of people not only visiting the post but coming over with an openness to respond.

9. Protect Your Comments Section (Moderation)

The comments section on your blog is a really important space on your blog and can both add to and take away from the perception of others towards your blog. If your comments section becomes a comment spammers heaven or always dissolves into a place where trolls flame one another it will not draw genuine readers into conversation.

As a result I advocate that you not be afraid to protect your comments section and set some guidelines in place for people to interact there. Ultimately it is your blog and your rules need to apply. If people step outside of your rules then they need to be willing to have their comments moderated.

10. Model the Behavior you Want

What about trolls and comments sections that get too negative? My theory is that the majority of blogs that have highly snarky comments sections will generally have bloggers posting to them that display their own fair share of snakiness in the blog posts that they write. I’m sure there are a few exceptions but I find that most blog readers take the lead of the blogger on a blog when interacting in comments.

As I’ve previously written on this topic:

“If your blog is written in a positive, optimistic, helpful and inclusive voice then I find that those commenting generally respond with a similar tone. Write in a snarky, negative, rant dominated tone that makes fun of others and you can expect a very similar vibe in your comments.”

11. Bounce off Comments with New Posts

One of the weaknesses of blogs over forums is that conversations can have a limited life simply because the post that they happen on falls off the front page of the blog as new posts are published.

One way to keep a hot conversation going is simply to write a follow up post that extends upon ideas in the first. One approach is simply to elevate some of the comments on the previous post into a new post to stimulate an extension of the conversation. This not only keeps the conversation going but also rewards those who’ve previously participated with a moment in the spot light. This is what I did recently on DPS with this post on video on DSLR cameras.

12. Use Email

Another of the challenges of blogs is that often readers will leave a comment and never return to the post to continue the conversation. You can ask them all the questions in the world but if they don’t come back to the blog they’ll never see them.

There are a variety of commenting tools to help overcome this (I use a ’subscribe to comments’ plugin which helps a little) but one effective way to keep conversations going is simply to follow up those who’ve commented with an email. For example - if someone asks you a question and you respond - shoot them an email after you answer their questions to let them know. The same technique works if you have asked them a question in comments.

13. Empower Your Community to Lead Conversation

One of the challenges that faces bloggers as their blogs grow and become popular is to genuinely and actively participate in every conversation happening on their blog. I personally struggle with this quite a lot across my two blogs which on any given day can have a total of 150-500+ comments.

One thing that can help is to try to develop a culture on your blog where the conversations are not dependent upon you alone. This takes time to achieve but unless you’re a conversation freak and/or can keep a million balls in the air at the same time (like Gary V, Liz, Scoble - each of whom leaves me shaking my head at the amount of conversations they participate in) you’ll need to do something to help you cope with your comment section as your blog grows.

One way to grow this community driven culture of conversation on your blog is simply to model it yourself and when questions are asked in the comments section on your blog to invite others to answer rather than feel you need to be the only one answering. As I say - this takes time but as you see your readers answering one another’s questions thank them for their comments and even elevate some of their answers to actual posts.

Lets Talk

OK - so this is where I invite you to comment, to add what you’ve learned about having conversations on your blog.

I’d love to hear what you do to foster conversation on your blog?

Do you use any particular techniques? Are there any tools that you use to help manage it? What’s the hardest part about generating great conversation on your blog? What’s worked for you?

PS: Tomorrow I’ll be posting some more tips on this topic from a few bloggers that have runs on the board when it comes to building blogs with great conversation. I’ll include a few of the tips left in comments below also so have your say and some of your ideas might be included in the next post!

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A year or so ago, I was sitting at home googleing people I had gone to school with. I went to school with one guy (who we’ll call Corey) in particular that I was curious to find out what had happened to. He was a big nerd in school, I can’t even remember who his friends were. He moved from town in grade 9 or 10 and I’d never heard anything about him since. Given that he was a big nerd in school, I had assumed that he would be a lawyer or accountant or something lame like that. And I was correct. He works in corporate law.

