do the se's actually penalize for frequent blog updates?
 

i was considering running a blog which updates every hour on the hour with a fresh gallery, however the point was brought up that the se's might take this as spam and penalize me. is this a possibility? what are the issues surrounding this?

SE's dont care how often you update.
On the other side, blog directories will ban you pretty quick.

wow, so I guess cnn.com gets penalized hardcore by updating every 10 minutes or so, huh?

SE's like frequent updates

Not much, the only thing is that you can't submit to blog directories that list the latest blog posts of the submitted blogs.

Exactly, if your updating with fresh content I don't think your going to have a problem. Sites that usually cop it from google for spam have 1000's of pages overnight you will be fine.

A fresh gallery every hour?

Assumption would be a hosted gallery as well right?