As a blogger of important, exciting, and provocative *breaking, real time tech news* as well as broken and static personal rants, as well as (formerly) AP material with my own brand of questionable commentary, I’m really interested in the firestorm of controversy surrounding AP’s odd decision to crack down on a single, relatively obscure blog Drudgeretort.com ( not to be confused with the the much larger Drudge Report.). Their crime? Users had posted small parts of AP stories without permission or using AP’s new online payment system at 12.50 for five words.

Major blogs jumped to action, calling for an AP Boycott, while another heretofore obscure group calling itself the “Media Bloggers Association” has agreed to meet with AP.   Based on some of the coverage I assumed this group had considerable standing in the blog community, and I was just ignorant about their existence.   I’m still checking, but based on their own website information it’s not clear to me exactly what role the MBA plays with respect to the media, let alone blogging.

I’ll reserve judgement on them until I know more, but I do object to the idea that “news bloggers” like me are going to be represented by a group I don’t even know about.   Rather than the “corporate meeting” format  maybe the AP should meet with … everybody via an online environment where we can get widespread participation across the board, especially from … bloggers.