So I found his company’s website and e-mailed him a quick note to say hello and reintroduce myself. I was surprised to see that responded rather promptly. He was living in New York, with his wife who was expecting a child any day. He said that he came to Toronto often, and that hopefully on a trip here, we could get together for a drink and catch up. We had actually made plans for the following week, but he cancelled because his wife was giving birth.

Then I never heard a peep from him for a year, where, out of the blue, he sent me an e-mail asking to hook up on his next visit, that week. I was quite excited. I love hanging out with people from my home town. Something so familiar about it.

So we met in the bar of the hotel he was staying at (some swanky place downtown). And spent about an hour and a half drinking martinis and talking about who we still know from school and what they are doing. My first clue that this guy wasn’t as sane as I would have liked, was when he described his social circle in school as the “cool kids”. Like I said before, I don’t think he had a social circle. I’ve actually since asked some of the people he said he hung out with if it was true, and they didn’t even remember him.

Then came the bomb. “Darcie, the real reason I wanted to ask you out for drinks tonight….” as he says this, I’m thinking, naively, that he wants something business related “….is that, well, my wife and I got married rather young….” Shit. Now I’m thinking his wife is upstairs wearing some sort of leather bondage outfit with a video camera set up “….and we’ve decided to have an open marriage. And I was hoping you’d be willing to participate” Ooooooohh. Right. I’m sure before he left for this trip, as she was feeding the baby, she yelled out “Don’t forget to get laid dear!”

Of course, as soon as he says this, the music in the bar shuts off and we are surrounded by dead silence. I yell up “Gonna need another drink here!” as I try to collect my composure. So I say “I’m flattered, really, I am, but I don’t know you that well, and I’m really not that kind of girl.” To which he responds with a tap on my leg “I’ll let you think about it.”

THINK ABOUT IT???? Gee, thanks, now that I have thought about it, I would love to help you cheat on your wife, destroy your family and ruin your child. That sounds like a grand ol’ time. Also, I’ve been waiting for some pre-maturely balding pot-bellied lawyer-type guy to come up to me and ask me for sex. There certainly aren’t enough of them around!

Was this guy for real??

This week’s Interact 2008 conference — all things interactive media — began upbeat enough, with Ted Leonsis’s inspirational keynote signaling an ‘anything’s possible, mix-and-mashup’ world of opportunity where entrepreneurs can offer (and perhaps find) fulfillment by providing one of the five keys to self-actualization: relationships, community, self-expression, giving back, or pursuing a higher calling.

But then, the sky began to darken.

With each successive speaker and panel, the mood turned increasingly somber, until by the end of the afternoon — terrabanged by the announcement of the failed bailout and a Dow plummeting 777 points — somber turned to sober . . . and the ad/marketing audience lit out to quench the condition at Happy Hour.

Actually, Leonsis foreshadowed the day’s drama with his own sobering statement: “Today, a marketing person needs to be a mathematician,” and not the English major that he was. Everyone knew exactly what he meant, of course. It’s about metrics, and testing, and deliverables that can be measured — a theme echoed several times during the day. Google VP of Search Product and UX Marissa Mayer talked about nuanced A/B testing, where reducing spacing a single pixel-width — or bathing paid search in a field of yellow rather than blue — resulted in 20% to 40% more click-throughs. Launchbox Digital’s Sean Greene had asked the panel he was moderating on ‘The Evolution of Advertising Models’ what the near-term effects of the dismal economy would be on ad spending, and the unanimous response was “a shift to what’s measureable” (hopefully, social ads in search of the elusive ‘engage’ metric won’t be left twisting in the wind).

You could almost feel the room heave a collective sigh: “We know, we know — we need to bone up on this technical widgified social media stuff.”

