According to TechCrunch two rulings by the FEC have given blogs official recognition as media organizations under US law.

From the article:

The first case was a complaint against the well known left wing blog The Daily Kos. Conservative blogger John C.A. Bambenek claimed that the site should comply with campaign finance laws because it charges a fee to place advertising on its website and it provides “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services” by posting blog entries that support candidates. The FEC determined that the website falls “squarely” within the media exemption and is therefore not subject to federal regulation under the Act; ipso facto: under US law blogs are formally recognized as media organizations.

This is awesome for so many different reasons. It doesn't change anything, really, but it's still cool.

About a month ago I saw an ad on the CFL website, requesting people fill out surveys at CFLnation.ca. Being the loyal CFL fan that I am, I took on the challenge put before me and spent about five minutes filling out a basic survey.

Yesterday, I received an email from the CFL informing me that I won a $50 Sony gift card for my troubles. Kick ass! Thanks, CFL!

It's about damned time. I've been using Reader for about a year now, and my biggest issue with it has always been that it didn't have a search feature. I mean, it is a Google product, isn't it?

Another big improvement (for me) is that, if you have more than 100 unread feed items (which happens every morning following a decent sleep), it no longer just says 100+, and actually shows you the count.

Awesome! Awesome!

UPDATE: In Read/WriteWeb's coverage of the news, I was even quoted! Yesterday I made the following comment on that blog:

I'm a loyal Google Reader user, but if they don't hurry up and implement a search feature very soon, the first company who does will win my service.

According to TV Squad, Californication has been picked up for a second season, which is a considerable amount of kick ass.

After only four episodes, Californication has earned a spot near or at the top of the list of my favorite shows on television. It's just so different, that it's impossible not to like. A couple of weeks ago I brought up the notion that Showtime may be replacing HBO as the dominant pay television station. TV Squad mentions the exact same thing near the bottom of their post.

"Grandma Aitken" is a 92 year-old superstar and is running in her 14th Terry Fox run this year. You can help her reach her pledge goal of $500 by donating online. This is just too awesome.

(via small dead animals)

I turned 24 on Tuesday and had a pretty good time celebrating it. Aside from that, birthdays are pretty much useless at this point. It was really just a good reason to go out on a weeknight with a bunch of friends and have a good time. One of my buddies even bought me a birthday card. A rather funny one too. If I can find a working digital camera around here in the next couple of days I'll take a picture and throw it up.

So, happy birthday to me.

A couple of years ago I surfed by a currency tracker called Where's Willy? and didn't give it much thought. For some reason or another I found myself there again a week or two ago and entered some of the bills I had on me. I've since entered $365 worth of bills, and will keep adding whatever I've got on me when I come home at night. Maybe one of these days I'll get a hit on one of them, who knows. Check it out!

While I'm not a Liberal party supporter, I do however support political parties embracing new technologies and reaching out to a younger audience. The Saskatchewan Liberal Party have launched a new website, that is far and away the best of any of the Saskatchewan parties.

In other provincial politic "news," if you live in the Regina Douglas Park riding, you should vote for Liberal candidate, Nick Schenher. Just because.

(via Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy)

The 59th Annual PrimeTime Emmy Awards were held last night, but I didn't watch. Hah! Take that FOX.

I was really only interested in finding out how my favorite TV shows did, so I just watched the blogosphere to find out. Here are the things I cared about, which means you probably won't, but read anyway:

Best Supporting Actor, Comedy

Jeremy Piven won for his role as Ari Gold in Entourage. It was pretty much a lock, as Ari is arguably the best, most original character on television. Period.

Best Supporting Actor, Drama

My newest favorite TV show, Heroes (watch for more about Heroes in the next day or two, hint, hint) was represented in this category by Masi Oka, who plays the almost eponymous Hiro Nakamura. While he is generally considered the comic relief, I still think he deserved the nod here over Terry O'Quinn who won for Lost. I'd have even preferred Kiefer to win for portraying Jack Bauer in 24, but, oh well, maybe next year.

Best Comedy Series

30 Rock is hilarious. Really, it is. It deserved to win. But somehow, I still feel that Entourage was snubbed. That could be because I haven't yet seen the entire first season of 30 Rock, but have been a loyal every-Sunday-night viewer of Entourage since Season 2. Who knows. I'll buy the DVDs and find out.

Best Drama Series

I pretty much knew three years ago that The Sopranos was going to take this award in their final season. I mean, how can you not, in good conscience give the award to the show that pretty much single-handedly revitalized the entire television landscape? You can't. That being said, I was kind of hoping for a Heroes upset in its freshman season, but, hell, you can't win em all.

And that's the Emmys as far as I'm concerned.

