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Should bloggers pay city's $300 business tax?

The good news for bloggers in Philadelphia - even those raking in the princely sum of $11 a year - is that there's not a secret team in the basement of City Hall reading your Web site and looking to hit you up for taxes and business fees.

The good news for bloggers in Philadelphia - even those raking in the princely sum of $11 a year - is that there's not a secret team in the basement of City Hall reading your Web site and looking to hit you up for taxes and business fees.

The bad news is that city officials do plan on working aggressively through federal tax records to find city-based income producers - not just bloggers but all types of freelancers - to make sure they're up to date with the city's one-time business privilege fee of $300 and other relevant taxes.

"If they're doing business out there, we want our money," said Revenue Commissioner Keith Richardson. "We want our fair share."

City revenue officials have made an effort to collect business taxes and fees from city-based freelancers - even from obscure bloggers who typically reap minuscule income from display or text ads.

But the cash-strapped city's tax-amnesty program earlier this year - which included letters to some 32,000 potential delinquent taxpayers identified in cross-checks with the Internal Revenue Service - seems to have raised both awareness and anger.

Some bloggers who barely collect beer money from online advertising affiliate programs like Google AdSense say the business fee - which can be either a one-time payment of $300 or $50 a year - is an unnecessary hassle and could chill expression in one of the nation's blogging capitals.

Recent publicity over City Hall's renewed efforts to collect the tax filtered up this week to widely read news sites like the Drudge Report and the popular tech blog Mashable. That seems to be triggering a debate over whether Philadelphia is overzealous in regulating what many see as more a form of expression than a potential source of riches.

One Philadelphia blogger who says he was alarmed to learn of the $300 tax obligation is Sean Barry, who says he's earned a whopping total of $11 though Google ads since he launched a blog called Circle of Fits about his passion for rock 'n' roll.

"If they want to come after me, fine - I didn't have any money," Barry said last night. "They have to contact Blogger [a popular blogging platform now owned by Google.] Blogger owns my blog. It doesn't make sense."

Joey Sweeney, of the popular local blog Philebrity, bragged in a post yesterday that he's all paid up - but that doesn't mean he likes the policy.

"At this point," he wrote yesterday, "Philly's brain drain is so drastic and wild that any news story that runs anywhere about how the City, in any official capacity, discourages creativity or free speech feels like a punch in the face."