But there was little letup. Avenue A/Razorfish’s Joe Crump was nearly morose, acknowledging (in a talk aptly titled ‘Digital Darwinism’) that not only is the rate of change of technology overwhelming, but current org charts are woefully ill equipped to deal with it in creative organizations. By early afternoon, Adobe evangelist Duane Nickull and Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar had applied a thick coat of glaze discussing SOA (tell the truth: did you know that it stands for Service Oriented Architecture?) and widget distribution strategies. Finally, the afternoon wrapped with a panel presenting a glass-half-empty outlook for interactive media employment that could be summed up as a grey-hair lament something like: “We need to hire more whiz kids that understand this stuff . . . but they’re a dickens to manage.”

Good thing we entrepreneurs are optimists. Why, there must be a pony in this pile!

The great words of someone famous come to mind: Out of adversity comes opportunity (or is it creativity?). Either way, there’s a dislocation, a discontinuity, a gap that begs for a solution. Here, the gap is agencies’ and marketing departments’ inability to keep up with technology of social media. So might be the solution?

Maybe training.

Maybe analytics tools or services.

Maybe app-building for hire.

Now, Crump shouldn’t actually be complaining — of Avenue A/Razorfish’s 500 employees, 200 are technical. But I’m not sure any of the best and the brightest (you know who you are) want to bury themselves in an agency with a salary and long hours.

So what’s the entrepreneurial play here?

Although VCs have historically shied away from service businesses — the multiples were usually far greater in product businesses — that scenario has changed. And in fact, it could solve several problems at once. If you’re dismayed that VCs want you to recite your revenue model (even though, like me, you expect you’ll figure it out once users have embraced you), there could be an alternative to raising money altogether: How about getting paid for what you love to do (and do well)? If in the course of providing your service, you’re also building a product, or developing some intellectual property (IP), then you’re in fact building equity in a service business.

I wrote about BuddyMedia creating ‘branded’ Facebook apps (They actually received funding from Bay Partners and others), and they’re a good example of ‘filling the gap’ for big agencies. But a better example may be Set Consulting. President/founder Jared Goralnick is passionate about productivity, and Set gets paid to improve clients’ productivity. But in the course of doing his work, Goralnick also built a product — AwayFind — aimed at avoiding ‘email bankruptcy.’ Voila! . . . a cashflow business, with an equity kicker.

And no VC. Ironically, when you get that combination working for you — and you really don’t need the money — is when the VCs come a-knockin.’

I work out with a bouncer (Read my post on Mustang) for some hip dance clubs downtown. One of the clubs he works at is currently “under renovations”. Which, is true, even though it is not the real reason it will be closed for several weeks. He was describing to me what they actually plan on renovating. It was all pretty meaningless to me because I don’t really plan on ever going and have never been. (Two reasons: #1- I look like I’m in pain when I dance, #2- I try to stay away from places that I must get frisked at before entering).

One of the things he told me the club is adding is an exit door from the washroom. Why hasn’t this been done before? Why can’t we get it all restaurants and bars? Do you know how much pain I could have saved myself if I’d have been able to say “Excuse my while I use the restroom” and then never return?

It makes perfect sense for these exits to be in every club. When you’re talking to a guy only because he bought you drinks, and you really want to evade him, but don’t want to walk away and have him nag you all night, you just go to the bathroom and never come back. I love this idea.

I also love this idea because I have some sort of weird internal sensor that lets me know I need to leave a bar, and fast, or I will fall over. I have a habit of not telling any of my friends I am leaving, I just turn, walk away and hop in a cab. Sometimes, this plan of escape fails when they are congregating around the front door. Then they all want to know where I’m going, ask if I want to get Chinese food, tell me they are coming with me but talk to some guy who has no interest in them at all hoping that he’ll give them their numbers…With this exit, I can just say “I’m going pee’, and never come back.

I wonder if there is some sort of petition we can get to make this a legal requirement??

I’m really excited today to announce that I have joined the advisory board of Photrade (picture is by Renee Blodgett and is Andrew Paradies, CEO of Photrade). You can read the press release here - but in short, Photrade is a company that excites me on numerous fronts and crosses two of my passions - photography and blogging.

