Whenever anyone says “the blogosphere” (yes, this includes me), you need to back them up and ask, “Which blogosphere would you be referring to?”

If you come from the tech-news world, as I do, you will think of that realm. Or perhaps you’re immersed in the political blogs, and that’s what you mean.

Today there are a myriad blogospheres, scattered like alternative realities across the Web. I was reminded of this, forcefully and delightfully, over the last day and a half at Blogher. I got some interviews done for my book, met some great people, but mostly marveled at the energy and the stories.

There’s so much more to write. But we’re getting ready for our final trip of the summer — off for a few days in the mountains, and off-the-grid. So all that will have to wait. Keep things together while we’re away, ok?

Laying low as I try to get some writing done. But this is irresistible. Times story today discusses why comedians are having a hard time poking fun at Obama. Partly, yeah, they’re scared of sounding racist. Partly, it seems, audiences are resisting laughing at the guy.

But mostly, apparently, the combined comic powers of our nation’s brain trust of late-night TV comedy writers can’t find anything funny about Barack Obama.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.

Vote for Obama! He’s not buffoonish in any way: Now there’s a campaign slogan — one that no other candidate could credibly adopt. And, you know, if you go listen to, for instance, his interview today on the PBS NewsHour, you realize, Mike Barry is totally right.

Amity Shlaes, in the Post, says that Phil Gramm was right: we are a nation of whiners. There is no recession. It’s all in our minds. Suck it up, America!

Economists define recession statistically, so in the world of economic stastistics it’s possible to say “there is no recession” with a straight face because the GDP has apparently not shrunk for two consecutive quarters.

But most Americans think “recession” means hard times. With painful food and energy inflation, significant declines in the housing market, tight credit and a financial system that keeps finding new ways to break, it takes more than guts to step in front of a turned-on microphone and say that times are not hard. It takes sheer stupidity, which I think defines Gramm’s statement last week.

What I find interesting about the treatment of Gramm by the right is that the conservatives seem to have forgotten how they used to view politicians who told Americans that the fault lay in their minds. Jimmy Carter’s famous speech in 1979, during the last huge energy crisis, told voters that there was a crisis of spirit, and that they were part of the problem: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” However right Carter was about a lot of what he said, it was a political misstep that Ronald Reagan rode into the White House — and that right-wingers have mercilessly mocked for three decades.

But now, it’s one of their own who has pointed a finger of blame at the general population — and suddenly, the conservative media is willing to give him some slack.

Watching the right squirm around on this one is sheer fun. Still, truthfully, we would be a lot better off if less media time were devoted to Gramm’s relatively trivial gaffe than to the painful fact that McCain’s chief economic adviser was one of the central figures behind the broad deregulation of the financial industry in the late ’90s — a deregulation that led directly to the multiple failures of the credit and mortgage markets that have been so ruinous over the last two years.

I would love to see a Democratic ad that simply explained this to voters, and said, “If you liked what’s been happening lately in real estate and on Wall Street, Phil Gramm is your man, and he’s shaping John McCain’s policy.”

• It’s worth fighting for: On her blog, a Tampa newspaper intern praises her editor’s speech about newsroom change in the wake of layoffs, sparking a huge debate among veteran ink-stained wretches.

• Justice Dept. Admits Error in Not Briefing Court (NY Times): The Supreme Court’s ruling recently that convicted child rapists shouldn’t be subject to the death penalty depended on evidence from a review of existing law. After the ruling came down, a blogger found that some recent additions to the military code of justice undermine the courts argument — facts that you’d think the Bush Justice Department would have known. More incompetence on the administration’s side is hardly news, but it’s a notable instance of the “enough eyeballs” principle at work.

• Lamentations of the Father: Ian Frazier’s classic, more resonant to me now that I have been a parent lo these eight years:

  Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room.

• Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? - New York Times: I guess it’s not news that learning new things is good for you, but here’s some neurological explanations for why and how the brain-stretching happens.

• Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes - Esoteric Curio: Forecast: less and less predictable spikes in traffic to sites, including small sites, at greater and greater magnitude.

• An Attack That Came Out of the Ether - washingtonpost.com: Thorough, fascinating gumshoe effort traces the false “Obama is a Muslim” email to its murky roots. Why am I not surprised that the Freepers play a prominent role?

• J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement : Harvard Magazine: Rowling’s excellent talk focuses on the value of failure:

  The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

  Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

At the Personal Democracy Forum last week, which I did not attend, Jay Rosen delivered a talk in which he described the turmoil in today’s newsrooms as a phenomenon of tribal migration from the old print world to the Web:

The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on — also called their business model — no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform….And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land.

This astute piece reminded me of the creative but premature choice of imagery John Markoff used back in 1995 when he wrote about the launch of Salon as a harbinger of “tribes of journalists” departing newsrooms for the Web. Today, Rosen suggests, this diaspora is finally beginning in earnest.

