It’s been a topsy-turvy time for the reputation of bloggers.

First, Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today posted a thoughtful piece on bloggers, intellectual property and plagiarism.

Borrowing a phrase from Dan Zarella’s post on the same theme, he wonders whether some bloggers are anything more than “human aggregators”.

He describes the growing number of “grey blogs”, that stand somewhere between content creation and content theft:

These sites, which for this article I’ll simply call “gray”, are generally identified by a large number of very short posts, with much of it in block quotes or otherwise directly lifted content. Though they meticulously credit their sources, bowing to more traditional rules for blog attribution, and work to add at least some original content, usually over half of their material comes from other sources.

The situation is made more complex, he suggests, by the fact that there are many shades of grey blogs. Still, he claims, there comes a point at which grey blogs overstep the mark, and “get away with content theft under the guise of legitimate attribution”.

He proposes a list of seven guidelines to sift the shades the grey and preserve quality writing on the Internet. Without some form of action, he fears that “high quality writers will have little motivation to post their works on-line and, as the well slowly dries up, there will be less and less work available for either reuse or for simply reading.”

This is an advance on the usual, tired “Journalists good, Bloggers bad” debate. Tony Long, my favourite curmudgeon, is fond of regarding bloggers as weeping pimples on the chiselled jaw of Real Journalism, or “self-absorbed ramblers” , not only content thieves but — what’s worse — content thieves who can’t string a sentence together or spell worth a damn.

At the other end of the reputation spectrum, everyone with an Internet connection must now know that Apple has lost a court-case which is being reported (or misreported? ) as a “Victory for Bloggers” which accords them some of the same rights enjoyed by journalists when it comes to the protection of their sources.

The many posts I’ve read on this topic seem able to negotiate the semantic minefields here with hardly a second thought.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was particularly upbeat :

“In addition to being a free speech victory for every citizen reporter who uses the Internet to distribute news, today’s decision is a profound electronic privacy victory for everyone who uses email,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can’t subpoena your stored email from your service provider.”

Journalists, content thieves or just hacks?

My suspicion is that in this buzzword-compliant age, the role of the new media is overdone. All three exist as abundantly in print and traditional media as they do in the blogosphere. Readers still need to be as discriminating and sensible about what they read as ever.

So go and read Daring Fireball , or Red Sweater or Betalogue or 43 Folders or something.bloggers, blogs, journalism, standards, plagiarism, content theft, grey areas, intellectual property, apple, hacks

A post on the The Rumbling Edge, Mozilla’s site for cutting-edge developments, lists the features and improvements that will appear in Thunderbird 2.0 Alpha 1.0, which has not yet been released.

Top of the list are custom Folder Pane Views for things like favorites, unread and recently used email. You will also be able to tag messages, and open multiple messages in individual tabs.

The new version will offer built-in notification of new email, which may look something like this:

You will be able to get pop-up summaries of the contents in folders.

Security will be enhanced with an improved Bayesian algorithm and better protection from Phishing.

Lastly, it will offer support for “find as you type” filtering.

The post lists all the many more fixes and improvements in detail, including twelve Mac-specific issues.

I see nothing to tempt me away from Mail.app, but it is interesting to see how Thunderbird is developing.email, thunderbird 2.0, mozilla, new features, notification, folders,

Hawk Wings could post stories about people who switch over from Windows and are gob-smacked by the power and elegance of Mail.app over and over and over again.

Aki at Aki’s Blog has given up on the Mac dream after four years as a PowerBook user, and is moving back to Windows. And not just back to Windows, back to Windows on Dell.

He mentions price, Java-support and battery life among his reasons, not least “Reasonable tools exist in Windows… such that many of the productivity gains I got on my Mac are now possible in Windows.”

What does he miss? His old 12″ PowerBook has Unix and was sexy, two words that you don’t often see close together. switching, mac, windows, dell, productivity, not apple mail

Emailchemy is an amazing utility that can convert and retrieve emails out of almost any email client you have ever heard of and some that didn’t know existed.

See an earlier Hawk Wings post for a full list of the 19 clients and formats it understands.

It can save emails and mailboxes from these clients into the following formats:

RFC-2822 mailboxes (”mbox” format or “UNIX-style”) and variants, folders of individual RFC-2822 email files (.txt or .eml files), Comma-separated value files (.csv files), Maildir (qmail) and Maildir++ (Courier IMAP).

An updated version released today support for reading and writing Entourage .rge archive files.

Emailchemy is shareware (USD 25 for a single user) and is available from the developer’s webs site .mailboxes, conversion, mbox, email, maildir, old email clients

The Automator web site contains a treasure trove of actions and tutorials on harnessing the power of Mac OS ‘s X Automator.

Some of these actions work with Mail.app to automate it and help you get things done more quickly.

Desktop Mailer offers three Automator actions to speed up the emailing of files.

Following the step-by-step tutorials creates three actions that can be added to Finder’s Contextual Menu, allowing you to add a selected item to a new mail message, to archive selected items in a zip file and email them or to just add selected items to an email:

Of course, you can do some of these things with Quicksilver or simply by dropping the files onto Mails Dock icon, but this way may suit some people better.

Another workflow automatically adds photos in emails from particular senders to a project in your Aperture library.

The iWeb Action Pack adds five Automator actions to iWeb, including one that will automatically extract images from cell phone messages sent to your email account and add them to your iWeb blog.

[Thanks, Nyhthawk, for the tip]automator, iweb, aperture, files, mail.app, apple mail, automation, tips, plugins

James Eagan has updated his Attachment Scanner plugin for Mail.app, which checks messages for attachments, and when it decides one is missing, give you a warning before you send.

With the help of several translators, it will now scan for attachments in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.

The plugin is freeware and you can get the updated version from James’ web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugins, attachments, localization

I am a big fan of Services in Mac OS X, especially of the way that they speed me up in Mail and elsewhere.

While plugins already exist to give you access to maps for contacts in your Address Book, today Robert Stainsby released a Service that makes Google Maps and ZoomIn Australia and New Zealand maps available for the text of any address that you select in any app.

Tonight I was reading a PDF about a meeting tomorrow.

With this Service installed, all I had to do was select the text of the address in the PDF, and then select the mapping service from the Services menu:

It switches to my browser and open a map (in this case) from ZoomIn Australia that shows me exactly where I need to go:

Very nifty. I’ll can see myself using this a lot.

MappingService is donation-ware and can be downloaded from Robert’s web site .address book, Google maps, services, productivity, zoomin, maps, where do you want to go today, helpful apps