Jason Clarke

After a nearly seven-month hiatus, my political weblog Moorelies.com has emerged from retirement anew. This time around (major version 3 by my account), I’m taking a backseat and operating primarily as publisher while two new bloggers, Chris Hata and Mike Faulkingham, take over daily posting duties.

Please head over to the new Moorelies.com and check it out. Chris (editor), Mike (writer), or I would love to hear your thoughts and/or comments.

Thanks!

UPDATE: Yes, against the best judgement (and wishes) of humanity, I once again appear in a video- this time, I’m announcing the return of Moorelies- go check it out and let me know what you think!

I hope to be the first to link to my friend Bob Cox’s new blog, WordsInEdgewise.tv, with good wishes. After four years, he’s abandoning The National Debate (along with the logo I designed for him- sad) and picking up with a new blog about his work with the Media Bloggers Association (Disclosure: I’m on the board of the MBA).

It may not be well known to the rest of the country, but here in Maine, we have a reputation for sticking together and helping our fellow citizens out. It troubles me, then, to see a fellow resident- and web developer- apparently harassing another Maine web developer.

I’m talking here about Rob Landry, owner of the Portland-based Pemaquid Communications, and his recent comments to and about Lance Dutson, the Maine blogger who just two weeks ago faced a multi-million-dollar lawsuit from Maine Office of Tourism contractor Warren Kremer Paino.

While Rob is certainly entitled to his opinion, I’m sure he’d agree there are more respectful and intelligent ways of expressing differing viewpoints- ways that do not involve leaving anonymous comments about a fellow Maine web developer across different blogs.

I believe that habit is wrong on a couple of levels. First, it’s professionally inappropriate to go around trashing another Maine web developer by hiding behind anonymous comments. Secondly, it’s in poor taste- and bad citizenship- as a commenter to intentionally muddy your identity. Obviously, it begs the questions: why hide behind a pseudonymn when making comments? Are you unable to support your own arguments? Or jealous of a fellow web professional? I’m not suggesting these are Rob’s motives- rather, I’m making the point that we can’t be sure, since he’s establishing a track record of obscuring his actions to the point of suspicion.

Maybe we should give Rob a pass. After all, by his own admission, he’s a newcomer to the whole world of blogging. I know because back in March, Rob emailed me asking for advice on what blogs are and how to set one up.

Now, I notice that he’s running what appears to be his own blog called foresider and located at http://foresider.com. Though his name appears in the registration info for the domain name, he’s curiously absent from any credit on the website. Rob has even gone so far as to intentionally mischaracterize his relationship to foresider.com, claiming that it’s a blog that he “advertises on.” While that is technically true- a link to his company, Pemaquid Communications appears on the blog- that would of course be an entirely disingenuous statement if he were also to own and publish the blog.

In the interest of fairness I emailed Rob asking for his take on both his questionable comments and his anonymous blog. Sadly, while Rob thanked me for the opportunity to comment, he nonetheless chose to continue his evasive maneuvers.

When I asked him why he left anonymous comments, he replied that he “Didn’t really think much of it,” so we’re in agreement there. Next he stated that he “wanted to add a comment that linked to the Foresider rather than Pemaquid Communications.” But of course, a comment’s link can point to anywhere- a commenter’s name is something entirely different. Again, he’s either woefully unfamiliar of common behavior standards online, or he’s intentionally ducking.

When I asked Rob why Foresider.com is an anonymous blog, he replied that he “[didn't] understand the question.” He asked me to “elaborate”, so I wrote him a follow-up email and attempted to re-phrase my already direct questions in a more explicit manner. While he replied to my initial email within 12 hours, he has yet to reply to my follow-up. It’s been two days and counting, and given his record to date, I can’t say I expect a clear reply.

Rob, if you were to ask me for further advice, I’d let you know that anonymous blogging without a damn good reason is generally frowned upon in the blogosphere. If you have something to hide, by all means, hide it. I know of a couple of bloggers in Nepal who blogged anonymously for months to avoid imprisonment and murder. Their country’s radio and television lines had all been downed by the government, so in their case anonymity became essential to survival. You can understand then how it frustrates me to observe anonymity used for cowardly purposes.

So if you’re just trying to lay low, you might want to recognize that lurking both in comment sections, and on your very own blog, are two things that don’t exactly place you on the shortlist for the blogosphere citizen of the year award. And they certainly aren’t tactics that will foster a community among the ranks of the few, but growing, community of bloggers in Maine.

As I wrote yesterday, Maine ‘Pay-per-Gate’ blogger Lance Dutson has been relieved of a multi-million dollar lawsuit brought against him, thanks in part to his attorneys, Maine State Rep Stephen Bowen, and the public relations and legal work of the MBA (disclosure: I’m on the board of the MBA).

So at least nationally, this sad, sordid saga is over. But as this story began locally, I believe it’s still active locally. Warren Kremer Paino may have buckled under the pressure of the blogosphere, national media, and a lone brave state rep coming to bear on them, but I believe you can also make the argument that by dropping the suit, they win in a different way.

