First rule of politics for incumbents: During an election year, try not to highlight your general uselessness, especially if you share a name with a famous football player, because people will notice.

Second rule of politics for incumbents: If you go to the trouble to introduce a bill, be prepared to defend it until the bitter end, even if you know in your heart it will never pass, not in a million years, unless futility somehow becomes a desired legislative virtue.

Bloggers in Malaysia are having an impact on the political process as the country prepares for elections next month.

Three well-known bloggers, who are opponents of the ruling party that has been in power for fifty years, are running for the first time as candidates on March 8, counting on their online popularity to bring in votes.

CNN has fired television producer Chez Pazienza for blogging without the consent of the network.

Ever since teaching 6th graders about blogging, I’ve paid more attention to how social media sites can enhance learning.

Blogging certainly can improve writing skills and at the same time introduce children to ideas that will make them more marketable when they hit the job force (assuming they do).

Perhaps it was an eventuality. All roads used to lead to Rome; now all superhighways lead to a crotch-shot. But this development is at least a testament to the power of the Twitter concept: the cybersex crowd has taken it up.

If a message on Twitter is called a "tweet," is a message on boobik called a "tw…" –never mind.

A soft real estate market affects all parts of the economy. It presents an opportunity for blogs to shine with the information they can present to detail seekers.

One good way to take a bite out of cyber-crime is to report scammers to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and the other search engines. How do you do that? By blogging about the details.

Today is the day for new year’s resolutions.  For most people, this means the inevitable pledges to get healthy, lose weight, work less and spend more time with family.  Like any good blogger, though, I have several social media resolutions for the new year.  In no particular order, here are my three big ones:

Fearing the practice of live blogging has the potential to draw fans away from actually watching or listening to the broadcast version of the game, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) isn’t just dictating whether live blogging can or cannot be performed during sporting events, but also how often.

With every new development in social media, communications departments are faced with new challenges. If the end goal is to control the message – and that is the boiled-down purpose of communications departments – then the expansion and adoption of social media is a direct obstacle to that goal.

Here’s a case that’ll likely leave you with an icky feeling. A lawyer for a large company in Idaho copyrighted a cease-and-desist letter, and when an anonymous blogger posted the letter on his blog, the company subpoenaed the blog hosting company for the blogger’s identity in order to pursue copyright infringement claims.

Scott Karp makes a good point in a post about Nick Denton taking the helm at Gawker again (something I also wrote about on earlier). It’s pretty much the same thing I’ve been saying over and over when I talk to companies — including media companies — about blogs and social media. Let me say it again: Blogs are just a publishing system.

Here are some numbers about blogging and social networking sites according to Nielsen Online. They just released November’s numbers on the top 10 social networking sites. The biggest gainers are Flixster (where you share movie reviews) and LinkedIn, a social network for professionals.

The Bloglines Beta feedreader began rolling out new features with the addition of a Save button for articles.

A lot of drama has unfolded in the past couple of weeks surrounding the demise of the newly created Blognation, an international network of tech bloggers. In the months since Blognation was launched, there have been death threats, accusations of sabotage, failure to secure funding, failure to pay bloggers, and even implications in the death of a blogger.

The company expanded its Yahoo Shortcuts into a dynamic set of tools available as a plug-in for blogs using the WordPress platform.

Getting an A-list blogger to endorse your product isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, according to new research. And, according to another research paper, getting celebrities to endorse political campaigns can backfire.

At PubCon in Las Vegas, the Search and Blogging Reporters Forum fielded questions about an array of topics, from blogging to SEO, to videos and RSS feeds.

Dilbert’s creator has been a regular blogger, contributing frequently to his site to the delight of his fans, but there will be less delight coming from Adams in the future.

Last week I read an interesting article by the Alley Insider that I’ve been dying to share – mainly because it included the following Nielsen chart that revealed an interesting comparison of sites.

Did you know that Nissan has developed a new kind of paint that can change colors on command? It was news to Nissan, too.