I think that his analysis is accurate as far as it goes, and offers a useful metaphor, but that it lets the “tribe” off too easily, in two ways.

First, there is the not insignificant point that Brad DeLong brings up — that the tribe is not composed of blameless victims:

the press corps’s flaws are much deeper than that–it’s not just that it doesn’t understand the new ground to which it is migrating, it’s that it did a lousy job on its own ground as well.

There’s no question in my mind that the woes of the journalism profession today have been at least partially self-inflicted. At the very historical moment that the news pros faced relentless new scrutiny from a vast army of dedicated amateur watchdogs and expert critics, they offered up a relentless sequence of missteps and disasters. Some were failures of professionalism, from the Jayson Blair meltdown to the Dan Rather screwup. But the biggest — the absence of a stiff media challenge to the Bush administration’s Iraq war misinformation campaign — was a failure of civic responsibility. With that failure, the professionals forfeited their claim to special privilege or unique public role as challengers of official wrongdoing and ferreters of truth. The democracy still needs these roles filled, of course. But after the Iraq bungle, the professional journalists’ claim to own them exclusively became much harder to accept.

The other area in which Rosen’s piece lets journalism’s incumbents off a little easy is in its picture of the change in the business landscape as a sort of vast, impersonal inevitability. Like the Irish Potato Famine or the pogroms, the digital age is just there, a force of history that is uprooting the tribe for reasons beyond its control. But in fact the tribe bears some responsibility here — at least its elders and leaders do. Perhaps the average newsroom grunt was in the dark, but top editors have been in a position for at least two decades to see the disruption ahead. Ay nof them could have sat down with their corporate bosses during that time and said, “This business is doomed unless we take some of the 20-25 percent profit margin you are enjoying and reinvest it in a totally different direction that won’t pay off for a long time.”

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that such advice would have been taken. The public corporations that own most newspapers today (and the private ones, too, for that matter) like their short-term profits. But a newsroom leader ought at least to have been able to frame this choice for the owners. Did that happen anywhere? If so, it happened so quietly it made no difference.

The incumbents of the journalism field are no more likely to risk giving up their profits and their privileges of place than those in any other field. Sunday’s NY Times Business section has an essay by Randall Stross arguing that Microsoft ought to give up on the new Windows 7 and rewrite its operating system from scratch. This would be exciting and bold and could pay long-term dividends, but would entail massive short-term disruption and revenue loss. It is no more likely to happen than the Times deciding tomorrow to shut down its presses and move all its news delivery online.

Migration is certainly still an option for many individual journalists. For institutions, I think the ships may have already sailed.

I’ll be offline most of this week with my family, camping, during the difficult interregnum between end of school and start of summer day camp season.

For those of you who’ve been following the AP takedown letters story, I don’t think it’s over yet, but it seems to have hit a lull. If you want to stay tuned in, Mary Hodder (in her blog and on Twitter) has been keeping on it.

The Beltway-Blog Battle (James Poniewozik, Time, this week):

Maybe we’ll also stop arbitrarily dividing “real” from “amateur” journalists and simply distinguish good reporting from bad, informed opinion from hot air, information from stenography. Maybe we’ll remember this election as the one when we stopped talking about “the old media” and “the new media” and, simply, met the press.

I posted on Blogology in July 2002:

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

Another good quote from Poniewozik:

“if 3 million people read Drudge and 65,000 read the New Republic, which is mainstream?”

And this one raises my eyebrow a bit:

Russert was one of the last giants of old-school journalism…It’s hard to imagine a future Russert with that kind of singular authority, as the power to set the news agenda moves from insiders to outsiders.

They said the same thing about Cronkite when he retired, of course.

I am no expert on campaign finance reform. But I’ve followed the issue for a long time.So when I got asked over breakfast about the headlines covering Obama’s opting out of public financing, I started trying to lay out the basics. And I was surprised about how remarkably straightforward the issue actually is.

We’ve always been concerned about the influence of money in politics. In the past such influence has taken the form of a relative handful of wealthy donors, and people fronting for businesses, filling campaigns’ warchests. This was a problem for democracy because this handful of people would almost certainly have an undue influence, directly or indirectly, on the politician they helped elect.

Public financing came along as an antidote — a way for large numbers of not-so-wealthy individuals to pool their contributions, using the government as a middleman, so that they could help finance the campaigns of politicians who didn’t want to take big contributions from the wealthy few. If they won, these officials wouldn’t be beholden to a small coterie of fat cats; they’d have been funded by a vast crowd. That seemed like a good road for democracy.

So here comes Obama. His campaign has managed — through both the general enthusiasm of his following and through very savvy use of the Internet — to assemble something unprecedented in American politics: a multitude of small contributors (something like a million and a half people) who have swelled his campaign chest by ponying up a huge volume of modest amounts.

