Quite simply, the plaintiffs offered a service and the defendants offered exposure in return, and the transaction occurred exactly as advertised. The defendants followed through on their end of the agreed-upon bargain. That the defendants ultimately profited more than the plaintiffs might have expected does not give the plaintiffs a right to change retroactively their clear, up-front agreement.

– U.S. District Judge John Koeltl, in his decision against the unpaid bloggers who sued the Huffington Post for retroactive payment despite the fact that their original agreement was to write for free

Huffington Post contributors griping in the wake of the site’s sale to AOL? Sure. But it’s also the same gripe that AOL users made in the dial-up era.

And–pay attention, angry bloggers–some of those AOL users eventually got paid!

The bad news: They had to go to court to get their cash, via a class action suit they filed in 1999. And they didn’t see a check until last year.

As the Columbia Journalism Review reminds us, the old, pre-Time Warner AOL used to rely on an army of volunteers–”community leaders”–to do essential gruntwork like moderating chatrooms. Wired called it a “cyber-sweatshop.“

And while it took a decade, the plaintiffs in the AOL case did end up with something for their trouble–a $15 million settlement, handed out last year.

Of course, 30 percent of that–$4.5 million–went to the lawyers, court documents show. But that’s still $10.5 million divvied up among a couple of thousand former chatroom monitors. You can’t retire on that, but you could buy a few MacBook Airs.

So could HuffPo’s angry bloggers get something for their troubles? Seems like a tough case to make: One big difference between AOL’s unpaid workers and HuffPo’s unpaid writers is that AOL really did treat its workers like workers.

It recruited them through want ads, held them to time commitments and compensated them with benefits like free or discounted dial-up access. (Remember that?)

HuffPo’s writers, on the other hand, simply handed the site some copy, which it ran–just like the people who submit op-ed pieces to newspapers. And I never hear about them demanding cash for their work. It seems quite clear that the trade is your words/their distribution.

Still, you never know! And I’m sure there’s at least one attorney, somewhere, who’s ready to try it out. Let’s check back in a decade and see how it panned out.

The young company has really gotten way too into these show-and-tell events. The formula is down pat: The usual crowd of tech bloggers and mainstream media types, plus some partners, show up at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif., office park and wait around for an awkward amount of time. Mark Zuckerberg walks up to the front of the company cafeteria and gives unscripted remarks about how great a few new products are. Product managers come demo them, questions are asked, lunch is served.

This time, at least, the Facebook product launch is in San Francisco, where the Web 2.0 Summit kicks off a little later in the day. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt goes on stage a couple hours after the Facebook event ends.)

Certainly, worse things could happen to me than having to write about a new Facebook product. But if the company wants to make such a big deal about these launches, it should come up with some really great stuff and/or bunch it all together (see: Steve Jobs).

It’s not so much the events; it’s the products themselves. Facebook’s last few launches–coming out of a self-imposed “lockdown” period of intense product development and much overtime work by employees–haven’t knocked any socks off: A gaming platform redesign, the Places check-in tool, a revised Groups feature, a way for users to download their archive of activity on the service, the Kleiner Perkins sFund launch (which Facebook got roped into hosting), single sign-on for mobile, the beginnings of a deals platform. And there were a few launches made sans event: Facebook Questions, high-resolution photos, etc.

All these are nice enough but, at best, slow-burn products. So far, none of them dramatically impact the way the majority of users value and experience Facebook.

That’s because many of them are fringe products; for instance, Pew says only 4 percent of U.S. online adults have ever shared their location with friends using a mobile device. Surely, Facebook can raise those user numbers, but location-sharing is not a mainstream activity and won’t be for a long time.

Still, even as I am bitching, I am setting Facebook up to succeed, because email is actually a mainstream product. The company will have to come through on the feature front, but there’s a good chance tomorrow’s launch could actually matter.

We can only hope.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Image courtesy Flickr user Robert Scoble.

“You know, we value our independence, and we continue to think that we just have tremendous opportunities ahead of us as a company,” Narayen said in an interview with Fox Business Network today. “The macro trends that are driving our business, creating content, monetizing it, managing it, and delivering that value to our customers, that is what we’re focused on as a company. We have tremendous strategic partnerships not just with Microsoft. We have partnerships with Google and with Apple, as well as with all media companies who use our creative tools to produce content….

