“Bridge officials set to slam brakes on FasTrak cheats,” a San Francisco Chronicle headline warns. But the article smells like a PR campaign to convince drivers who zip through the gateless toll booths without a pass that something very, very bad is about to happen to them. “FasTrak cheats could face late-night visits from folks who would boot their cars or tow them away.” That’s presuming FasTrak bureaucrats can get new legislation passed. Translation: The electronic toll-collection technology doesn’t work as it was supposed to, and they can’t fix it.

Commenter Beng asked the question about CES’ two-tier journalist passes that I wondered, too: “What is the difference between the blogger badge and the press badge, and does that mean that even Engadget and Gizmodo get blogger badges?” Gizmodo editor Brian Lam is toting a Press badge, just like Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. Our own Jordan Golson has been tagged a “Blogger.” Hey Jordan: Besides a separate lounge with espresso and cookies, what other perks does a Press pass get you that a Blogger badge doesn’t? Just login and let Calacanis answer again, that was hilarious.

Did Plaxo exploit blogger Robert Scoble by cajoling him into breaking Facebook’s terms of service to test a new feature, temporarily getting his account suspended? Plaxo executive John McCrea would prefer you didn’t think so. “Biggest regret? A lot of folks saying/thinking we took advantage of you. Bummer,” McCrea Twittered. Note that McCrea didn’t say he regretted actually taking advantage of Scoble.

That’s because as Plaxo’s vice president of marketing, McCrea was surely aware that his company’s PR agency was actively pitching reporters on the Facebook beat to cover the story. If that’s not taking advantage of Scoble, I don’t know what is — and if McCrea weren’t taking advantage of Scoble in just this way, he wouldn’t be doing his job. Here’s the pitch Plaxo’s agency sent.

“Alicia Mickelsen” 01/03/2008 02:10 PM
Subject: NEWS: Plaxo Pulse’s upcoming feature breaks down the walls of Facebook - causes controversy

Hi REDACTED,

Facebook has one of the few walled gardens left in the ever-growing Open Social Web. And just today the evidence of this walled garden became apparent when a user tried to take their friend’s public contact information and take it with them into another service.

Plaxo has been working on a new feature, a Facebook Import that gets the contact information of your Facebook friends - names, emails and birthdays - and pulls them into your Plaxo Pulse account. In very early stages, this feature caused famed blogger Robert Scoble to lose his Facebook account. However, the Facebook Importer behaves quite similar to other address book import that Plaxo already uses including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

This is an interesting time for the walled vs open debate and Plaxo has been leading the way since the beginning with their support for open standards and OpenSocial, and this step is an interesting move for the future. If you would like to learn about how the Facebook Importer works, how it’s truly unique and new, and what Facebook’s reaction to this first user means for future.

Let me know when you are available today, and I would be happy to put you in touch with Plaxo executives, including the lead engineer of the Facebook Import.

Thanks,
Alicia

Alicia Mickelsen
Breakaway Communications for Plaxo
156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 410, New York, NY 10010

The libertarians are coming! But don’t let a Republican explain it to you. Instead, crazy fun local lefties the San Francisco Bay Guardian report on the Ron Paul phenomenon. I’ve culled some easily-absorbed bullet points from the lengthy article.

• It’s rare to see GOP campaign signs in Mission District windows and beat-up old cars, or crowds of enthusiastic supporters flooding the city’s streets.

• Paul’s frank assessment of the United States as an overreaching empire [remember, this is the Bay Guardian] got his campaign rolling.
• Paul’s libertarian platform is attracting support from lifelong members of the National Rifle Association to medical marijuana activists to disenchanted college students.
• One unifying theme among all Paul supporters is their absolute belief in their candidate’s integrity. “My gut tells me Ron Paul is different.” “Ron Paul’s not trying to sell you on himself; he’s just selling you the message of freedom.” “He is the only Republican nominee who would not steal the election.”
• Paul’s Dec. 16 fundraising push raised more than $6 million in a 24-hour period, breaking the record for funds raised in one day held by the John Kerry 2004 campaign.
• Most of the donations to the Paul campaign are small contributions from committed individuals. The average size of each donation is around $100.
• There is no political mystery to Paul; he has been articulating the same message — one of limited constitutional government, low taxes (if any), and free markets — since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 from his home state of Texas.
• Paul is a self-proclaimed noninterventionist and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He is by no means liberal or progressive; he’s more a classic conservative who opposes government regulation.
• He sees the USA Patriot Act as a breech of civil liberties; wants to stop US involvement in the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other free trade agreements; and supports bringing American troops home from Iraq posthaste.
• He is also staunchly antichoice, introduced legislation in 2004 to repeal bans on assault weapons, and wants to beef up the US’s borders.
• There are more than 80,000 Ron Paul online meet-up members around the country — 452 in the San Francisco group as of the writing of this article — and most of them find themselves in complete agreement with Paul’s perspectives. “We’re right where Kerry was in 2004 going into the primaries, when Dean had already been crowned winner by the media,”