A new ally of mine in blogging, Ahmed Bilal, who is helping me launch a new blog soon has got a great new post up on Performancing about building your blog.

The list, 27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog rehashes a lot of what everyone already knows, but should be (and just may become) required reading for every blogger. While I've pretty much let this blog go in the past, I'm going to be launching a couple of new ones in the coming weeks, and will try to follow his advice as closely as I can.

So, whether you are launching a new blog or just want to build yours a little more, check out the awesome list.

Ok, that may be a little drastic and premature, however, it could be (and hopefully is) a sign of things to come.

As of midnight tonight, the New York Times is ending its Times Select program. While some people think it might be a little late, I really don't care when it happened, I'm just glad it has. Times Select goes back to 2005, and had upwards of a couple hundred thousand subscribers. However, this program effectively shut out almost the entire internet from reading the Times' wonderful news copy. By shutting it down and opening it up, they are allowing us regular folk the opportunity to access their content free of charge.

This is huge for a number of reasons, not the least of which is precedent. A lot of websites (especially news media) charge for content, and it is annoying to no end. I'm sure you've clicked a link to some news article only to find out you had to pay to read it. Screw that. Hopefully the New York Times getting rid of this business model in favor of something else signals the rest of the industry to do something similar. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not against paying for value on the internet, however, if a company can find a way to support their content/program in ways other than a subscription, it's always a good thing.

So, way to go New York Times, let's hope there are many more to follow.

I have recently launched a new blog devoted to the NBC television show Heroes, called Heroes the Blog. The show just provided such an excellent blogging opportunity I had to take it, and this is the result.

Ahmed Bilal of Soccerlens and Performancing provided a lot of guidance pre-launch and will continue to help out on the project along the way. As well, Todd of Doublecool and Saskatoon Live will be a blogger on for Heroes the Blog, which rocks big time.

If you are a fan of the show, be sure to check out Heroes the Blog, and if you want to help out in any way (including blogging), email me, and I'll be more than happy.

Awesome!

While videos being removed from YouTube happens who knows how many times a day, I doubt it's every day that the copyright owner tries to go after the uploader. But, that's what VW is trying to do.

Volkswagen has filed a subpoena in an effort to have YouTube release the identity of the uploader of a Nazified fake advertisement for the VW Golf. However, YouTube isn't caving yet, hoping to protect the future of their user base's privacy.

While I applaud Google and YouTube for not just handing over their user's identity at the first sight of a legal document, I really have no sympathy for anyone who glorifies or lightens the image of Naziism. So, on one hand, I hope that VW fails in their quest, but on the other hand I hope they succeed.

For me at least, it's win-win.

I was listening to John Gormley a couple of weeks ago, and he had a little segment about Faceball on. I had forgotten about it until today, so I went and checked it out.

There are a couple of pretty funny instructional videos that really made me want to play. I'll have to talk my roommates into it. But first, I need to procure a beach ball.

Late last month NBC announced that they were no longer going to sell their shows on iTunes, because Apple wouldn't let them charge $4.99 per episode. NBC decided to go with Amazon Unbox, which pretty much no one uses.

Today, however, comes news that CBS and FOX plan to give away at least three season premieres (combined) on iTunes. A pretty effective grab at publicity. FOX will give away Prison Break and K-Ville, while CBS will give away Big Bang Theory.

Leaving iTunes in the first place was a huge mistake for NBC. Previously, NBC shows had accounted for upwards of 1/3 of iTunes services, which means that a lot of people only watched their shows via iTunes. A lot of these people will now be getting them from torrents.

A while back Google introduced the rel="nofollow" attribute to discourage spammish links. While in theory it works for certain sites, many in the blogging community don't think it's a good idea. Almost all major blogging platforms implement the attribute on all comment and trackback links, which robs your commenters of any link love.

By setting your blog up to have Google and other search engines follow links to your commenters websites, you encourage more comments and give back to your community.

I've been trying unsuccessfully for a while to set my blogs up to do this, but Movable Type made it difficult. Until now. I came across this entry that shows you the two steps to disable nofollow in Movable Type. It was the second step that was killing my efforts for so long.

WordPress users can simply install the dofollow plugin. They have it easy!

So, if you think it's a good idea, go ahead and set up your blog for dofollow links. Let me know in the comments what you think, and earn some Google love. For the record, I've implemented dofollow here, Too Real and Heroes the Blog.

With the Canadian dollar reaching parity with the US dollar, some people (myself included) are getting pretty upset while shopping.

One extreme example is the difference in the price of cars between the two countries. Tony over at The Clever Shark is conducting an experiment to find out why the difference is so extreme (as much as 38% in one case). I applaud his efforts.

The car business isn't the only example of this though, as it can be seen in just about every consumer market in the country. Something needs to be done.