“We partner with Microsoft and the partnership with Microsoft is all about making sure that our creative applications, which are the best-selling creative applications in the world, work really well on the Windows platform. So, that is the nature of the partnership with Microsoft.”

But trouble came when Mr. Yu pulled out an Apple iPad, held it up and remarked about how nicely it displays electronic books. The problem is, South Korea’s communications regulators haven’t approved the device for wireless networking in the country.

Tech-industry bloggers pounced on Mr. Yu, criticizing him for using a device that isn’t even available in South Korea yet.

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Conjuring up references to 1970s cult classics like “Shaft,” Just-a-Band’s latest video, “Ha-He,” introduces the fictional Makmende sporting shades, chains, an Afro pick and what appears to be polyester. Directed by Jim Chuchu and Mbithi Masya, the clip is a tribute to “ass-kicking” of days past–even the name “Makmende” is a throwback to a word used in mid-1990s Nairobi to connote a know-it-all or local hero (and bully.)

The video–with “Big-G,” “Godfrey and the Laydayz,” “Black Sahara” and others backing up Makmende–has drawn more than 24,300 hits in the week since its release and the success doesn’t end there. Kenyan bloggers and Tweeters have seized on the video and launched a campaign for the man they’re calling Kenya’s very own Chuck Norris–complete with one liners about Makmende’s superhero skills and prowess. Makmende on Facebook has already collected 19,200 fans–with more joining by the minute.

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The furor was kicked off by comments from Anamitra Banerji, the head of product management and monetization at Twitter, who told MediaPost.com that “We are working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.” He declined to give an exact date on when the micro-blogging site would launch an ad platform, according to MediaPost.com.

Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mediapost.com, quoting Seth Goldstein, a panelist and the CEO of Socialmedia.com, said that Twitter plans to launch its ad platform in about a month. In an email sent to Digits, Mr. Goldestein said that he doesn’t know when, and if, Twitter will launch any ad platform.

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Sony (SNE) joined forces with the label by streaming his runway show on video site Vevo, projecting it on enormous Bravia screens and providing Vaio notebooks and “Bloggie” video cameras to reporters.

The commingling was perhaps better in theory than in practice. Plenty of flashbulbs popped, and others took photos with their iPhones and BlackBerrys, but few journalists and bloggers used the Sony-furnished devices. The event’s Twitter hashtag, “#WRastSony,” produced only a handful of tweets, with about half coming from the Sony Electronics account.

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Bloggers quickly began speculating as to which device is better, with many pro-Kindle reviewers calling the reader less distracting, while the Apple camp cites the iPad’s multi-purpose nature as a selling point.

An iPad “does so much more–games, photos, videos, email,” wrote Fred Vogelstein in Wired. “I might eventually ditch my laptop for it too.”

GigaOm also sees the Kindle as a defunct device. “The Amazon Kindle is dead thanks to the rich media capabilities of the iPad as well as the full software-based keyboard,” Stacey Higginbotham wrote.

But are those bells and whistles distracting to those who just want to curl up with an e-book? Brad Stone wrote on Bits that the Kindle “will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period…when you read a book, you just don’t want to have email, Twitter and the ESPN Web site beckoning from the browser.”

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“If the consumer wouldn’t understand that the endorser, whether it’s a celebrity or a mommy blogger, is being paid…to talk about the product, that’s something that we’re concerned about, because we think consumers are being misled,” said Mr. Gordon in a panel discussion on Thursday.

He said the blogosphere “went a little crazy with visions of storm troopers taking down suburban houses and seizing the computers of mommy bloggers,” but that the FTC has no plans to enforce the rules so aggressively.

Instead, he said, the agency wants to focus on people who are being paid to make plugs for products in “non-traditional contexts” such as tweeting. In particular, they’ll go after companies that make claims that aren’t true or can’t be substantiated, essentially the same mission of the FTC in holding companies accountable offline.

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The Web site said in AdAge that no advertisers have signed on yet and that it would help them figure out how to best inject their messages into relevant parts of the site. Greg Coleman, HuffPo’s president and a former Yahoo (YHOO) and AOL (AOL) exec, said a company seeking advertising around the World Series might tweet about baseball, for example.

