Are you a blogger for hire? Looking to con your way onto talk shows? Perhaps marginally raise your advertising rates? Well for a measly $15, you can give your career a much-needed jumpstart with Bloggings Most Wanted. In a scheme riffing (or ripping) off the Million Dollar Homepage, which sold 1 million pixels at $1 a piece, Bloggings Most Wanted offers up a 40-by-40-pixel square for every $15 you spend.

The Internet Society of China forced blog service providers like Yahoo and MSN to sign a "self-disciplinary pact," says Reporters Without Borders. The pact requires blog hosts to "censor content and identify bloggers." Alas, it does not require bloggers to "add value." [Boing Boing]

Bloggers are journalists too, say the CIA and NSA. The U.S. government spy houses both recently changed their policies on whom they consider press. The most tangible impact: waived copying fees on documents requested through the Freedom of Information Act [The Blotter]

Six Apart has, at last, released Movable Type 4.0. The best new feature in the blog-software package: You know those hopelessly annoying dweebs who leave tiresome comments on your blog? Why, now you can "promote" them to be full authors! How thrilling: more loser-generated content. A feature suggestion for Movable Type 4.1: Give readers the ability to demote them right back to commenter status. [Movabletype.com]

A blogger has noticed that Gawker Media, publisher of Valleywag, Gizmodo, and other blogs, makes its sites' traffic numbers public, as well as its advertising rate card, and done the basic math. But if you believe a revenue projection that ignores discounts off the rate card and unsold inventory, then our publisher, Nick Denton, has a bridge to sell you. Maybe even some ads, too. [Shylock Blogging]

Earlier this week, we conducted a thoroughly unscientific poll asking Valleywag readers how much Forbes should pay Dan Lyons, the senior editor recently revealed to be Fake Steve Jobs, to bring his faux-Apple-CEO show to the magazine's website. The answer? A solid majority said Forbes should pay Lyons at least $100,000, and the weighted average of the votes came in at $275,495. That's just a bit more than Lyons school chum and Lenovo marketing VP David Churbuck said the blog was worth, shortly before his pal was outed. The people have spoken, and for Lyons's sakes, one hopes his bosses will listen — but I can't help pointing out that that's a lot of cheddar for a blog long on cheese. The final results, after the jump.

Attention, blogtards: Michael Arrington has seceded from the blogosphere, a space in which his ego no longer apparently fits. In an otherwise tiresome review of yet another Web 2.0 product, Arrington made this fascinating observation:

First Fake Steve Jobs went to Forbes.com; now Freakonomics, the economics blog, has relocated to the New York Times website. The assimilation of blogs into mainstream media continues apace. [Freakonomics]

For the moment, reason reigns at Six Apart headquarters. Executives at the maker of Movable Type, the popular blog software, have ordered the release of another test version instead of rushing out a new release. [MovableType.org]

Gartner, the Internet research firm, is making a bold prediction that flies in the face of the contemporary spasm of blog enthusiasm: Blogging will peak this year, according to a summary of the report by Ars Technica. And this stat really caught my eye: There are 200 already million ex-bloggers. Oh, I can think of a lot of names I'd like to see added to those ranks. And I could speculate about what a slowdown in blogging could do to a lot of blog-based businesses in the Bay Area. But I'm just not feeling it. Instead, with apologies to Monty Python, a sketch about an ex-blogger.

A blogger's life is tough. Roll out of bed, brew some coffee and begin espousing your views to the world — all from the safety of your home and Strawberry Shortcake bathrobe. Those are the harsh working conditions that prompt us to, like oppressed steelworkers of old, demand organization and representation. We want a freaking union. Or so say the deluded Internet scribblers at Chicago's YearlyKos blogging convention. Those attending the gathering are under the impression that a professional labor group will make bloggers more respectable. Instead, the call to arms just shows how clueless political bloggers are about the business.

Movable Type, the aging blog software made by San Francisco startup Six Apart, may be set to release a new 4.0 version on Tuesday. Barely. Which is bad, considering that Movable Type is still the company's cash cow. Byrne Reese, its product manager, accidentally forwarded an internal planning memo to an outside developers' mailing list. Reese says the memo, meant to help management decide on Monday whether or not the product is ready, is "intentionally pessimistic." But it has a laundry list of unresolved bugs. And Reese admits that some of the bugs will "dramatically slow" adoption of the new version. Despite that, he thinks the company can "manage" a release. And by manage, he means spin like a top: "We will need to be on our toes in regards to communication and PR to stay ahead of the curve with people who will say that we rushed the release." Here's a radical notion, for a blog-software company that claims to be about transparency: Why not just admit you did, in fact, rush the release? The full memo, after the jump:

Chitika, an ad network for bloggers, has released a self-serving and utterly ridiculous study estimating the blogosphere's revenues at $500 million. Shamefully, the University of Texas participated in the charade (PDF), relying on data from Chitika customers and Technorati popularity rank. Chitika's customer sample, of course, could be biased and flawed in a thousand different ways; why the UT-Dallas researchers didn't insist on a random sampling is beyond me. And Technorati, of course, measures the number of blogs that link to a blog — an interesting datum, but not one that correlates with traffic, or that advertisers particularly care about. A more realistic estimate?

Blogs continue to sell — but blog valuations are staying modest. Discovery Communications, the cable-and-online media company, has bought enviro blog TreeHugger for a reported $10 million. With nearly 2 million unique visitors, that means Discovery paid a very modest $5 per "eyeball" — the unpleasant online-advertising slang for a reader. Contrast that to the bubbly hopes of GigaOm's Om Malik back in 2005, when he wrote about the "return of monetized eyeballs" for Business 2.0. (Full disclosure: I helped him crunch the numbers for that story.)

Om Malik, the moody tech blogger behind GigaOm, is better known for his blue periods. But now he's entering a green phase with his new environmental blog, Earth2Tech. His heart's hardly in it, however. In sending around a note announcing the site, all he could manage was this: "Apparently like everyone else, we are going green!" For those who know Malik, that's his slightly chagrined way of admitting he's following a trend, not setting one. While it may not attract much excitement from its creator, it's sure to pull in those green ad dollars. (Side note: GigaOm contributor and Earth2Tech lead writer Katie Fehrenbacher is the sister of Jill Fehrenbacher, who in turn is Engadget founder Peter Rojas's girlfriend.)

The Times has deigned to notice that people are getting hired as bloggers. A very few, though. And in a trend that should be worrisome to English majors, most of those getting gigs seem to be geeky sorts like Robert Scoble, who are adept not just at writing blogs but at setting up the tech behind them. No matter. As anyone at Gawker Media could tell you, the tricky part isn't getting hired to run a blog - it's managing to not get fired.

In recent articles by CNET's Greg Sandoval and Martin LaMonica, the reporters referred to "wrote in a recent blog" and "posted a blog." Which suggests some editor at CNET is imparting a house style. And it's wrong. I'm tired enough of the word "blog" as it is, and in our crazy, mixed-up world of new media neologisms, but when I update a blog, it's with a "post" or "entry." Blog is short for "Web log," and refers to the collection of posts, entries and comments over time — yes, the hoary Chicago Manual of Style has set up rules for citing blogs, as has the AP.