****

CD is on target. Steady State’s drivel about The Tiraspol Times being a case in point.

No, seriously:

I don’t really get Copydude’s harsh criticism of TOL being some kind of vanguard of neo-conservatism. Having met a few TOL staffers myself, I can say with confidence that their political beliefs are actually quite contrary to the any extremes left or right.

Receiving money from organisations such as the Ford Foundation and Freedom House is nothing bad per se. Look at openDemocracy, a *very*, what shall we call it, “heterodox” online magazine. They get their cash from pretty much the same philanthropies. But it doesn’t affect their angle of writing.

The same goes for us. While we receive money from HIVOS, we don’t get an editorial guideline attached to it. While we might not be a traditional blog in the hardcore-narrow sense anymore, we’re certainly not having an agenda beyond our aim to promote blogging in the region we’re interested in (which of course, in many people’s reading, is already highly political).

I think the post I wrote on our homebase (the one Lyndon refers to), sums up what my position on paying bloggers is. That said, the only people that earn cash from this project are those situated in the region (with the exception of a Berlin-based tech administrator and our Prague-based managing editor).

All other voluntary bloggers, including myself, don’t get a penny for this. Maybe regard the AFOE award as a recognition of this if you still think that “faux-blogs” shouldn’t receive any badges of honour.

And, WRT TOL staff are journalists, not bloggers… I thought we were over this senseless debate. Why can a journalist not be a blogger and vice versa?

I always find defining what is, and what isn’t a blog these days to be very difficult and I’ve basically fallen back on the old “I know pornography when I see it” method of identifying what is, and what isn’t a blog.

I’m generally happy to class NewEurasia as a blog, though – mostly because of the way it is formatted, and its roots (which definitely are in blogging).

And all credit to NewEurasia – Ben has done a great job in promoting the site into a valuable resource that many, many people want to read. If someone in the Russia blogging scene had his drive, then we could quite easily see a Russia Blog follow the same development path.

Finally, as for the impact of money on blogging – I don’t think it should really affect our judgements of what is, and what isn’t a blog. There are a lot of bloggers out there making money – sometimes very good money – from their blogs. I don’t think, for example, that there are many who would deny Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, the title of blogger, and he looks to be pulling down a six figure income.

(I should note here – I have Google ads on Siberian Light. True, they only bring in just enough money to cover the hosting costs, but I can dream…)

“No genuine person from Tajik or UzB would ever use words like ‘disgruntled’.[...]

Your cred is shot.”

And no genuine Russian citizen (which you claimed to be on another thread) would ever use terms like “assbanger” and “butt out.”

Your cred is shot.

And by the way, for better or for worse, plenty of people from the region learn American English these days, and not the UK version. To be honest, I agree with you that the “disgruntled” post was probably made by a non-native of the region, but how can you be so sure?

More to the point: of course neweurasia pays people to blog – but they don’t hide this, and they are themselves conflicted about this, as well they should be.

I question whether for-pay projects should be described as “blogs,” but your criticism should probably be to AFOE for accepting the nomination, since I don’t think the neweurasia people hide the fact that they pay people to blog – actually, they publicly advertise for paid bloggers. One might note that they also advertise for unpaid, i.e., more traditional, bloggers.

They pay some of the bloggers involved $150 monthly – big money for C-Asia – but that doesn’t change the fact that they have real people on the ground blogging for them. Do you think they actually have fake people writing the blogs, or is one’s “cred shot” simply for taking $150/month (and I’m willing to accept that, in C-Asia, it may be)?

The point is that neweurasia is totally transparent about this, and their organizers are themselves conflicted about this aspect of their endeavor. Do you really think the “Neo Cons” are so subtle as to spend time budgeting chicken-feed money (to them) on such projects? I doubt it. More likely, this is a project spearheaded by idealists – people on whom you see fit to pass judgment without even reading their blog more closely to see just how obvious it is that they pay people.

With respect to “Steady State,” obviously it’s an NGO-supported project, and therefore by definition has an agenda. But at least this is all transparent, unlike the situation with the “Tiraspol Times,” an obviously non-commercial, agenda-driven website pretending to be a market-supported newspaper.

Not even a UK English writer would use ‘paycheck’.

Your cred is shot.

But they are still what I call ‘faux blogs’ – the mainstream media, NG0s and lobbyists thinly disguised by the blog format.

It’s quite obvious that they are well-staffed and funded for a political agenda.

By the time I’d finished reading about NATO welcoming Georgia and Poland welcoming US missiles it became quite obvious that Rumsfeld’s ‘Lilypad Of Bases’ programme also includes a Lilypad of Blogs.

The credibility of blogging has always been about independent voices and this is now seriously threatened.

If you look up TOL on Sourcewatch, you’ll find a long list of funding which includes the Ford Foundation and the notoriously Neo Con ‘Freedom House’. TOL is also staffed by journalists, not bloggers.