Nick Denton’s Valleywag reported that his pseudo-competitor John Battelle’s Federated Media might have crossed the integrity line when he got Microsoft to pay for a bunch of his roster’s so-called elite, A-list bloggers to write something that supported MSFT’s “People Ready” campaign.
Dave “no nonsense” Winer chimes in here. By the time the dust settles, a lot more will. In the few minutes since I started writing this, CNET’s jumped on board, too.
I wasn’t gonna touch this initally. Then I said “who cares,” let’s piss of some more people. Also, by way of disclosure, I “know” some of the people MSFT has sponsored, “know” in the Web blogging sense.
Anyway, my take is simple: while this is certainly questionable and in my opinion, wrong, it comes with the terrain of a new medium, ie. blogs. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not prescribing to the Amanda Congdon school of “I’m not a journalist so I can do and say what I want.” Au contraire, I think this will eventually not pass at all, but as the medium grows, we’ll see this kind of stuff. Mainly, in 1, 3, 5 years, do you really think as many VCs will be blogging as do today? But more on that later.
On the one hand, I’m tired of the whole “conversational media” BS, cause blogs are anything but. Adding comments and being bombarded with spam comments is anything but conversational, it’s sycophantic in the sense that the blogger controls the conversation, thus making it a monologue, and in effect largely what traditional publications are.
The problem, of course, is that despite the obsession these days around blogs, be it Rafat Ali’s Content Next Media, Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch, Om Malik’s GigaOmniMedia or Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s Blogger Mojo - allrighty, scratch that last bit of shameless and delusional promotion - blog are not really publications in the strict sense that advertisers want.
Don’t get me wrong, some provide better food for thought and fodder than most venerable publications do, but they offer neither the:
- brand equity,
- audience demographic, nor
- reach
that advertisers like MSFT ask for. So savvy salesmen like John Battelle go in, pitch these “beyond the banner” ideas and elite A-list bloggers go along with it, because, well, they’re either inexperienced in traditional publishing, think they’re beyond traditional publishing rules or simply don’t see anything wrong with it. [Update: Battelle’s comments here].
Fred Wilson, I can imagine, sees nothing wrong with this because he pays his proceeds to charity. To him, the problem is yours, not his. [Update: See Fred’s comment and link to this post in the comments].
Richard McManus, who runs one of the more in-depth blogs and is a model for what blogging tools should be used for, probably could care less because his empire is growing and he welcomes the MSFT seal of approval. [Update: Read Richard’s two cents here].
Michael Arrington boasts about his conflicts of interest and this is probably on page 2 of his list of potential conflicts. [Update: just as I suspected, Arrington comes out gunning and throws a red herring at Valleywag, which makes you wonder about the validity of some of his earlier MSFT claims: “Take Time To Understand: Why Silverlight is Important“. Not surprisingly, notice how on his CrunchNotes post he suddenly calls the MSFT slogan “lame.” Class all the way. My beef with Arrington’s stance is this he’ll come out and say that he wants to be larger than CNET, implying he’s in the same category of publications etc., yet he wants to be evaluated based on a different set of rules. That’s utterly hypocritical and arrogant. When you scan the landscape of tech bloggers, you get a sense of who will stick around and be relevant in 1 or 5 years, and who won’t be. Judging by his reaction to this, you can imagine where I cast my vote on his legacy. Once in a while, humility goes a long way, but we’re wasting our breath here].
Paul Kedrosky, a very smart VC with a great concise blog’s tagline is Infectious Greed, so I doubt he cares much about our objection. [Update: Paul’s answer, here].
I am surprised to see Om Malik go along with this, with his B2.0 background and what not, I could see him passing but when someone comes to you as a writer and says MSFT wants to partner with you, how could you turn that down? Of course, he has VCs now with high expectations, and adding MSFT to his client list is too good to pass up. [Update: Om reacts in a classy way, as suspected, but we think he’s just taking it way too hard.]
Mainly, the point I’m making, is that this comes with the territory and new terrain they’re charting. We’re still experimenting with blogs, and while they’re not going to be much different than “traditional media” down the road, they are now.
Take me for example, if I’m going to write this story, I should technically email all of the parties involved and get their take (that’s what CNET, Winer and Denton, I presume did). But I can’t be bothered. I’m a PR spinster myself when I need to be, I don’t to hear such spinning from others. I’ve also worked as a VP of Sales and been in Battelle’s shoes and know it ain’t easy.
I worked for 7 years in ad sales and held some publishing and editorial duties and always sought to avoid any potential conflicts of interest, but with blogs, we sometimes think it’s different. Over time, it’s not different, and things like this to be done to incite (oh oh here I go) a conversation about whether or not it’s kosher.
Update added: All it would have required was for the bloggers to make a post on their blogs explaining what it was. It’s not, after all, like they were writing up posts about MSFT’s People Ready campaign… but once you write text for a client, you’re not really a publisher, you’re an ad agency.
While Ask.com has run some irreverent and in most people’s opinions, ineffective ads, it’s gotten people talking about what Ask.com should be stressing, effectively making the ad campaign effective, in a crazy way.
I really doubt that Battelle et al. thought this would get bloggers’ attention in a good way. Frankly, it makes me distance from MSFT, dislike Battelle’s tactic (note singular John) and distrust what the bloggers have to say.
But in the end, few of them actually blog because they need to, they blog because they like to, meaning that they really have no one to please but themselves.
All right, people, let’s move in… now we’re giving MSFT way too much credit, and promo.
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