The “it’s possible to do this stuff already, simply by following these 65 simple steps…” arguments don’t hold a lot of water with me, frankly. You say that a regular journalist could start a blog with a free copy of WordPress and a few easily-installed plugins. I think that process actually sounds, to a regular beat reporter, something like “find and pay for a web host, figure out what the hell FTP is, grab a zip file, figure out how to get that onto a server, ask somebody which half-dozen *other* random zip files you need from across the web, deal with each of those, get them properly working with one another, and then repeat this process every other week just to deal with the security vulnerabilities in your WordPress”.

I don’t know about you, but that seems like a hell of a lot of distraction from actual reporting. And that’s just to get *started*. Meanwhile, I’ve heard from journalists on WordPress.com who were thinking of paying $6000 for the first year of VIP service, just so they could have ads on their blog. That seems like madness, too.

The same things go for the concerns about display ads and the promotion on Blogs.com. Even if you do figure out the secret to turning on display ads from Google, you’re still obligated to remove any objectionable ads after they’ve appeared on your site. Our program lets publishers filter ads before they’ve gone live, so you don’t end up having to monitor your own site to see if it offends you. While anyone is welcome to submit their site to Blogs.com, not every site is accepted, as the members of this program will be. And that’s not to say that the program won’t encompass more in the future — we just wanted to stick to what we know we can offer right now.

But nitpicking aside, I do think you follow the gist of what we’re doing, and I appreciate the considered take on the concept behind it. I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here: This isn’t designed to be a silver bullet, just a smart option for those who are interested. Sure, tech-savvy journalists could string all of this stuff together on their own, if they had the time to do it and were willing to take their eye of off their actual work to do so. But my goal was that we would provide a clear path forward, and it sounds as if you agree we’ve succeeded in providing at least a first step there.

Finally, I do hope you’ll keep the healthy skepticism about what we’re doing, but at the same time I encourage you to remember that most journalists are not in the job of learning technology any more than they were in the job of setting type. Every time I hear “just” do these technical steps or “just” learn these new technologies, I think we’re possibly leaving behind a whole generation of journalists who do good work but haven’t had the time or inclination to immerse themselves in the world of web technology like you or I have. We owe it to them to offer more.

(And frankly, I’d love to have you participate, if only so we don’t have to worry about you losing all your posts again! :))