After all, with this decisive victory in Lance’s favor, national attention will turn away and onto other matters of importance. I haven’t heard anything different from our silent state government, so I can only assume that WKP will be back at work Monday spending our tax dollars to sue our residents.

The full story goes beyond WKP, as well. The fact remains that some of the most bizarre and inept behavior committed against Lance was never even raised on the national scale. And unfortunately, while Warren Kremer Paino has learned it cannot intimidiate a Maine resident while acting on behalf of our government, the sad reality remains that Dann Lewis, Maine Tourism director, still has his job. And Nancy Marshall, head of the PR firm representing the state agency, is still retained as official flack. Both have yet to be held fully accountable for their actions to date.

I trust that Lance will continue to follow these issues, and if he does (and I know he will), it will nearly impossible not to uncover further and greater incompetence. Now that he knows he has the full weight of a million other bloggers, plenty of legal help, and at least one state rep behind him, I hope that Lance’s efforts to hold those in power accountable is helped by more of his own fellow Mainers.

We owe it to Lance to support him, as he has come a long way to make it here. But we also owe it to him to help in any other way we can. There is still much left to be done.

Congratulations to Lance Dutson, who is free from the legal black cloud imposed on him by Warren Kremer Paino Advertising. The agency dropped their lawsuit Friday, though they made no public comment on the matter. Cowards, to the end.

In his latest post on the now seven-month-long Pay-Per-Gate saga, Lance thanked his own legal council, along with Media Bloggers Association and our (disclosure: I am a board member) legal and public relations support. He also mentioned the work of Maine state rep Stephen Bowen, who just yesterday publicized a letter he wrote to Maine’s governor’s office asking that Warren Kremer Paino advertising’s state contract be investigated.

More on this soon…

As I reported earlier, the Media Bloggers Association has stepped up to assisnt in the defense of Maine blogger Lance Dutson against the multi-million dollar federal lawsuit he has been served with by Warren Kremer Paino, the ad agency of record for the State of Maine Office of Tourism.

The MBA (disclosure: I am a board member) is working to publicize Lance’s case in an effort to shine a light on his accusers and their actions. Furthermore, the MBA’s legal council, Ronald Coleman, is participating in Lance’s defense of this action.

From the MBA’s announcement:

“This case is nothing more than an attempt by a deep-pocketed litigant to bully a blogger for criticizing state officials and state contractors”", said MBA President Robert Cox. “We have successfully defended MBA members in nine previous cases and I don¹t expect the outcome here to be be any different.”

Dutson went public this morning with news of the lawsuit and provided key links here including his account of the events leading up to the lawsuit and the complaint served on Dutson by the local sheriff at his home in Maine. Dutson has vowed to fight.

“The idea that criticism of the state government can be defamatory is absurd”, said Dutson, “This attempt to bludgeon critics of the state government is not going to work.”

Through it’s legal defense initiative, the MBA provides member bloggers with “first line” legal defense, pro bono advice on how best to respond to legal threats related to the member’s blog.

“Bloggers don’t usually have an in-house legal department or high priced outside First Amendment counsel, but they’re at least as likely to need one as any MSM outlet. That’s where we come in,” said MBA General Counsel, Ronald Coleman of the Coleman Law Firm.

Stay tuned to Lance’s MaineWebReport and the Media Bloggers Association website for more news.

Lance Dutson, the blogger whose ‘Pay-per-gate‘ investigation has uncovered several instances of incompetence by the Maine Office of Tourism and its subcontractors, today announced he has been sued for over a million dollars by Warren Kremer Paino, the Office of Tourism’s advertising agency of record.

This is a devious, frivolous lawsuit, designed to intimidate Dutson into silence, and it should not- and will not- stand. Dutston has decided to stand and fight, and bloggers everywhere should support him by linking to him and publicizing this idiotic abuse of our legal system by the Warren Kremer Paino advertising agency.

Dutson is supported in his fight by an excellent legal team, including the support of Ron Coleman, council for Media Bloggers Association (disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors for the MBA). Coleman and the MBA are a perfect 8-0 in defending lawsuits against bloggers, and I have faith that Dutson’s case will prove to be another victory for bloggers’ rights.

One more thing: Nobody should forget that while the lawsuit has been filed by the Warren Kremer Paino advertising agency, they are involved in this mess as the advertising agency of record for the Maine state Office of Tourism. As a citizen of the state, I fully expect that the Office of Tourism would have something to say in this matter. So, how are they going to respond? Will they come down in favor of the ad agency that is suing one of their citizens for millions of dollars? Or will they stand up for somebody they are supposed to be working on behalf of?

Stay tuned…

Yes, the time has come for me to publicly express my love for Akismet. It’s a relatively new plugin for WordPress that grabs comment spam and dumps it in a moderation queue.

Since I installed it, Akisment has blocked 100% of the droves of unprintable comment spam that streams into my site on a daily basis, effectively eliminating comment spam as a problem and hinderance to managing my blog.

Akisment is a production of Automattic labs, the newly-formed company behind WordPress. It’s a cinch to install and use on your WordPress blog- just grab the files, upload them to your /plugins/ folder inside your WordPress install, and then grab a free API key for the service by singing up for an account at WordPress.com (a free, hosted installation of the WordPress tool).

