You can't get a copy of Columbia School of Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann's profile of Hugh Hewitt on-line but if you can find a back issue lying around your summer cottage, it's well worth your time. First of all, there's a little cameo by our own contributing editor Chuck DeFeo who has been helping Hewitt with his on-line news and activism project Beyond the News.

Hewitt is the author of Blog -- perhaps the Bible of right-wing political activism these days -- and host of a popular conservative talk show based here in California. And, of course, he is well-known to PDF readers as a gracious and smart panelist at our Spring forum. You may not agree with him but boy, he sure is nice about it.

Back when the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 was first enacted, you couldn't sell a story about phones or cable companies for love or money. Regulation by the Federal Communications Commission? Forgeddaboutit. "Boring," the editors would say. No one cares. Until about six months ago, if you uttered the words "Silicon Valley" in New York you were liable to get shot. "Broke," my editors said. "Over. Done. Who Cares?"

What a difference a few years and a Tom Friedman best-seller makes.

Last week, a pretty geeky story about how the FCC is going to loosen regulation in high speed Internet access made the front page of the New York Times' business section. A story about the two founders of Skype -- along with the requisite too-cool-for-school photo -- is a big feature in this month's Vanity Fair. The Times' Tom Friedman spent a little time last week with our own Andrew Rasiej and today, Sunday, Nicholas Kristof spends a little time out in Oregon waxing rhapsodic about the free wifi. Oh, and let's not forget the Times own editorial about PDF's kissing cousin, Technorati that ran last week. (Formal Disclaimers: PDF was founded by Rasiej, who is running for Public Advocate in New York City and Technorati's founder, Dave Sifry is brother of PDF Executive Editor Micah who is working on Rasiej's campaign).

A goodly number of PDF contributing editors are either testifying or working hard to lobby the Federal Elections Commission regarding its proposed rulemaking on political commentary on the Internet. That makes it hard for us not to claim first dibs on any conversation going on out there about the role the commission might play in regulating spending in support of speech online.

So, we're claiming them. Read what we've published by former Commission staffer Allison Hayward. Or check out PDF contributing editor Mike Krempasky's testimony along with his other FEC-related comments and commentary at Redstate.org. Or, have a look at the site that Mike K. and his Democratic counterpart, contributing editor Michael Bassik have up at The Online Coalition.

Bloggers, particularly those embarked on reporting or investigation projects as part of citizens journalism undertakings, have a new, important resource from a trusted authority in on-line law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published its Legal Guide for Bloggers. The FAQs up at EFF's site aren't the same as getting a lawyer – and remember laws vary from state to state -- but reading them beforehand will help keep your legal bills down and help your lawyer, should you need one, better prepare to help you.

The topics discussed by EFF's lawyers covers a wide range of issues: copyright, liability and defamation, election, and labor law. The idea is to better inform folks working on-line of their rights.

As EFF says on its site: "Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn't use the law to stifle legitimate free expression."

The guide is free, of course. So bookmark that page.

Mapping trends has always been a favorite tool – sometimes even a sport -- of policy wonks everywhere. Remember redlining? That's the almost classic example of a well-intentioned government program neatly turned into an ban on investment.

Well now, mapping has gone high-tech and the implications are, well, they're tremendous. It's not just pretty pictures anymore, it's three-D malleable information.

We got a taste of this last year during the presidential election when Fundrace.org linked up the addresses of campaign contributors with their donations and created a map of giving trends. A lot of folks who wrote checks weren't happy to see their names and addresses broadcast to the world.

In the past month, two more examples of the power of mapping have popped up. Their timing sugget more, much more, is on the way. One, Paul Rademacher's melding of Google maps and Craigslist's RSS feeds has created a national database of apartment rentals. No kidding. You can now see before you click on the Craigslist ad. Cool, eh?

In one of the better pieces of analysis I've seen – and okay, it is because I agree with him -- Rick Hasen, PDF occasional contributor, makes a few predictions about how the Federal Elections Commission will follow through on attempts to "regulate" blogging.

In essence, Hasen's downplaying all the alarmist scenarios that have been on offer over the past few weeks and predicts, the FEC will come down on the side of bloggers using the media exemption to remain free from oversight. The commission will, in essence, follow the course of action that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors decided to follow.

