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."
Any blogger that supports their site through ads is making money through a marketing campaign. You can even pay Google to put other peoples' ads on your site for you. What's wrong with that?
Good god, it's like a competition on the back of a pack of corn flakes: "Write an essay on how you feel about the word "Crunchy!", and win a trip to Paris!"
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I wonder how much of this thing goes on that we *don't* hear about.
Looks like it worked - allready mentioned on slashdot!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
So Microsoft paid bloggers per click to advertise for them?
Where's the scandal here? There's no mention of Microsoft forcing these guys to say that they weren't being paid, and doing something like this is up to the personal ethics of the individual blogger, surely?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
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.
To me, 'People-ready business' represents a new low in catch-phrase marketing. We all know 'can you hear me now', a stoned man saying 'dude we're getting a Dell', 'works out of the box' and the Vegemite song sucked. But new levels are being reached, requiring of extending the "int catchphrase_rating" to "long int catchphrase_rating". These levels are being reached by the one and only, Microsoft.
/Waits patently for check
For a while now, Microsoft has been looking for a way to make money. Their business has been dying down not due to competition, but due to sheer lack of anything to sell. So comes Vista. With it's color-coded file explorer, OSX ripoff interface and Vista-only-for-no-real-reason DX10, they were sure they were saved.
This was not the case.
The hotcake Vista was predicted to be turned out more to be a segway, and (while ducking from flying chairs) the marketing department had to come up with a way to sell this new steaming turd. Enter 'people-ready business'.
I am not personally sure what this is intended to mean. Are they attempting to sell a business that is ready for people to use? Doesn't Mcdonalds fall into this category? Or is it an attempt to make people ready for a business? If so, what business? Microsoft?
Has Microsoft finally admitted to being the Borg? Is the next tag line, "lower your shields and prepare to be boarded"?
Who knows. This blogger is unsure.
Great Intellect...
I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but last I checked they weren't having a problem with their Google page rank, so I do doubt that that was part of their "People-ready business" blog campaign.
Surely the Slashdot crowd has some ideas of their own as to what "people-ready business" might mean?
Business ready to fleece the people?
If we're talking Vista, maybe it means business with some people-sized holes where the customers should havebeen inserted?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Sources report Slashdot was popularized a new term "Money-ready bloggers", a term coined to discredit unetical bloggers who choose topics based on money bounties.
unfinished: (adj.)
A people-driven business leverages collective synergy with a quality-driven approach that focuses on delivering key objectives. It is quite obvious, actually.
(The BS bingo blurb is courtesy of the DailyWTF)
What would happen if all Slashdotters started linking People-ready bussiness to Linux' Wikipedia page?
Maybe that's the People-Related Business they're talking about.
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.
> passel of A List Bloggers
I thought the collective noun was "a crock of bloggers".
I'd be happy to clarify what "people-ready business" means to me.
Money for nothing, pix for free
the parent comment is right on the money...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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..
What Microsoft did was an obvious and blatant violation of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association ethics code. The bloggers should have publicly criticized these Microsoft tactics instead of going along with them.
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.
"What's wrong with that?"
Well everything. They should have disclosed it for starters. If you see a banner, you know it is an ad, same with those noxious google and other links, there is no question that it comes from a paid source.
The bloggers are guilty of greed and ethical lapses to the point that they should be shut down. There is no excuse for doing this, period.
MS is even more guilty for paying them to do this, knowing that it was unethical to do, it is even more unethical to support. I would go on a rant about MS and unethical behavior, but that is old hat by now.
What it comes down to in the end is that MS destroyed several bloggers in a cynical attempt to subvert the journalistic process, but I am not so sure any of the blogs could be considered journalism. Those involved knew full well what they were doing, and can't hide behind any weasel words or excuses. It is greed over ethics, pure and simple.
The people who took that money can never be trusted again, they should pack up and go home. MS isn't trusted at all, and while it is wishful thinking, I hope they will pack up and go home as well for inflicting MeII on us.
As a writer myself, I would hope my boss would fire me if I ever even brought this kind of bribery up, much less did it. I am pretty sure he would which is why I work where I do (The Inquirer FWIW).
-Charlie
Whoa there. This is not a case of "M$ is ebul!!!11one", but a case of proper journalism in blogging. When respected blogger take money to blog (positively) about something, things go wrong. It's kinda the same as reading a payed-for review in a magazine: it's bound to sound positive.
Now, placing ads on your site is something completely different. It's clearly not part of the bloggers opinion, nor is it hard to distinguish it from the real news you're reading. In this case, the line is not blurred, it's simply gone.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Here is the text without links, which it should let me post:
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Recently Microsoft unveiled their new slogan, "People-ready business". They have asked bloggers to write about what exactly this means to them. As someone who has grown up on Microsoft technologies, not only in the home, but in the workplace as well, I feel that I am very qualified to write about what this means to me.
Not everyone is a computer genius, and ever for those with strong technical skills, information technology is ever changing. It is near impossible to keep up, and thusly it is vital to design technologies that are intuitive to the end user. Time shouldn't be wasted on fighting with the technology. The tools should be designed in a way so that users can easily take advantage of them. They should also feature-rich and powerful so that advanced users can maximize productivity. Microsoft's crown jewel in this regard is likely their Office Suite. Not many people may recall, but at one time Microsoft was the underdog in Word Processing and Office software. It had to wrestle control of the market away from such giants as WordPerfect and dBase IV. Microsoft Office has become the de facto standard for how most people work and communicate.
