Center for Citizen Media

Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media had an entry about PayPerPost last week called PayPerPost: A Cancer on the Blogosphere, or Merely Semi-Sleazy? What comes up in just about every one of these kinds of articles/blog entries is the idea that some people feel that other people being paid to write about products on their weblogs is okay as long as they explicitly disclose that fact. In many of these cases, the people complaining the loudest about PayPerPost don't follow their own advice and let everyone know that when they are writing about a particular product that they may have been given it for free or may have some connection to the company they are writing about. To me, some of this seems like endorsements of products made by radio hosts. For example, Leo Laporte "endorses" a variety of products on his KFI radio show each weekend. (By the way, why do radio stations have some of the ugliest websites around, with all kinds of stuff flashing and huge graphics and too many items on their home page?) He may or may not use these products or even believe they are good, but an advertiser is paying him to say some nice things about the product. He doesn't say that he really uses all the products (he does say that he uses some of them), but it's clear that the advertisers are paying for his voice to be associated with their product whether or not he actually uses it. This seems to be very close to what PayPerPost does. If I write about something, the 2 or 3 people who read my weblog can see by the tags that it's a PayPerPost entry, so they should be clear that it's something like an advertisement. I'm obviously not Leo Laporte, so it's still not clear to me whether there is a real benefit from my endorsement, but that's the way the system works.