In a sense, Obama is already a publicly financed candidate. The government used to be the middleman; now the Internet plays the same role. As I read cynical takes on Obama’s move (like that of David Brooks), I can’t help thinking: isn’t this what public financing was all about? Isn’t pooling a multitude of small individual contributions the ideal way of financing a political campaign? Don’t we want more campaigns to be like Obama’s? What exactly is the problem?

As they put it over at Mother Jones:

By opting out of the public financing system, Obama is acknowledging that money will always play a crucial role in American politics. But by discouraging donations to independent groups, focusing on small donors, and refusing PAC and lobbyist money, he’s also trying to insure that money plays the right role in American politics.

Robert Cox, the Media Bloggers Association guy who represented Cadenhead in this matter, has a lengthy post about what happened this week. Go read it. I wasn’t there but I’ve dealt with lots of similar situations as an editor and this all sounds pretty believable. Congrats to Cox for doing what good lawyers do in situations like this: do your best to achieve your client’s goals but also do your best to keep everyone out of court.

Now here’s the crux of what’s at stake. The sticking point for AP seems to be their belief that a headline-and-first-paragraph excerpt is not covered by fair use:

AP’s argument has been that a large percentage of the value of what they deliver is carefully packaged in that content and so the publishing of that information without permission was a copyright violation.

Here is AP’s fear: if they say that doing this once is OK, then, well, doing it twice is probably OK, and you’re rolling down a slippery slope to their nightmare, which is someone creating a whole site based on a reposted feed of AP’s heds and lead paragraphs.

At what number, then, does fair use turn into infringement? Any answer’s going to be arbitrary. The AP lawyers’ suggestion, then, I imagine, is: set the allowable number to “zero” and you don’t have a problem.

The trouble is that fair use law does not, apparently by intention, draw a simple line. It sets up a bunch of criteria that you have to weigh. And so the nightmare reposted-feed site is almost certainly not a fair use. A Digg home page with lots of AP stories? Well, on the one hand Digg is a business that conceivably is taking business value from AP; on the other hand, Digg users rate and discuss stories, so they’re adding them. And AP accounts for only a little bit of Digg’s total volume of stories.

So there are complex, messy issues here. We on the Web can sit back and say, “AP doesn’t get it! They should love us for linking to them!” But AP has what economists call an “incumbent business model.” They have a way of obtaining revenue that they feel is threatened. That they will try to protect it is simply a given. (That AP is technically a cooperative owned by its members adds yet another level of difficulty to the conflict. It probably makes it harder for AP to take any but the most conservative course, since a riskier move — “Let’s bet on the power of links to make our content more valuable!” — would require a broader consensus from a group of already-embattled news executives.)

This story is going to keep unfolding in unpredictable ways. What’s important to me is that, when the dust settles, Joe Random Blogger doesn’t have to worry about the AP lawyers sending him takedown letters because he wanted to post about the day’s news.

UPDATE: Funny to see AP’s own story on this topic linked to from Romenesko with the following text: “AP vs. blogger: resolved.” Gee, that was easy…!

So the AP has closed the book on its dispute with the Drudge Retort. The matter may be “closed” — but the book never got written!

Apparently this means the company will not go after Rogers Cadenhead further, and that is a relief to him. The rest of us remain somewhat in the dark. It’s hard to read all the signals but to the extent that we don’t have clear signals it means that the AP itself, or some portion of or faction within the company, still reserves the right to send DMCA takedown notices for brief excerpts and links to its material.

What this means, I’m afraid, is that the AP/Drudge Retort matter has not been the resolution of anything at all, and that we are likely to see a larger and longer conflict unfold, between the AP’s efforts to nail down its rights to smaller and smaller bits of its content and the desire of bloggers (and their readers) to quote headlines and brief excerpts with links, which is the core of what they do.

The AP has some sort of guidelines that it will promulgate — we don’t know yet what they are. (Cadenhead’s post indicates that they are unlikely to please the blogosphere unless they get radically modified before their release:

If AP’s guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we’re headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use.

I’m getting ahead of the action here, but it doesn’t take a genius to come up with a likely crystal-balling of how this will play out: Bloggers will look at these guidelines, and at least some will find them objectionable, and set out to flout them, picking a fight. Then we’ll get a drawn-out legal dispute that will further define the extent and limit of fair use on the web.

A good lawyer would probably tell you that, in this sort of situation, you literally want to pick your battle carefully: the specifics of the particular case that ends up being the test here will matter a lot. Specifics like, How much was quoted? How much further debate/discussion takes place on the site posting the excerpt (so-called “transformative” reuse)? What’s the nature of the site itself, and is it a business?

Fair use is complicated. I spent years learning about it at Salon, and still find it a tricky realm. I’d urge bloggers to consider that they take a little time this weekend and, instead of flaming the AP — which at this point has most likely already circled its wagons and told itself, “Those bloggers are crazy” — study up on the details of fair use law. That way, whoever does wind up as a test case can make the best of the fight.