Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association has an interesting op-ed piece on the new frontiers in First Amendment freedoms created by bloggers. Clearly, when the First Amendment was written, the Founding Fathers didn’t envision a world where every man owns his own printing press and has access to nearly every man, woman and child on the planet.

The past five years have seen unprecedented changes in the media landscape. Bloggers have been credentialed to major political conventions; played a key role in ending the career of a powerful news broadcaster; derailed a major political campaign, thus shifting power in the U.S. Senate; received media credentials to cover a high-profile federal trial; and, most recently, were embedded in presidential campaigns.

The advent of near-ubiquitous recording devices such as cell phones, iPods and digital cameras, combined with Web-based broadcast platforms such as blogs, video-sharing sites and podcasts, means “news” can be broadcast by anyone to anywhere at a speed of thousands of megabytes per second with an audience reach of infinite size - all at little or no cost. The world is only slowly catching up with implications of this new media landscape where any person is potentially gathering news at any given moment.

Cox also point out how conflicted the sports business is over bloggers:

The Dallas Mavericks banned a local sports reporter from their locker room on the grounds that the writer’s articles only appeared on the newspaper’s sports blog. The LPGA credentialed a blogger one year then refused the same writer the next year on the grounds that the LPGA did not credential bloggers.

I think the question for the LPGA (and PGA) is whether they’ll “get it” in time to take advantage of bloggers. Will they take advantage of the new media and viral marketing? Or will they be left behind?

Stop the madness.

Apparently, a group of leftist bloggers are trying to form a union of bloggers. They think it will help them to get health care benefits; they also plan on collective bargaining and professional standards.

I’m having a really hard time wrapping my brain around this one. Collective bargaining with whom? I have a golf blog because I love to write, and I love golf. I work for no one, so there’s no one to negotiate with. (OK, so there’s Mrs. Golfblogger. But that’s not a negotiation. I just do what she tells me). I have ads, but if I don’t like Google’s terms, I’ll just go to a different ad agency. There are dozens of them out there.

Professional standards? Please. Some of these people are the ones who write on a regular basis about how Bush blew up the towers. And I regularly visit the grassy knoll with the latest PGA Tour conspiracy theory.

There’s some sense in the health care benefits thing. I suppose that if enough of them got together in a pool, Blue Cross would give them a better rate. But there are already any number of small business pools they could join. If their blogs are making money, they surely count as small businesses. GolfBlogger, for example is incorporated as an Limited Liability Corporation (but that’s more about liability issues than any potential profits).

And if they did manage to pull such a thing off, I wonder if the internet would suddenly become a closed shop. Would I have to join to blog? Would I suddenly have someone to answer to? And could I belong to more than one union at once. I’m already a member of the teacher’s union (we have a closed shop ... all teachers MUST be members.)

The whole idea is just nutty. The internet is decentralized and anarchic. Once people start imposing a structure on it, it’ll lose what makes it such a great thing in the first place.

I’ve been participating in a blogger’s secret word game, in which each week we get emailed a word, and are expected to use it in the most clever fashion possible. The first week’s word was flatulent; week two was speculum. Week three is: floccinaucinihilipilification, which means judging something to be worthless.

I have no idea how to incorporate this into a golf post. Ideas and suggestions requested.

Any golf bloggers out there interested in starting a Golf Blogger’s fantasy golf league at CBS Sportsline? I thought we might start a blogger’s pick-a-pro league. If you’re interested drop me a line. If we get enough, I’ll go about setting up the league.