MacNN is reporting a huge win for bloggers and online journalists in their fight against Apple.

Earlier this month, a Santa Clara County Court ordered Apple to pay the legal fees associated with the defense of subpoenas issued to online journalists (and other related entities) in response to online reports about a confidential audio/video product — code-named “Asteroid” — under development at the Cupertino-based company. The “Asteroid” product was never released, but Apple claimed the news reports violated California state trade secret law and that the journalists were not entitled to First Amendment protections

As a result of the final decision, the court ordered that Apple pay 2.2 times all the actual legal costs and fees incurred by the journalists. A sum that amounted to almost $700,000.

For 99% of us, blogging is not the road to riches. So why not try and save as much money in the process as we can? If you are blogging, and have bought a computer solely for that purpose, blog from home, and are pursuing some monetization mechanism for your blog, you can most likely declare yourself a home business! By doing that, you can claim tax deductions on your newly established home business.

There are several requirements for eligibility though:

Requirement #1: Regular and exclusive use. You must regularly use part of your home exclusively for a trade or business.

Requirement #2: Principal place of business. You must also be able to show that you use your home as your principal place of business.

Learn more.

Have a sense of humor? You’re in luck, because funny works. Of course its great to be interesting and engaging, but it is equally important to not take yourself too seriously and inject some light-hearted humor into your writing.

Here are three reasons why humor is good for your blog

1. Humor let’s your personality show
2. Humor lightens the mood
3. Humor makes your blog stand out from all the other ones

Tan Kian Ann has more.

Six Apart wants me to get excited about this:

Today, Microsoft is making some of their biggest announcements ever — if you’re even remotely interested in technology news, you’re going to hear about the launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. But what you might not know is that these new milestones mark the first time that blogging can really be integrated between Movable Type Enterprise and two of the most popular software platforms in the world.

Now dont get me wrong. I used to like Six Apart, but again why use Microsoft Word. The future of companies is small. Small is the new big. I want tools that work for small businesses. Most small business owners I talk to are using Open Office, because its free.
Other’s use Google Docs.

I haven’t fired up Microsoft Word in ages. In fact I don’t know of very many people with a home edition copy of this software. I really want to get excited about MovableType. But the only way that’s going to happen is if they port that to PHP/MySQL for my entertainment. Give away all access for free and make it open source.

I know I’m dreaming. Anil Dash needs to find some new product to evangelize. Because he hasn’t been the most popular SA Evangelist, and he sure isn’t going to pass as Microsoft’s new product evangelist.

One of my favorite tools on the web for a long time has unofficial been retired. Overture Keyword tool was a tool to determine the volume of searches on the Overture Network, which includes Yahoo’s search engine.

Yahoo’s upcoming Panama ad integration made this tool obsolete as they won’t be using the old Overture system. So I knew it was coming but it came at a time in which I have just now realized how much I’ve been suckling on its nipple.

Anyhow Yahoo/Overture thanks for your years of awesome service.

In last weeks post on Linkbaiting I introduced you to linkbaiting. I also made the blanket statement that Wikipedia was the best living linkbait on the planet. I want to explain how easy it is to create resources that are highly link receptive.

Link Receptive Resources are easily explained as stuff people want to link to.

I was recently pondering a few link receptive resources I’ve been wanting to link to. The first person that comes to mind is Andy Hagans. He seems to create, or have his team of workers create stuff that just asks to be linked to.

Remix and Reorganize Content To Make It Link Receptive
Instead I want to talk about Elite Skills’ Massive Resource List For All Autodidacts. This link alone has been huge in picking up links at the moment in Yahoo Site Explorer it had picked up 4k plus inlinks.
More →

Hillary Clinton is running for President, and she has apparently found herself a tech-savvy PR staff.

Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?

She’s asking this via Yahoo Answers, a service that we’ve blogged about before. This is a good thing, most communication methods are, but also for the ever evolving web. Joe Shmoe can sit there and think “hey, if Hillary does it, it can’t be that bad!” and perhaps be a bit more open minded on online services. Web 2.0 should celebrate this, since Hillary Clinton won’t be the only one cuddling with the internet crowd this year.

Thanks for the typ, J!

Jeremy Schoemaker, a top blogger who blogs at Shoe Money, currently ranked #93 on Technorati’s top 100 and ranked 1,373rd on Alexa, has been subpoenaed for a slanderous comment made on his blog.

Schoemaker hired QuickConnect for some web design work and when he wasn’t happy with the results, he wrote about his feelings on his blog and how he found a new designer. The slanderous comment on the same post appears as follows:

Just learned something new about Quick Connect today. I watch their site pretty closely, and they have a staff page. At one point we courted their lead designer, Duane Teeters. We offered him a ton to come work for us, but he was loyal to Yoder and to his credit was a good employee. Well, he is GONE from their staff page. Yoder hired two kids to replace this talented guy, and their work is not nearly as good as Duane’s IMO.

Oh, and if you want a nice laugh, one of the kids he hired is named Josh. If you visit Quick Connect’s homepage at http://www.helpmypc.com and view the source, you should do a search on the age for the word “Josh.” It looks like Josh has some hidden links on Yoder’s home page to promote his own art business.

This guy doesn’t seem to be able to keep a reign on his own employees! And also, I received a Dunn and Bradstreet report on him yesterday. He was shifted from a “likely to pay on time” category to a “high credit risk” category. That would explain where you $3,000 went. It is gone just like Duane.

This case is an important one for the blogging community for multiple reasons.

More →

Rafat Ali is reporting that Shiny Media has received 4.5 Million in Venture Funding. This is the second blogging firm to receive venture capital in as many months. I’m a bit shocked that a new media group would give up 50% of their publishing firm for 4.5 million.

Taking this kind of money is definetly a huge risk. Venture capitalists are definetly going to want to see some good return on their investment

From Paid Content:

UK-based blog media company Shiny Media has received a relatively big $4.5 million in funding. The round was led by a new VC firm called Bright Station Ventures. Shiny was founded by three freelance technology journalists in UK in 2003, and now the company has 22 blogs and says it gets three million readers each month, and employs over thirty bloggers. With the funding, BrightStation gets 50 percent stake in the company, this Times UK story says.

Brightstation is a new VC firm founded by the flamboyant UK entrepreneur Dan Wagner, with a total fund size of $100 million. Wagner bought business info service Dialog in 1997, then sold it, missed investing early on in eBay, and then went on to do bunch of other startups.

Fresh out of ideas to write about? Can almost feel the blogger’s block come on? Don’t worry, this is completely normal, and in fact help isn’t too far away. Here are several unorthodox tools you can take advantage of to get your creative juices flowing.

1. Usenet / GG Groups
2. Yahoo! Answers
3. Google / Yahoo! News
4. Keyword Tools
5. Technorati
6. Del.icio.us
7. Digg & Reddit
8. StumbleUpon
9. Wikipedia
10. Craigslist

I have used Technorati and Digg myself and found them to be very useful.

Read more.