“You cannot use the social engagement for the purposes of really hawking your products,” he told AdAge. “The advertiser is really put in a position where they need to add value to the conversation that’s taking place.”

The initiative is already generating discussion, not surprisingly, on Twitter, where some users wondered if the extra revenue would go toward compensating the site’s unpaid bloggers. “Losing respect for them, min by min,” Casey Rentz tweeted. Others were more sympathetic: “I have decided that sponsored tweets (a la the HuffPo) are okay, as long as they are clearly marked. I may be a brand tweeter one day,” Jill Elswick wrote.

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On Thursday, U.S. State Department officials held simultaneous press briefings for a select group of predominantly Chinese bloggers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, giving a rundown of the U.S. president’s China schedule and took questions from the bloggers.

The attendee list included many influential bloggers, such as journalist Michael Anti, who blogs about freedom of the press, and Rao Jin, whose Anti-CNN Web site scrutinizes China coverage by the news network and other foreign media.

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Fwix, a one-year-old start-up backed by BlueRun Ventures, is one of a growing number of portals for “hyperlocal” news, a buzzword that refers to sites about schools, culture, gossip and other information on a neighborhood level. Other hyperlocal aggregators include Outside.In and EveryBlock. Some, like Patch, have their own staff, while others, like Fwix, mostly organize news written by bloggers and community members.

Now Fwix is launching a new advertising product, AdWire, and agreeing to split revenue with the people who write the local information, laying down the gauntlet against big news aggregators from Google on down.

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Noting the new guidelines have created a “firestorm of controversy within the ad-supported interactive-media industry,” Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg suggested the FTC rescind the new guidelines.

“These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinguish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered,” he wrote in an open letter to the FTC on Thursday. The online-advertising trade group suggested the FTC try a do-over, after opening up the issue for discussion with bloggers and online advertisers…

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Bloggers and Twitter users, led by Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger, expressed indignation about a court injunction that called into question the British newspaper’s right to report on a parliamentary debate.

The catalyst was an order filed against the Guardian on Sept. 11 by Carter-Ruck, the London-based law firm representing Trafigura Ltd., an oil-and-gas firm alleged to be responsible for dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

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A service, Blog2Print, from New York custom-book maker SharedBook, prints blogs into books and says that demand has been been growing 50 percent every month, although from a small base.

“When we launched, people would say, ‘Who would want to print their blog?’” said Caroline Vanderlip, chief executive of SharedBook. But while demand was slow when the service was first introduced, she said after Google (GOOG) featured Blog2Print in a communication called “Blogger Buzz,” some 5,000 people clicked the link in 24 hours. It also works with other blog services such as TypePad and WordPress.

“It’s the modern equivalent of writing a journal in a black, bound book,” she said.

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As the intro to the video notes, Huntsberry was delivering his chat at a Federal Communications Commission hearing earlier this month. And as best I can tell, he was trying to alarm the FCC by pointing out just how easy it is to grab this stuff.

Along the way, he notes how many “legitimate” companies participate, in their own way, in the piracy value chain. Everyone from small storage start-up Drop.io, which allows users to host big data files for little or no charge, to Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), which can point people toward pirate havens, gets tarred by Huntsberry’s brush.

Not surprisingly, the video inspired all manner of invective from my fellow bloggers, who railed about Huntsberry’s lack of sophistication, his temerity for asking the FCC for help in stopping piracy, and other offenses real and imagined.

I find it hard to get worked up about it, though, since I hear this stuff from media executives all the time. The big difference is that the ones who are most impassioned about it usually don’t want the FCC to stop piracy. They want the industry to offer compelling alternatives to piracy.

For instance, here’s a site someone who works for a very big media company points me to with some regularity. Said executive says it’s the latest and greatest in piracy. I wouldn’t know, because the download scares me off (and in case my employer is wondering, I don’t condone piracy, but I do write about it). So I’ll take said executive’s word for it.

In any case, the idea is not to tip me off about a great place to hoover up a camcorded version of “Pandorum,” but to point out how fast this stuff evolves and how difficult it is stop. I don’t see any harm in noting that, right?