Here's the professor:

The FEC will likely be inundated with anti-regulation comments from the blogging world, and one commissioner has already indicated that "it's pretty clear that the result is not going to be bad for bloggers." To reach that result, the final regulations are likely to expand the media exemption to virtually all bloggers, or to exempt blogging from regulation altogether even when accomplished with the significant help of corporate or union resources.

Fortune's David Kirkpatrick has taken a look at Scott Heiferman's Meetup.com and it's worth a read. Kirkpatrick does a great job of describing the process that many of us here at PDF talk about a great deal: moving on-line behavior in to the "real world."

Here's an excerpt:

Heiferman says that he and his colleagues have noticed that Meetups are becoming more political—and not just on a national level either. In New York City, a Meetup group for pug owners, for example, helped organize dog owners to protest plans to close dog runs in Washington Square Park. “It was a shock to us,” he says, “that Meetups are not just warm and fuzzy events. Even the dog meetings turn into political gatherings.” In several Meetup groups in Bangalore, India, of which there are now 100, he says that software programmers are working together to improve their working conditions—it’s a nascent move toward collective bargaining.

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A few days ago, I got smacked around by the folks at Captains Quarters over a column I wrote in eWeek about blogging and the FEC.

The story had a dumb headline that didn't really get at the point I was trying to make so Captain Ed made fun of me then pointed out that my eWeek column would exempt me from the commission's rules. Maybe. But maybe not. In any case, I'm not standing behind anyone in claiming free speech rights on a par with Big Media for anyone and everyone working on-line. Anyone who tries it can meet my lawyer. And he makes me look like a nice, refined quiet sort.

Where I differ from the folks at CQ is important, however. And it's one that's going to get easily lost in the calls – particularly on the right – for the FEC to be shut down. Glenn Reynolds has raised his powerful voice in support of this idea. But I think he's wrong for a few reasons.

Please God, would someone – anyone – make the people with salaried journalism jobs stop trying to draw a line between what they do for publications that appear on paper and what people like me, working almost entirely on-line do? Will I – will any of us -- live long enough to see the silly caterwauling about subsidized punditry, fund-raising and partisan bickering die down to a dull roar? It's nothing more than a convenient disguise for salaried journalists to use to assure themselves that their station in life is secure from the rabble in its pajamas. It's short-sighted and silly. And everybody knows (or ought to know) it.

Well, after reading Garance Franke-Ruta's silly and not entirely accurate take-down of the rightwing blogosphere in The American Prospect it seems unlikely that I'll ever get my wish.

The same day that the White House Press office decides to give a day-pass to a writer from the on-line FishbowlDC, Franke-Ruta contemplates the bloggers, specifically the right wing of species, and finds them lacking. Big surprise. The American Prospect ain't exactly non-partisan. But that's not all that's going on with this story which – appearing on The Prospect's site on the World Wide Web begins, "During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events."

Why are bloggers so schizophrenic about Big Media? This isn't a trivial question. Since Big Media – any media, really – is such a part of politics how people use it, see it and react to it is important.

On one hand bloggers love Big Media: They clamor to be on TV, they look on with approval when one of their own is singled out for recognition by a larger, established entity. But they hate it: They dismiss reporters as politically biased, lazy or ignorant. Some bloggers say they'll someday surpass the power of Big Media. Others, it seems, can't wait to get a paying gig with The Man. And Big Media? Well, their reactions seem to range from resentment to a kind of increasingly less grudging respect.

Shows like MSNBC's Coast to Coast are making an effort to get different commentators. But their efforts often lead to – I'm sorry there is only one word for this – the parody enacted by Jeff Jarvis on his site. Jarvis, one of on-line reporting's pioneers, posted a picture of himself sitting in his office talking to MSNCB's Ft. Lee studios a few miles from his house. His family, he happily reported, was downstairs watching him on old-fashioned TV. Something similar happened when the Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum pointed to a Howard Kurtz column in the Washington Post citing some of Drum's recent critics. The fact that Kurtz flat-out ripped off Drum's selection of quotes -- and apparently didn't read the posts themselves -- wasn't mentioned. Try getting away with that sort of laziness toward another Big Media reporter and you'd get your head handed to you.