Thousands of engineers are at the Moscone Center in San Francisco attending Apple Computer's Worldwide Developer Conference. They were greeted with this sign:

This is not the first time Apple has attempted Silence of the Blogs. Last May a California Appeals Court

"smacked down Apple's legal assault on bloggers and their sources, finding that the company's efforts to subpoena e-mail received by the publishers of Apple Insider and PowerPage.org runs contrary to federal law, California's reporter's shield law, and the state Constitution."

In traditional journalism it's called being on "deep background"--a very accepted policy where journalists agree that the information they are about to learn is not publishable.

In his blog, Steve Rubel takes a swipe at this policy saying,

This raises an interesting question. Is information that is presented at a public forum bloggable? I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV, but this seems somewhat draconian to me.

To which the commenters not only took him to task for not disclosing that his employer, Edelman, has Microsoft as a client but reminded him this is an invitation only conference.

It is curious that someone of Rubel's experience didn't know that the conference is not a public event. A point that was shared in the comment section.

WWDC is a private event for developers which sign NDAs to be developers and NDAs to attend. They're given advance looks at technology in person and in lectures that they will later receive on DVDs and online. So it's not a public event in any real sense.

There are a few public press events tied to WWDC because they found it was a better forum than Macworld Boston in attracting press, and it's a forum they control.

This is one of Apple's rare regular events in which they slip the kimono in the interests of providing enough information for their partners to get their job done.

But it is Blogher's Susan Getgood who sums up the situation with this rather pithy comment--

Does this seem like a little bit of a PR stunt at all?

Image Credit: Flickr member and blogger John Gruber
Elana also blogs at FunnyBusiness-- a blog about business culture.