The law, called the Free Flow of Information Act, is intended to prevent journalists from being forced to divulge confidential sources, except in cases such as witnessing crimes or acts of terrorism. The amendment, introduced by Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) last week, limits the definition of a journalist to one who “obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity…”

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Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam lack the kind of technology and financial resources that China and some other large countries use to police the Internet. The Southeast Asian nations are using other methods–also seen in China–to tamp down criticism, including arresting some bloggers and individuals posting contentious views online.

That is distressing free-speech advocates who had hoped that Southeast Asia–until recently a region where Internet use was relatively unfettered–would become a model of open debate in the developing world as its economies modernize.

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In fact, co-founder Ivan Kirigin’s first day at Facebook was last Monday–four days before he and his wife, Abby, announced that they are shuttering their start-up.

Confused? You should be: This is one of the odder M&A stories I’ve seen in a while. Not surprisingly, the tale differs depending on who’s telling it.

Some basic, undisputed facts: Sometime this spring, TipJoy, a year old start-up that lets Web surfers “tip” bloggers and publishers, shopped the service to multiple parties, including Twitter and Facebook. By July, Facebook had offered, via a term sheet, to buy the company. Facebook then pulled its offer, and shortly after, offered Ivan a job. Now he and his wife are shutting TipJoy down and returning what’s left of the $1 million they had raised to their investors.

Also undisputed: No one has accused anyone of violating any laws, or contracts. Facebook’s offer was nonbinding and nonexclusive. And it’s not unheard of for companies to walk away from an M&A deal late in the process. That’s what happened, for instance, when Google (GOOG) bailed out after deep talks with Digg a year ago.

You could see why some of TipJoy’s backers, which include BetaWorks, the Accelerator Group, ex-Googler Chris Sacca and the Y Combinator start-up factory, might cry  foul. The argument would be that Facebook’s actions effectively prevented the company from finding another buyer. But even if that was true, it doesn’t mean that Ivan Kirigin had to accept Facebook’s job offer and/or shutter his company.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu declined to discuss the negotiations in detail, but offered this statement via email: “We take pride in operating in a transparent and ethical manner. We can’t offer any specifics here, but to suggest anything untoward occurred on our part simply ignores the facts.”

I’ve sent the Kirigins repeated requests for comment but haven’t heard back. Their statement announcing the decision to close their company doesn’t mention Ivan’s new job. But it does hint, obliquely, at their future plans:

When we evaluate why there’s been so much hype about payments on Twitter, and yet so little traction for us (and even far less for our competitors) it is clear to us that the reason is that a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party….the only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments–then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

UPDATE: Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, commenting on this story on his Hacker News site, says Facebook hired Ivan at his urging:

Facebook didn’t do anything wrong. Tipjoy was out of money. They’d been talking to several potential acquirers, including Facebook, but those deals all fell through. So the Tipjoys were going to have to get jobs somewhere. Since they were worried about money and Ivan admired the hackers at Facebook, I asked FB if they’d offer him a job, and they did.

It doesn’t portend anything for the future of startups, as this story seems to imply. If your startup tanks, you have to get a job somewhere, and lots of hackers get jobs at Facebook. There are several other YC alumni working there.

Ivan Kirigin also weighs in within the same comments section, and says that my report “completely doesn’t tell the whole story.” Ivan, I’m all ears, so either drop me a line or leave a comment below.

Note: I’m assuming that the commenters identifying themselves as Paul Graham and Ivan Kirigin in the comments section are indeed Paul Graham and Ivan Kirigin. But I’ve sent emails to both men so I can verify that. Update: That is indeed Paul Graham.

On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a beta program that pays bloggers for Kindle subscriptions to their posts.

The Kindle comes with an experimental Web browser that allows users to surf ordinary Web sites. But for the sake of convenience, Amazon also sells Kindle subscriptions to a select list of blogs that are automatically updated and made available on the device’s home screen. Those subscriptions can cost as much as $2 per month.

Under the new program, Amazon will pay registered bloggers 30 percent of its subscription fee–pretty low, considering that Apple (AAPL) gives iPhone developers a 70 percent cut on sales of software applications for the device. So that’s about 60 cents per reader, per month, for the most expensive blogs.

