so this is mass communication?

Who would have thought that this day would come? Not only is there a scholarship for blogging … it is for $10,000!

Scholarship Requirements:

• Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about. No spam bloggers please!!!
• U.S. citizen or permanent resident;
• Currently attending full-time in post-secondary education in the United States; and
• If you win, you must be willing to allow us to list your name and blog on this page. We want to be able to say we knew you before you became a well educated, rich, and famous blogging legend.

Important Dates:

• Submission Deadline: Midnight PST on Oct. 6
• 10 Finalists Announced and Public Voting Begins: 9am EST on Oct. 8
• Public Voting Ends and Winner Declared: Midnight PST on Oct. 28

You can nominate someone or put yourself in for the scholarship - just write a 300-word “essay.”

Spread the word.

(A blogless friend pointed this out to me, other wise I’d give a HT link!).

As someone who has written and integrated several social media plans for government public affairs, this is a topic near & dear to me. Colin McKay over at So Said the Organization just posted about a blogger outreach code for government.

He lists some good rules of the road.

I don’t, however, think government public affairs needs a different code of conduct than civilian public relations. I think the WOMMA code is just about as good as it gets — the problem here is getting people to operate within these guidelines.

So why don’t practitioners follow the rules?

I think part of it is just not realizing that there ARE rules of the road. I think some organizations are so lost when it comes to social media, that they think they can just pop right in without really taking the time to understand the community.

Is it their fault for not taking the time to do their homework before jumping in or is it OUR fault as practitioners immersed & well-versed in social media for not educating the industry?

You tell me.

PS - Kevin at Bad Pitch Blog has a great “quiz” to take for practitioners to determine if you’re ready to start engaging bloggers.

The UGA Grady College social media conference now has a name: Connect. And a Web page! And much more …. like a kick-butt agenda & online registration .

True to any done by academics, the conference organizers have a survey to find out what you want from the practitioner-focused event, so please take a few minutes to fill it out.

If you can be in Athens Oct. 19-20, then you need to be at this conference.

And, well, if you can’t … then lucky for you my social media class will be covering the event by blogging & podcasting all day long.

The most interesting thing I’ve done all week (& trust me, it has been an awesome & interesting week!) was to listen to the class-cast from 9/11 when Dr. Scott Shamp and his hair-flowing-avatar-having assistant Matt from the New Media Institute both taught my social media class about SecondLife.

Dr. Shamp called SecondLife the “wild west” & talked about the lawless nature of the virtual world … how businesses are using it … how users are using it …. how people actually earn a living exchanging Linden dollars for real dollars. It was off the hook. But maybe I’m just way into this stuff.

We can’t see what happened as they show my class SecondLife, but the audio quality is good enough & the content is interesting enough to keep me listening.

If you have sometime, check out this class-cast on SL.

It seems that since blogs really took off after the 2004 presidential election, political & legal junkies have been talking about whether this form of “free advertising” should be regulated by the Federal Election Commission.

See, the issue is that blogs and other social media content like YouTube videos could fall into the category of being a “political committee.” And that means Uncle Sam would put them in the same boat (so to speak) as just like the Swift Boat Vets or MoveOn.org — and provide guidance on what political bloggers can and can’t do online.

An Associated Press article says the verdict is in: blogs are more like media than political committees. They won’t be regulated:

 ”While the complaint asserts that DailyKos advocates for the election of Democrats for federal office, the commission has repeatedly stated that an entity that would otherwise qualify for the media exemption does not lose its eligibility because it features news or commentary lacking objectivity or expressly advocates in its editorial the election or defeat of a federal candidate,” the FEC said.

What does this mean? Well, a whole heck of a lot actually. Bloggers can become third party voices - whether on their own accord or as secretly hired mouthpieces - during the election. If bloggers are indeed opinion leaders, then the candidate with the biggest and best blog echo could find some success through this.

What an interesting primary season this will be …