Let me break it down into those two areas:

Photrade for Photographers

Store, Share, Protect and Make Money From Their Photos

Photrade offers photographers of all levels a number of services. At it’s heart is the ability to upload images to online photo albums where you can store and share your shots with the world - however added to this online albumn space is the option to sell copies of your images and to license them to other websites.

In short the vision is to provide a space for both pro and amateur photographers to Store, Share, Protect and Make Money From Their Photos.

I won’t go through the full feature list here and now (I’m obviously a bit biased and have therefore asked one of my DPS moderators to write up a review for DPS) but I’m excited by what I see Photrade developing for photographers. In the mean time you can check out a first impression review of Photrade at Read Write Web and see what TechCrunch had to say about it here.

Photrade for Publishers

Free Copyright Protected Images for Your Blog

Most bloggers and web publishers know the power of a good image to lift our articles and posts. They can set content apart from the rest - but issues of copyright can be something of a minefield to navigate. I know at b5media we’ve really gone through many options for working out how to license photos legally and it can become very time consuming and expensive to get the images we need.

Photrade has a system that awards photographers yet also protects publishers while giving them the photos that they need - for free. Here’s how it works (from their FAQ):

“Photrade’s adcosystem allows photographers to get paid for every view of their photos while providing free content to online publications. A photographer posts a beautiful photo of New York on Photrade.com to share within the adcosystem. A blogger, who is writing about New York searches for photos of New York and finds the perfect photo to fit the post.

The blogger grabs the sharing code from Photrade and posts the photo in their blog. When the blogger grabbed the code photrade put a small advertisement at the bottom of the photo, and also added text attributing the photo to the photographer (note: any/all watermarking remains on the photo).

Every time the photo is viewed the photographer earns a portion of the ad revenue generated by that image. So, the photographer gets attribution and payment for the use of their photo, advertisers get contextual in-content ads and publications get beautiful free images.”

Here is a little diagram of how it works.

Photrade is in beta so what you see over there isn’t the end product - however even in the few short months that I’ve been tracking with them I’ve seen some amazing advances in their technology and am so excited by what I see coming next.

Further Reading on Photrade

Check out what other bloggers and media sources are saying about Photrade:

• Mashable
• CNET
• PCMag

Lastly - let me share a video from Photrade who explains a little more of what it is and how it can be useful to both publishers and photographers.

Site Tour from photrade on Vimeo.

I hope this serves both as a disclosure of my involvement with Phototrade but also a helpful introduction to the company and services that they offer.

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One of the sessions that I enjoyed most at Blog World Expo (actually it was one of the few sessions I actually was able to get to) was a keynote by Gary Vaynerchuck.

While I’m sure he rubs some up the wrong way his tips on building a successful blog (and business) were refreshingly honest, entertaining and inspiring. Here are 13 snippets/quotes of his keynote that I thought were ‘tweet worthy’.

• “answer every single email and every single comment on your blog’ for the rest of your FREAKING life.”
• “content is king but marketing is quen and the queen runs the household”
• “you have to go to every meetup you can possible go to”
• “pump out content - if you don’t produce something every day you’ll be out hustled”
• “‘Hustle’ - you have to work your face off.”
• “you need eyeballs - the easiest way to do this is to become part of the community”
• “induce conversation at every turn for the rest of your life”
• “your job is to create a connection”
• “be you and be every flaw”
• “its about putting up good content, creating conversation and spend 10% of your time working out how to make money”
• “if you’re not good at monetizing, get a bus partner that can.” do what u do & bring in others who can do the other stuff.”
• “if you’re a shy guy - become the greatest shy guy on earth”
• “don’t drink hatorade”

PS: here’s some video of the session courtesy of David Peralty (note: it does contain some language so proceed with caution if you’re easily offended or are in a work environment).

Gary Vaynerchuk Blog World Expo Keynote Speech from David Peralty on Vimeo.

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Transparency happens to be the number one search term for this blog. Don’t ask me how it happened. I’ll simply say that I talk about honesty and transparency quite a bit. The reason is that it is the cornerstone for business and brand.