With Akismet activated on your blog, the service begins working right away. Each time a comment (or trackback) is submitted, the service reviews it according to a centralized list of spam parameters and then decides to pass it to you or hold it in your own queue. You can check your Akisment queue and remove false positives, or leave the service alone and let it delete the spam for you every 15 days.

I have a feeling that a big part of Akismet’s success rate is that it is powered by the collective experience of all its users. For example, when checking your particular blog for spam, it relies on an algorithm that is ehanced each time it is put into use. So the more people that use Akismet, the more it learns about blocking spam, and the more effective it becomes for all.

Akisment was built for WordPress, but the developers have released an API with the intent that anybody who accepts comments on their site- be it blog, news site, whatever- can take advantage of the service.

If comment spam has become an unmanageable task for you, I highly recommend you try Akismet today.

Let’s see if that title earns some much-warranted attention to this story. See, something stinks here in my home state of Maine, and at least this time around it’s not the State’s abysmal DirigoChoice health are program.

Instead, I’m talking about some highly irregular, irresponsible, and completely unprofessional behavior on display by our state’s Office of Tourism. The story is getting long, but it’s quite familiar, as it involves potentially huge sums of taxpayer money wasted on inept programs by seemingly clueless consultants and buearocrats.

Pay-per-gate, as it’s being called, is an ongoing investigation by Lance Dutson of Maine Web Report, a fellow Maine-based blogger and web developer.

Back in October of last year, Dutson discovered that the Maine Office of Tourism was buying Google AdWords targeted to specific Maine businesses. As he noted at the time, that act itself is just plain wrong, for the reasons he lists, including the facts that the State is not only bidding against the businesses it is meant to promote, but further that it should be focusing on general Google-juice and not re-directing traffic better suited for other sites to its own web presence.

The plot thickened, as its apt to do, when Dutson then noted that the Office of Tourism is expressly forbidden from spending its budget within the State of Maine That fact is important because last month, Duston reported that the Office of Tourism was violating this rule by not filtering Maine out of its expensive AdWords campaigns.

(UPDATE: Lance wrote to tell me this point is not correct. While the Office of Tourism is not prohibited by law from spending within Maine, they would certainly appear to be wasting money doing so. Maine business spend, in aggregate, millions of dollars marketing themselves to Maine residents. An Office of Tourism, meanwhile, should exist to represent them outside of the state.)

Here is where a good PR strategy becomes extremely important. After some of the campaigns were pulled, then all of them, Lance waited while the PR firm and the State both failed to respond to his inquires. I have an inquiry myself: have any of these people ever heard of blogs?

After a series of go-rounds between the consulting firm, the state, and Dutson, in which the ads were pulled first within the state and then overall, the director of the Office of Tourism Dann Lewis again demonstrated that the Office has no business what-so-ever doing business on the web. Here’s an excerpt of Lewis’ letter to Dutson, according to the Maine Web Report:

I will devote sufficient time to this over the next several days in order to respond to you fully and factually by Monday afternoon, March 6. I will be in Washington on business for the next three days, hence the time frame for my full response, which I hope you will share with the readers of your site.

In the meantime, I would ask you to refrain from making any further comments on this matter.

Yep, you know what this last statement reeks of: It’s called “Do you know who I am?!” disease, and it appears to be prevalent among even the most mid-level of State governmental agencies.

Worse, Lewis’ promise to present the Office of Tourism’s side of the story hasn’t even come true: it’s now 11pm on March 6th and Maine Web Report has not posted any reply from the agency or Mr. Lewis.

Since Lewis’ request for Dutson to “keep quiet,” the blogger has done anything but. In the past week alone, he’s discovered perhaps the most sickening and relevant facts yet. According to a 2004 newspaper article, the Office of Tourism was spending up to $7,000 per month on Internet advertising. Keep in mind, that’s $7k per month- or $78,000 per year- to out-bid Maine businesses at their own game. And as Dutston notes, in 2006 it’s likely that the Office of Tourism’s budget is at least that, if not much higher.
All in all, this is a sordid, embarrassing affair that is quickly rising to the level of scandal thanks in part to the state’s bungling response to Duston’s many legitimate inquiries. As a web developer, I’m appalled at the level of incompetence on display here. As a taxpayer, I am on the verge of outrage.

Now that my RSS reader has grown to include 139 feeds (I put an informal cap at 100 a few months ago), it’s time to do some pruning.

As much as it pains me, I’m starting by usubscribing from all my feeds that are not full-text. The biggest loss for me in that department is Dr. Helen, who is on Blogspot and therefore can easily flip her feeds to full-text with just a simple click. I hope she considers doing so!

Another one I’m going to miss is Paul Davidson, author of Lost Blogs and a funny blogger who provides a great diversion from my tech-heavy reading list.

I hope both bloggers recognize that providing full-text RSS feeds will actually bring them more fans, not less, and take a risk by offering full-text feeds.

UPDATE: jasonclarke.org gets results! Paul Davidson left a comment on this post saying he’s enabled full-text posts for the time being. Thanks, Paul! You’ve been re-subscribed!