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Microsoft Pays Bloggers to Tout MS Slogan

Posted by samzenpus on from the we-love-our-sponsor-and-their-product dept.

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."

7 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. In other news... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Nothing wrong with writing advertisement by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  3. MS sits back and watches by c3ph45 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Nothing unusual by timmarhy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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....
  5. Bloggers != Journalists by supersnail · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:Ethics are easy if your wealthy, but.. by bateleur · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Real life costs money, and if someone offers you money to do something which, lets face it in this case, is a pretty trivial and short term thing, what's the big deal?
    Have you actually read what these bloggers wrote?

    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.
  7. Easy Way To Counteract That by geordie_loz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..