Today at the Interact 2008 conference, AOL founder Ted Leonsis dropped a bomb on a largely communications oriented audience. Having a “special place in my heart” for public relations and marketing, I can tell you that your industry is the one that is most in need of transparency.

Of course, your industry is not the only one needing transparency. Anyone in business needs transparency as it is the cornerstone of trust and brand loyalty. However, public relations more than any other industry in my book needs to be transparent. Transparent with customers. Transparent with the press and bloggers. Transparent with clients.

Ted notes that many of your [Public Relations] clients are asking for handling. What they don’t realize is that the more handling they have, the more they will be rejected.

Pure and simple, handling eliminates flaws. It’s the photoshopped model on the magazine cover. It’s plastic. It’s memorex. And, let’s be honest, consumers see right through it. It’s deceptive and in todays age of user-centric communications, plastic is the downfall of traditional communications. It’s all about transparency.

I like the group at Ars Technica. They do some pretty unique things and have a great mix of content on their site. But when it comes to policy coverage, the blog-like style they use sometimes encourages shortcuts or causes a story to miss big details.

For instance, Sunday night, Matthew Lasar wrote a post about the FCC’s consideration of rules governing “embedded ads” (product placement). While he touched on some good points, he missed a few things that you’ve just gotta have if you’re gonna write about telecom policy.

First off, he immediately divides the debate into two sides, a “good versus evil” mentality:

As the filings stream in during the Federal Communications Commission’s proceeding on what to do about embedded advertising, one thing is clear: you are either for a crackdown on the practice or against one. If you are a public health or consumer advocacy group, you belong to the first category. If you speak for the media companies and broadcasters, you are firmly ensconced in the second.

One side sees embedded ads as an intrusive, dishonest, and unhealthy innovation. The other sees product placement as the new foundation of the media’s economic well being. It is really that simple.

I’ve read Mr. Lasar for a long time, but having covered this issue myself, and actually spoken to some of the policymakers and advocates on both sides, I felt his subsequent quotations of written comments without a deeper discussion of the difference between commission authority over broadcasters versus cable content, FCC initiatives to deal with cable pricing and content (so-called a la carte pricing), and the known views of the commissioners themselves left much to be desire, especially when he closed the post like so:

All these commentaries grapple with the complex questions swirling around the product placement regulation issue. Does the FCC have statutory authority to make new rules? Does the First Amendment restrain the agency’s hand? Does the Children’s Television Act already guard children’s TV shows against embedded advertising?

But beyond these concerns, a prominent divide on the issue stands out. Consumer advocates see product placement as a clear and present harm to civil society. Big media sees it as the future.

For one, I believe the job of a reporter or blogger is to attempt to answer the questions. Dig deeper. Find out the why behind the what instead of assuming motives. Most importantly, talk to someone. Both as a solo blogger and during my time at Communications Daily, I always made it a point to talk to sources and experts, not just regurgitate written statements. Granted, I’m in D.C and have been around the industry for a while, but it doesn’t take much effort to get a hold of someone in this town, especially if you’ve been bought by Conde Nast, and your publication has hired a damn fine journalist to run the Ars D.C. operation.

I know FCC issues can be complex, and for an “outsider” they can easily be reduced to black and white. But there is a serious lack of in-depth technology policy coverage on the web, good coverage that exposes the many shades of gray and layers in these issues. There is a real need for it, so If you’re going to do it, do it right. That means more than quoting comments, adding some editorializing and posting it. The job of a good reporter or blogger isn’t just to ask tell your readers what the questions are, it is also to FIND THE ANSWERS, or at least to try, in order to get the truth to those readers. The record in this case is sufficient not only to require background and context, but the issue is important enough that reporting on it should get more than a few cut-and-pastes. Get on the phone and talk to someone who knows more than you do. That’s what I always did, and whenever possible, I still do.

The following is a comment I posted on Ars forums in response to the article. It’s not an attack on anyone, or anyone’s work. What it is (I hope,) is an attempt to fill in the blanks and provide some background as to the questions raised in the article and how some of the issues it raised came to be.

