I agree with many of Shelley’s points in the other thread. But I am perplexed as anyone else why AP decided to pick on Cadenhead first.

Here’s what I posted to the “Bits” blog in response to Saul Hansell’s comment. It’s for your readers, too, while this Times subscriber awaits to get his mere words approved…

On the topic of blogger boycotts, I might have some expertise, having studied the blogger “boycott” of TimesSelect. Indeed there was plenty of hot air in May and September 2005, with many bloggers swore off linking to the Times columnists (or even the rest of the paper!), but few kept to the boycott strictly. JD Lasica couldn’t resist a “Paul Krugman nails it” 11 months into his boycott.

And what was the effect? As best as I could determine, while readership of the Op-Ed’s declined 45%, the number of blog references to the Times columnists declined only 20% as compared to the pundit peers. I shared my analysis with the Times (and other media/academic/bloggers), but had very little help from the Times (and no data) beyond a conversation with Marshall Simmonds.

http://civilities.net/TimesSelect

Did the blogger boycott hasten TimesSelect’s demise? Maybe, maybe not: I don’t have the data. Simmonds was not in a position to share the referral data with me, so I ultimately couldn’t make a judgment on it.

As per this scenario, my guess is that the A.P. has more of a problem with Cadenhead’s “Drudge Retort” looking like a wire feed. There’s a great assortment of things we call “blogs”– and a link-an-excerpt service is much closer to a spam blog or Digg than it is a comment-and-analysis type weblog. One definition of a blogger is that you automatically close ranks around any other blogger in a jam, and hence all the excitement here today.