A seventeen year-old Michigan high school student is facing child pornography charges after posting a picture on his blog of his friends having sex at a New Year’s Eve party.

The Washinton Post reports that one of its blogger recently resigned amid allegations that he previously plagiarized content.

Everybody’s spittin’ mad over at WashingtonPost.com over the launch of a conservative blog called (what else?) Red America, hosted by prominent political blogger Ben Domenech, who runs his own blog called RedState (think red state vs. blue state from past election coverage, not fascist vs. commie).

While Dell Computers will partner withh CFDynamics to include its client on a line of Dell servers, while CFEclipse needs a few good contributors.

Blogger Buzz has posted that the story from late last week, where a BlogSpot user said he was told to remove the MSN Search box from his blog, never happened.

Western media is getting the silent treatment from Chinese blogger Wang Xiofeng, the creator of an apparent hoax and state media true-believer, because he doesn’t believe his words will be reported accurately.

A BlogSpot blogger claims that he received an email from Google saying that the MSN Search box he had placed on his blog violated Blogger’s Terms Of Service.

I always wanted to be an expert in something. After six years of college and two degrees, I thought I was a political expert.

Edelman’s Phil Gomes offers a thoughtful piece (from Steve Rubel but posted to Phil’s blog) on blogger relations, suggesting that it’s better to build relationships with bloggers than it is to just hurl pitches at them.

Have you noticed that it’s been awhile since we last heard about a company firing an employee blogger?

Shel and I had quite a robust discussion about the Wal-Mart and Edelman blogger relations campaign yesterday in show #119 of FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report.

Our little PR corner of the blogosphere is awash with opinion about the Wal-Mart/Edelman blogger outreach campaign stemming from a story in the New York Times on Tuesday.

I’m sitting in an airline lounge at Dulles, having just finished a talk on new media to the annual gathering of US Army Public Affairs officers.

Yet another new service from Google, this one aimed at anyone who wants to create a web page (not a blog) with the minimum of fuss and absolutely no exposure to anything techie:

Technorati’s Dave Sifry has a word of advice for blogger upstarts: find your niche and aim for “The Magic Middle.” Sifry says there’s a middle ground, where topic specialization, a modest number of inbound links, and a little help from some new features can be enough to climb the ladder of blog success.

Robert Scoble says that some SEO’s are paying bloggers to do some link juicing.

Ralph Poole says he’s sick of Channel 9 and me and asks “when are you going to deliver?”

If nothing else, this piece in the WSJ underscores the argument that bloggers are not journalists, or as Brian Oberkirch rightly puts it, “personal blogs are not media.”

Click on the image to see the slightly larger (and better in-focus) original on Flickr.

Okay, I track blogs. I always have. It’s not a big deal, it’s part of PR and what I hope to convey to others in the industry and the agency life – that it’s not just enough to be tracking the media, but you need to get your Pubsub / Technorati / Blogpulse on (yes, all three).

Steven Sinofsky, check this out! (Steven is the guy who runs the Microsoft Office team and I believe is the highest ranking blogger currently at Microsoft).