As CNN reports, ‘blog’ has been named the top word of the year by Merriam-Webster. I’ll blog to that.

Thanks to Stowe Boyd for the pointer.

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Slash­dot: Are Blogs the Future of Jour­nal­ism? “Let’s hope not.”

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Sounds to me as if Doc doesn’t much care for PDFs.

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Mark Glaser in today’s Online Jour­nal­ism Review: On Air and Online, Olber­mann Draws Atten­tion to Vot­ing Prob­lems. MSNBC’s Keith Olber­mann uses wit and intel­lect in his new Weblog and on his show to cover the con­tro­ver­sial voting-irregularities story that he says most major media haven’t touched.

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Ray Gar­raud begins to video blog, using Audioblog.com. (Look out, medi­a­s­phere!) Good start, though next time we’ll need some­thing meatier, Ray.

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Intro­duc­ing Oliver Willis, pod­caster extra­or­di­naire and, appar­ently, already America’s favorite talk radio show host.

Phew, that was fast!

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Danny Schechter’s doc­u­men­tary WMD: Weapons of Mass Decep­tion will be released in select the­aters nation­wide Fri­day by Cin­ema Libre Dis­tri­b­u­tion (“Out­Foxed”). Says the dis­trib­u­tors: “The release of ‘WMD’ is well timed given the recent admis­sion by the pres­i­dents of ABC, NBC and CBS news depart­ments that their own cov­er­age of the run-up to the Iraq War was flawed.”

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Marc Can­ter at AlwaysOn: Pay­ing Blog­gers to Blog. Mar­qui is pay­ing blog­gers to blog for $800 a month and $50 a qual­i­fied lead. The blog­gers can say what they want and we won’t fire them.

This is already kick­ing up a lot of dust in the blo­gos­phere. (For the record, our­me­dia has no rela­tion to this plan.)

Robin Good thinks the idea rocks. So does the Head Lemur.

Shel­ley Pow­ers has some early thoughts about spon­sor­ships in blog­ger­land, hark­ing back to those ‘50s quiz shows.

Stowe Boyd at Corante thinks it crosses a line: “Now, when you are read­ing some shill blog­ger of the future, will you have to read the dozens of poten­tially com­plex and con­flict­ing pro­vi­sos and dis­clo­sures in order to deter­mine whether the blog­ger is say­ing some­thing for cash or not?”

Marc offers his riposte here.

I’m on the fence on this one. I’ll sim­ply point to a cau­tion­ary arti­cle I wrote for OJR in 2001about The fuzzy world of spon­sored con­tent.

The arti­cle lists some of the eth­i­cal prob­lems with cor­po­rate spon­sor­ships, but con­cludes: “There will always be read­ers who don’t trust any­thing on a site if you sell things (doom­ing all con­tent sites), just as there are some peo­ple who don’t trust news­pa­pers or broad­cast news because they sell adver­tis­ing (doom­ing all media except Ms. mag­a­zine and Con­sumer Reports). Like it or not, spon­sored con­tent helps keep con­tent sites afloat.”

The lessons that apply at web­sites apply to blog­gers as well. If you do it, do it care­fully and hon­estly, and know that there’s a price you’ll pay in some read­ers’ eyes.

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SearchEngine Jour­nal: Blogs – Dia­mond in the Rough for your Marketing?

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Tech­News­World: Open-Source News? Wiki Builds a New Kind of Jour­nal­ism. More on the launch of Wikinews. Excerpt:

“Wikis encour­age mul­ti­ple points of view and have a strong neu­tral­ity pol­icy,” Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the Wikipedia, told TechNewsWorld.

“We hope­ful that we will get a high qual­ity syn­the­sis of the news,” he said.

That’s quite dif­fer­ent from blogs, he main­tained, which are like the edi­to­r­ial pages of the Inter­net. “A blog is one person’s analy­sis of the news,” he said.

With a blog, peo­ple cre­ate com­mu­ni­ties around them­selves, added Ross May­field, CEO of Social­Text, a Palo Alto, Cal­i­for­nia, maker of col­lab­o­ra­tive soft­ware for the enter­prise Rel­e­vant Products/Services from Sprint — With Sprint, busi­ness is beau­ti­ful., which incor­po­rates Wiki and blog technology.

“Wikis are more about group voice than indi­vid­ual voice,” he told TechNewsWorld. …

“You have an open, col­lab­o­ra­tive prac­tice for devel­op­ing con­tent that works because the bar­ri­ers are very low for any­one to make a con­tri­bu­tion,” he added. “So you end up get­ting a more diverse body of participants.”

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