So this is fun. Back in January, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson sent a subpoena to Room Eight, a local politics blog. The subpoena demanded "identifying details of a Room Eight blogger who wrote under the name 'Republican Dissident,' as well as the authors of a dozen comments on his posts." Are you alarmed yet? Here's the kicker: the subpoena was sealed, with an all-caps warning threatening prosecution if the contents of it were revealed. Now, six months later, the DA's finally given up. And we can all read about how a random functionary on the Bronx Board of Elections got the DA's office—without the DA's knowledge, according to Johnson!—to threaten to expose and prosecute an anonymous blogger and a dozen anonymous commenters, just for criticizing her. So yes the forces of good and anonymous online criticism won out this time. But here's why it's still scary:

It's hard to convince people, sometimes, that blogging is a "real" job. But it totally is, in a statistically insignificant (but marginally growing!) number of cases. But, you know, the obsessive hobbyists don't help with that perception. And, uh, neither does this ad, from the University of Phoenix.

The snob in me has always felt that the casual, rough-draft nature of personal- or promotional-blogging was a bit beneath published authors—or at least the "serious" ones—who have spent months or years painstakingly creating their books, only to start a blog in which they vent insidery frustrations (Keith Gessen!) or post breathless blow-by-blow accounts of how that manuscript is coming along.

It's certainly the impression you get scanning Daily Kos and Think Progress and even the inestimable Talking Points Memo. Don't you people ever drink or get laid? Barack Obama leads John McCain comfortably in the polls, the immediate legacy of the Bush years lies symbolically somewhere between "The Scream" and the Hindenburg, and American liberalism in general is said to be on a dramatic uptick. So why are liberals still so earnest and dire? Here's a random excerpt from today's Kos:

The email reprinted above is the founding document of the beloved Media Bloggers Association, that venerable organization that bloggers across the world recognize as the leading bullshit pretend front for one self-aggrandizing tool to get on TV all the time and pretend to represent citizen journalists. That they recognize now, anyway, because until the MBA inserted itself into the Associated Press blog dispute, no one had heard of the four-year-old organization. Though Robert Cox, the guy behind the MBA, was perhaps more well-known as the notorious right-wing crank and annoying tool behind Olbermann Watch, the blog that disagrees with everything MSNBC host Keith Olbermann says. Come read the email that started it all, and learn so much more about Robert Cox.

Recently, we met the Media Bloggers Association, supposedly a group that provides legal aid to bloggers and one that is currently negotiating with the Associated Press to establish guidlines for reposting tiny snippets of their copy. Our night editor asked who died and made them Internet Kings, and they responded with a bitchy email that said we didn't even email them or anything. Then a couple enterprising commenters did some more research (and not the "email them for comment" kind either-what is up with the internet?). And now we have reason to be suspicious of everything the MBA and their head troll Roger Cox have to say. They might just be a money-making scam!

The Associated Press wants us bloggers to purchase a license from them for permission to quote 5 words from their stories. Ok guys, good luck with that. Recently they threatened some D-list bloggers in order to put the fear of god into everyone, but it backfired, naturally. So they're trying the good cop approach-they will not sue bloggers, they promise, and they will meet with some blogger advocacy group to hammer out an agreement. These new guidelines will be drawn up in consultation with something called the Media Bloggers Association, a.k.a. The Justice Blogiety of America, a.k.a. the Congress of Blogustrial Organizations. It's a powerless group of funny-looking nerds with no ties to mainstream "blogging" as we know it. Amusingly, after Night Editor Ryan Tate made fun of them last night, they sent him a wounded email asking why he didn't call them for comment first. OMG guys, you represent bloggers? Don't you know we never pick up phones? That email is attached, and more fun with the M.B.A. is below.