While I appreciate the effort to cover this issue, you’ve missed several important distinctions that significantly impact the debate and readers should consider.

First of all, no one disputes the Commission’s authority over broadcast television, and no one disputes the fact that “embedded advertising” (which is really a fancy word for product placement) must be disclosed. As you already reported, you’ll see the disclosures fly by in ending credits. This is not controversial at all. Rules governing advertising on broadcast television fall under the “public interest” test the FCC must apply to its decision-making process. Product placement has been around for years, but its increasing frequency and the changing advertising market that NAB admits to both demand that the commission re-examine current rules to make sure that broadcasters are satisfying the “public interest” obligation they must meet in order to keep their licenses.

Second, the NPRM would not be making any new rules with respect to children’s programming. What the Commission wants to do is clarify the existing rules to make it clear that embedded advertising is prohibited under the existing ban on advertising inside children’s programming. The requirements of the Children’s Television Act are not in dispute here. The FCC is obligated to make sure their rules carry out the intent of statute, and this means making sure that the rules do not fall out of date with respect to changing technologies.

Whether or not the ban applies to cable programming in addition to broadcast television is part of the larger issue of how far the commission’s authority extends over cable programming. The extent that a channel is a subscription service is an important factor in making this determination (for the same reason that HBO can be racier than TNT). The cable industry could remove any doubt by offering channels a la carte, something NCTA has consistently and strongly opposed, much to the ire of Chairman Martin.

While the FCC has not chosen to heavily regulate cable programming out of (legitimate) First Amendment concerns, a move to further regulate product placement in broadcast television, would surely “trickle down” to the basic cable channels that carry vast amounts of second-run and syndicated broadcast content in addition to original programming.

Where the cable industry in particular has a vested interest in keeping product placement rules the same is they are now in the process of rolling out their new Tru2Way interactive content platform as well as moving to all digital networks. Digital technology will eventually allow much more addressable advertising based on programming choices and other viewing habits in addition to location and time slot. If ordinary product placement must be disclosed more clearly, the industry’s ability to sell ads in interactive programming and games (which could be targeted to children) could be in jeopardy.

The commission has already reached a “broad consensus” on clarifying the existing ban on advertising to children, according to Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein (D). But Chairman Martin has not called for a vote on the issue. Nor has he called for any vote on re-examining rules governing product placement and disclosure.

With respect to the children’s programming ad ban, Commissioner Deborah Tate (R) has been a strong advocate for child safety and protection, but has declined to say publicly whether she supports clarifying the ban on ads in children’s programming. When the House adjourns, her term will expire, leaving an open seat and increasing the likelihood of 2-2 party line votes that would prevent rules from being adopted in absence of a majority.

Framing this debate as “big media versus consumers” oversimplifies what is a combination of far more complex issues that have been out there for years and are an inevitable consequence of the FCC’s legal obligations as well as the constitutional constraints it operates under. And while you’ve based much of the article on the public comments, you don’t include much information on where the Commissioners themselves might stand. Nor do you attempt to provide any background on the subject of FCC’s lack of explicit statutory authority over cable television content (and the a la carte pricing debate that springs from it) or any analysis from industry experts that would allow you to give readers a better view of the issue than just “consumers versus media.”

I just viewed this great video on how WordPress (and blogging) changed one person’s life. Inspiring stuff from Glenda Watson Hyatt (follow her on Twitter here).

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If you’re in Maryland, as I am, or one of most other states in the Union that are not really in play, then you can keep moving. However, if you are in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico or Nevada (states that are swing states according to Politico’s Swing State Map), then there are some dates you need to be aware of going into October. Notably, you need to know when the last day to register to vote (or change your party, if you’re so inclined) or request an absentee ballot.

* Iowa, New Hampshire and Wisconsin allow onsite registration at the precinct voting center with proper ID

If you’re in a swing state, your vote really does matter. You don’t have much time to get registered and if you don’t vote, you can’t complain. Go do it ASAP.

And if you don’t live in a swing state, make sure your friends and readers who do see this breakdown.