Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Pays Bloggers to Tout MS Slogan
Stony Stevenson writes "In an effort to inject Microsoft's latest slogan, 'People-ready business', into popular usage (and no doubt raise its Google page rank), Microsoft asked a passel of A List Bloggers to write blurbs on what this meaningless phrase means to them. Michael Arrington, Om Malik, Fred Wilson, Richard MacManus and a handful of others happily agreed to churn out some mush for Microsoft, which it later used in banner ads. What it really meant to these guys was income. Redmond paid the bloggers for every user who clicked through to the PRB microsite. That caused other bloggers, lead by Gawker chief Nick Denton, to rightfully question their ethics. A spitball war has been raging ever since."
A whore will fake an orgasm for you, if you pay for it.
Oh, and astroturf isn't real grass.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There's a whole profession of people writing text for advertisement.
What IS moraly wrong is presenting it as a personal opinion; that's verbal prostitution. Publishing it on the web would be indecent exposure.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Could this have been a part of Microsoft's plan. Seems to me that this controversy will help them much more than the original paid-for blogs.
the difference, is this is a cash for comments style scandal. no harm in having banner ads, but your opinions should reflect the truth not you advertising. otherwise why would we bother listening?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Next time some blogger makes a fuss about not being treated like "real" journalists just point them to the Cringley/McKraken articles.
They will be treated like journalists when they can demonstratte some ethical and professional resposibility.
Not that all journalists are perfect but they do lose thier jobs when they get caught red handed.
Anyway all the best blogs are deeply personal, opinionated, and, do not pretend to be journalism.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
This sort of campaign blurs the distinction between comment and advertising.
It diminishes the value of the opinions being blogged and potentially tars all tech bloggers with the same brush.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I'd be happy to clarify what "people-ready business" means to me.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Like you say, there are bills to pay. So there's no problem if Microsoft want to pay these people as writers to write pieces for them on a particular topic. The problem starts when those pieces end up as content in a place which is normally home to opinion. The value of opinion pieces all lies in their honesty. If you think you're reading opinion when you're really reading an advert, you're being misled. And that's bad.
Most of the time when celebrities do ads for money there's no conflict with their actual profession. In fact since they're often actors it's just another script to them.
Might I suggest that we all blog the term People Ready Business, and link it to www.ubuntu.com or our www.apple.com our our favourite decent provider of software, and someone who deserves the publicity. A bit like all the tags for VISTA on amazon marking it as DRM Filled, Buggy, Bad Vista etc..
Isn't this what's been happening in most magazines now for years?
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
We're seeing too much of that on Slashdot these days, not just the astroturfers posting their messages, but endless bombardment of MS-oriented slashvertisements in place of real articles. Sometimes it's several content-free articles per day apparently posted just to keep MS in the headlines. How about easing up on that and getting back to technology?
None of the negative coverage is getting through, such as a 30% return rate for the Palladium testbed, so that suggests that Slashdot is a participant (willing or unwilling) in spreading that movement's marketing churn.
A moratorium on MS churn, whether slashvertisements or otherwise, even one day a week or one week a month would do wonders to improve Slashdot. Let's leave political parties like MS on the sideline and re-focus on technology.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
One of the biggest issues with blogging is that there is no separation between the person who is writing, and the person who is trying to make money. Most other media outlets have separate departments for those things to create a division between content and advertising.
There is always friction between the two, but it is much harder to attempt to be objective when you can sit and rationalize it to yourself. This is not to say that no one has ethics stronger than their profit motive, but it's no surprise to find that the reverse often holds true.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.