Not happy with updating your friends publicly via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce and Jaiku (and feeding all those updates into FriendFeed)? Then, um, try Plurk, a startup which declares, "We've taken the time, the complexity, and the deep introspection required out of blogging." Also, too, the irony. [The Inquisitr]

Gopalan Nair, a US citizen and blogger, was arrested and charged in Singapore for insulting a judge. He accused the judge of prostituting herself in a vituperative email and blog post. Then he basically asked to be arrested: "In another post on his blog Saturday, Nair taunted authorities, saying he was in Singapore at a particular hotel, and also gave his phone number." So bilious! Also, kinda dumb! Anyway, we'll add Singapore to the list. [AFP]

Socialite and beginning blogger Emily Brill has "media strategist" representation for her blog chronicling the misadventures of a "Fifth Avenue Misfit." Who knew? It's DolceGoldin, who we reported on earlier re: their dealings with author James Frey. And "she's had one for a while now, surprisingly," we're informed. May we suggest the next strategy for Brill: earning actual monies from said bloggings! [Daily Intel]

We've heard all about the negative effects of blogging: there was the NYT-induced blogger-death panic, in which blogging created an unhealthy lifestyle, resulting in two heart attacks that would have happened anyway. And there are the people who have had relationships destroyed by compulsive blogging. Blogging also exacerbates narcissistic tendencies! But expressing your feelings might actually be good for your health, Scientific American finds: "Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery." Whoa. Four reasons why blogging is good for your health:

The gossip has been coursing into our emails in various forms and tones for several weeks now: former Gawker editor (and newly minted NYT Mag essaysist) Emily Gould and n+1 editor and newly minted novelist Keith Gessen are no longer boyfriend-girlfriend. OK? We'll spare you the overlong analysis of possible root causes. So all you ladies who have been whispering about Keith's hotness from the back of his readings (I was there, I heard you!) can now say it to his face. Gessen's take on the situation? It was casually buried in his article in The Stranger last week:

It's a long holiday weekend, so perhaps by Tuesday there'll be nothing left to say about former Gawker editor Emily Gould's extensive New York Times Magazine cover story about sleeping with people and blogging about it and having panic attacks on bathroom floors? No? Well, in any case, The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar, a Canadian, provides a tasty summary of the essay and the ensuing media cluster-fuck. "This was an extended blog post, an overlong 'Modern Love' essay, 7,937 words that did not venture beyond the author's own experience; for some perspective, the NYT's investigative expose on the Pentagon's purported ties to on-air military analysts had 7,486). And for what?"

"The switched on are switching off," reports the Sydney Morning Herald's Jill Serjeant, who interviewed Internet addicts to ask them how they're fighting back. All very interesting. But we prefer the bits where her sources talk about their symptoms— like how they sometimes blog in their dreams or on the toilet. It helps us feel normal. Check out the whole list below and then, please, share with us your tales of hitting rock bottom.

From the Skwib, a graph called "The Economies of Despair." Lesson learned? The people who read books intersect only vaguely with people who read blogs, or people who buy books written by bloggers.

Twitter is, uh... a microblogging thing, where you tell everyone what you're doing at any given moment. It's basically a colossal waste of time. But if you subscribe to ONLY ONE FEED let it be this one: the Twitter account of London's Tower Bridge. It makes all other Twitter feeds utterly redundant.

Hey, bloggers! The countdown to the three-day weekend clusterfuck of examining and reexamining former Gawker editor Emily Gould's forthcoming New York Times Magazine piece may be cut short! Because The Observer has a copy, and it'll probably be online tomorrow. You are forewarned: there is a photo of a blogger at a laptop, blogging. It's just Emily's hands, though. According to Matt Haber, the piece is "heavily diaristic." Do you want to read about Julia Allison? Sure you do.

A tipster sent us a reminder today, calling us idiots and pointing us to a 2004 Modern Love column from the NYT, which we will refer to as "The Dangers of Blogger Love 1.0." A young female blogger named Heather Hunter met a boy-blogger, through their respective blogs. And the girl found out about another woman in her guy's life... through that woman's blog. Read on, for the blogger-love warning that went ignored.

Jeez. Busty Amanda Congdon left her gig hosting internet video time-waster Rocketboom back in 2006? Has it really been so long since anyone's heard from her? Well, you know the story. She moved on to bigger and better things, on proper television. An HBO development deal and a gig with ABC news. Neither went anywhere. ABC had no use for her, and they were also a little peeved that she was doing "freelance commercial work" for DuPont. Her development deal developed nothing. So now she's hooked up with some production studio called Media Rights Capital to make another cheap web video program. Hooray! Did you know Congdon invented being internet-famous, btw?

Novelist Nicholson Baker's new non-fiction tome, Human Smoke, details World War II through a series of wispy, "Gawker-like vignettes" of 100 to 200 words each. The New Republic's Anne Applebaum thinks that approach is crap.