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But things may be changing in the blogosphere, as the Federal Trade Commission considers whether to impose new rules for parent-bloggers. The FTC is weighing whether these informal endorsements should be considered paid advertisements if the blogger receives any quid pro quo from the manufacturer, either in the form of free goods or money.

The news is making a lot of parent-bloggers nervous. A number of parents have turned to blogging as a way to earn income or get free products during these tough times. But the FTC is concerned that the manufacturer-blogger relationships may not be transparent to readers.

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Time for some image repair, don’t you think?

The AP is trying to do this at this very moment by distributing an 11-point FAQ that attempts to clarify exactly what it’s thinking. But that document is still a little vague and overly formal. Good thing I got on the phone yesterday with the pleasant Jim Kennedy, who oversees strategic planning for the AP and who speaks in clear, concise English.

Much of what we talked about was a rehash of what we talked about Monday afternoon, when AP Chairman Dean Singleton first riled everyone up with his “mad as hell” speech. But given the rampant confusion of the past few days, I thought it was worth going over again. Some excerpts from our chat:

On the AP’s plans to chase down people who “misappropriate” its content: Kennedy stresses that the news organization isn’t planning on creating a Wall Street Journal-style pay wall around its content. And it’s not concerned about bloggers who link to its stories. His beef is with sites that are reprinting AP’s stories on a regular basis without paying for them. “The activity that we’re trying to limit is the systematic harvesting of news without trying to license it,” he says. “The people who are building a business by taking the content and trying to recreate a news report. That’s what we’re trying to address. We’ve had success doing this.”

On the AP’s plan to promote its work more effectively. This has been construed in some quarters as a plan to create a search engine or news portal. But it’s really just an attempt to upgrade the AP’s search engine optimization strategy–that is, trying to get its stuff to show up higher on Google’s (GOOG) search results. It will do that via “search pages,” or “topic pages,” which are par for the course in the Web world. Check out this New York Times (NYT) page on Somali pirates, or this Huffington Post page on newspapers, and you’ll get an idea of where the AP is going.

If the search page plan works, the pages will be generating plenty of page views when people land on them, and it’s possible that the AP will sell ads on that inventory, Kennedy says. But their real function is to shuttle searchers to the original source material from the AP’s members.

On the AP’s beef with Google: It’s real. But many of the stories published this week conflated the AP’s gripe-essentially, that it’s not getting paid enough by the search engine for the use of its content–with its saber-rattling against aggregators who aren’t paying the AP at all. The AP may indeed end up suing people in the latter group. But it plans on resolving its Google problem with a new contract that will replace the one that expires this year.

Kennedy is vague when it comes to specifics about the Google contract and what he’d like changed: “It’s just a reevaluation of the situation,” he says. But he’s clear that the company intends to keep working with the world’s largest Web site. “When we’re talking about Google, we’re talking about our future business relationship,” he says. “When we’re talking about misappropriation, we’re talking about people who have never contemplated a business relationship with us.”

On the confusing message that the AP presented to the world this week: Guilty as charged, says Kennedy. But he argues that his group has indeed given some thought to what it’s doing, even if it hasn’t communicated that clearly to date. “The future is going to be a lot different than the present and the past on the Internet, and we’re trying to get ready for that process,” he says. “To the untrained eye it looks like we’re stupid. But we’re looking forward to a totally new space where we have to get ready to do things in a totally different way. We’re trying to be smart business people and we’re trying to stay in business.”

A new microblogging site targeting moms and modeled after Twitter launched Friday. Rachael Herrscher, a 31-year-old mother of three, has added the abbreviated commenting feature to her site Today’s Mama.

Ms. Herrscher is not the first to rip off the idea of Twitter. The more popular the site becomes–it is adding millions of users by the month–the more knockoffs pop up. There are Twitter clones for different countries and a handful by subject or topic.

Dubbed “Connect” on Today’s Mama, Ms. Herrscher’s version has several Twitter traits. Posts are constrained to 140 characters or less, comments directed at someone begin with the “@” symbol and topics are marked by the “#” symbol.

Unlike Twitter, however, Today’s Mama has a group function. Ms. Herrscher has created groups by region, such as Bay Area Mamas, and topics, such as parents of teens or the book “Twilight.” After a user joins a group, she can send a message to it by adding an exclamation point and the group name.

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