(Photo by Anarchyware)

Source:Valleywag

“I just threw away 5 months of Wired, unread. There may be some newly-minted jargon for that, but I have no way of knowing.” - Adam Lisagor

Source:Valleywag

What, did you think laid-off newspaper vets would become bloggers? The Bay Guardian lists a half-dozen senior editors, bureau chiefs and reporters who’ve escaped the crumbling newspaper economy by becoming publicists for Governor Schwarzenegger and various high-powered firms. The Guardian worries these pros will use their inside knowledge of the news biz to deflect bad coverage from their clients. I disagree: Public relations plays an important role in telling stories accurately and providing journalists with timely, helpful and correct information. (How’s that for spin control? Send any mid-six-figure job offers to paul@valleywag.com.)

The Daily Mirror reports on a factory worker from Yorks whose £27,000 Vodafone bill whups those run up by entrepreneur Joi Ito and Wired editor Chris Anderson. “Ian Simpson, 29, was sent the bill for four weeks’ service after wiring his mobile up to a laptop to download TV shows - and only then found out his £41.50-a-month [Vodafone Anytime 800] deal didn’t include unlimited web use.”
(Photo by Daily Mirror)

FedEx was hit with a $319 million tax bill over the job classification of FedEx ground employees. A number of lawsuits have been filed by FedEx ground drivers who believed the company was responsible for their taxes; FedEx maintained that they were independent contractors. That’s not the interesting part, though. FedEx, in a tried and true public relations move, “took out the trash” and released the bad news late Friday on a holiday weekend. The earliest story we could find on the IRS charge was released at 6:34 pm Eastern, well beyond when most people were reading news stories. Very clever, FedEx. (Photo by Brosner)

A breakdown of my inbox after having my first major tech piece in the NYT:

• “You, sir, are an idiot.” - 2.
• “OMG you mentioned my company! BFF!” - 2.
• “I’m a freelance writer who just happened to think of you today and oh say, what’s your Times editor’s email?” - 2.
• “I know I haven’t talked to you in years, but I’m one of those blue-state middlebrows who thinks the New York Times is the most important publication on Earth — well, that and NPR, which is all I let my kids listen to — and anyway I always knew you were a great writer and now that you’re in Circuits I guess I can admit to knowing you. So I take it you’re no longer a Republican?” - 3, amazingly. I haven’t been so cruelly happy since Berkeley prof Brad DeLong called me a “wingnut” in 2004, apparently for not pulling the lever hard enough when I voted for Kerry. But I digress.
• “Please write the exact same story again, except with me / my client in it.” - 17. I understand. PR people gotta eat, too.
• “God you’re sexy. Brad Stone, too. Is he taken?” - 1. I have no idea. Brad?

When a reporter gets called out for doing something questionable, such as eWeek senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols running Novell press releases as his articles, there’s usually at least the appearance of concern at the publication. You know: Whoops, sorry for the misunderstanding. But eWeek has let Vaughan-Nichols dismiss complaints as some sort of grudge by another writer who posted a dozen or so examples of directly cut-and-pasted paragraphs. Grudge or no, what I see is eWeek — whose 400,000-plus readers include a lot of senior tech people I hang out with — publishing statements written by Novell publicists in a way that makes them look like eWeek’s independent findings and analysis to me. Vaughan-Nichols claims it’s OK: “Like all reporters, I write stories based on press releases.” Like all reporters? I’ll send a $100 iTunes gift certificate to the first reporter besides Vaughan-Nichols who posts 3 links in the comments to his or her own work, each of which contains at least one paragraph provably lifted without attribution from a press release, to which you must also point. Or heck, just email 3 links to paul@valleywag.com and I’ll post ‘em for you.

We’ve heard rumors that there will be three presidents attending the Caribbean wedding of Google cofounder Larry Page and his bride-to-be, Lucy Southworth. The Times Online is reporting that Bill and Hillary Clinton are expected to attend, which leaves two presidents unaccounted for. The likeliest candidates: Dubya and his dad. Here’s why.

The evidence: Lucy’s sister Carrie Southworth, pictured, is an actress whose latest appearance was in an episode of CBS’s Rules of Engagement. She is married to Coddy Johnson, the field director of George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. Johnson is the son of Clay Johnson, Dubya’s roommate at Yale.

Coddy Johnson is also the godson of George W. Bush, according to a classmate at Stanford’s business school, where Johnson graduated this past spring, putting him on campus at the same time as Lucy, who recently passed the oral exam for her Ph.D. in bioinformatics.

Larry and Lucy are hosting a reported 600 guests on Necker Island. Surely the couple could make room for her sister’s husband’s godfather — maybe even his dad. The presence of a sitting president would also explain the extraordinary security measures Page and Southworth are taking.