Bloggers are rightly suspicious of mainstream media sites that add blogs. The mechanics are just a starting point: reverse chronological order, a stable permalink, archives by date, etc. Much more important is the culture or philosophy of blogging.

Unwritten rule #1: link to your source.

Blogs are part of a conversation. They are (in part) a reaction against the old media model of a professional news organization deciding what stories to cover, and what information to include in each story. In the world of blogs, anyone is welcome to add to the conversation -- as long as they link to their source. That link is both a "hat tip" to give credit to someone who had the story earlier and an invitation for readers to dig deeper on their own. It overthrows the notion that the writer (journalist, reporter, blogger) is the sole interpreter and packager of what's important.

Today's violation: Martin LaMonica at CNET News.com's "News Blog": Gold-plated support comes to Amazon Web Services

Looking to take on more demanding customers, Amazon Web Services on Thursday rolled out two paid-support plans that give customers access to its engineers to resolve glitches.

OK, that's interesting. How much does it cost? Where do I learn more?

Not from CNET, so let's look at a few real blogs:

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm has the prices:

It’s offering two different service levels: One starting at $100 a month and the other, at $400.

Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb covers a related announcement:

Amazon is also beefing up support options for free customers with the release of the new AWS Service Hearth Dashboard that monitors the status of all AWS services. Amazon says that during outages, users can expect to see updates from the team every 15-30 minutes until things are fixed. Status updates can be accessed via the page or by RSS.

Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, offers his perspective as a customer:

I’d still like to see a pay-per-incident model, personally, even with an extremely high price-tag for each incident. We rarely use support for AWS, but at the same time, we’re very big customers of theirs, so the monthly price is quite high. But if we really come up against a big problem, it’d be nice to know I could pay for support just that one time. I imagine most of their customers will like their Silver and Gold monthly packages, but for us, they’re just not quite the right fit. Do they work for you?

Each of these bloggers linked to Amazon's detail page or to today's post on Amazon's very useful Web Services blog (or both).

That's how to blog. Maybe CNET should take lessons.