However, being "People-ready" means the tool isn't as important as the people who use them. Our documents and databases, our emails and calendars, it is the data that we create that is so vital to us. In that regard, there has been growing concern over Microsoft's proprietary document standards. When creating a document in one version of Office, can you be assured that a user with another version of Office can open it? How sure are you that you'll be able to open your data 5 years from now, or 10? How useful is the tool, if we end losing access to everything we create with it? Shouldn't our content belong to us? Being "People-ready" means empowering the people to fully control their documents. In that regard, I recommend everyone to look into alternatives like OpenOffice and KOffice, which both utilize the Open Document Format.
Being "People-ready" also means being flexible and far-reaching. When working and communicating with others in a global environment, having open standards allows for people around the globe to connect together, even across different platforms and technologies. Again, technology should be a tool that allows us to collaborate, not intrinsically divides us. End-users don't care about hardware levels, or version-numbers. They just want to be able to connect with other people. If Microsoft were truly dedicated to being "People-ready" their products would focus more on open-standards. Their web-browser would be standards-compliant, so that people can more easily develop web-sites and know that everyone will be able to see and use them the same way. Microsoft would utilize open-standards for applications like Outlook, so they could handle contacts and appointments with anyone regardless of platform. They would open up their instant messaging network, and instead build on an open platform like Jabber so that we can simply to one address for messaging, and bring everyone together under one service and one protocol for the entire world rather than a collection of diverse networks again that divide us.
A while back Microsoft ran a campaign about believing in the people who use their products. The campaign suggested that Microsoft wanted to encourage us to innovate and be successful, when in truth, no major company has done more to stifle the growth and development of other companies. Honest competition is fine in a capitalistic society, but repeatedly Microsoft has been accused, and often been found guilty of anti-trust practices. They have bought out companies, strong-armed vendors into locking out the competition, breaking the law, and operating with hostile intent to destroy other businesses. "People-ready business" is not threating to "fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google".
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It's always insightful to reverse a slogan and see what it means. Non-people ready business? People not ready business. People ready non-business?
So the slogan is just a restatement of the normal situation. It's spin.
I don't know, but it will probably have the side effect that googling for "people" and/or "business" will bring up microsoft.
I think the problem is that people can now use the Firehose to influence which stories we see. And since most people don't check the firehose too often, it can be (and maybe is being) influenced by the MS and Apple fans. That to me partly explains why we have been seeing too many of these stories lately. More interesting (and obscure) stories just don't pass muster.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
No, I'm New Here
And now.... Slashdot is helping Microsoft get the phrase "people ready business" out there, by posting a story about it, and using the phrase "people ready business" in the article... and, no doubt, numerous people will put "people ready business" into their replies to the article about "people ready business", thus, adding the number of times "people ready business" is on a single page...
I for one, will not help contribute to this meaningless mentioning of the phrase "people ready business" in slashdot, which is helping microsoft get it's phrase "people ready business" higher up in google's rankings, and into people's heads...
That's all I have to say about that....
ps..... "people ready business"
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
News Flash: Bloggers accept money to promote products and brands.
Another news flash: So do radio DJs, actors, video game companies, advice columnists and virtually everybody else who has a large number of readers/listeners. Hell, there's been some product placement in newspaper comics lately.
Comment of the year
But I do not go to work for some bunch of scum sucking pigs just because I could earn more money than I currently do. Instead I work for a company that I find agreeable.
I know alot of people who try and pass on the responsiblity for what they do at work to management, and I tell them what a load of crap that is too. If you don't like what you do then find a better job, even if it does involve a pay cut. Otherwise you are complicit in whatever misdeeds you might be asked to perform at work. And don't tell me that if someone said 'here, have lots of money and all you have to do is write some blog entries', you'd say no. Not if the money were good. I wouldn't. Then you have no morals, but why do you find it so hard to believe that some of us do have a moral code which we value as such an important part of who we are that no amount of money would justify tearing it up and putting it in the bin.
And before you talk about how I have never been desperate enough, guess again. To get my current job involved me relocating a long way at considerable inconvenience to take a cut in salary.
I think I am probably in the minority in this otherwise the world would be a better place, but I am very unlikely to change in this regard. The only thing I can think of that might change my outlook would be watching my kids starve, but seeing as I have spent years in the past doing dead end jobs, I know I could return to this and still earn a not too dissimilar wage. Ethics are easy if your wealthy, but.. Actually, I think the opposite is true. Since I have never been wealthy, I have never been in situation where I got used to having alot of money to spend. Once you get used to having a large amount of money at you disposal (or your wife does) it is much harder to go back to being closer to the breadline.
This also makes it easier when looking for work as my salary demands are lower. This does not mean I am bad at my job or that I value my work less. It simply means that I get other satisfaction from my job apart from just getting a monthly wage. I think it actually means I take far more pride in the code I produce. This argument should not really come as any surprise to people who use Linux as this is built and maintained on similar, non-monetary values.
I dont read
...there is a lot of people out there who view the blog as some sacred confessional that shall not be besmirched with bought-and-sold thoughts. Yeah, and they're often called "bloggers". They're the ones that want all of the authority of legitimate journalists without any of the responsibility.Click here to get to their "post your own story" page. http://peopleready.federatedmedia.net/prpost
"I knew my business was people-ready the day I dumped all Microsoft products and switched to linux. No more worries about people complaining about viruses in emails or attachments, no more rebooting."
The response page:
" Thanks!
Thanks for posting! We'll give your post a quick once-over and get it up on the site shortly. "
Somehow, I'm skeptical.
Kevin Smith on Prince
I've never heard of software designed for the use of cats or whales, although I'm sure it would mk an awesome article to read.
Microsoft put the "sucks" in "success".
"come and see the violence inherent in the [open-source] system...help, help, i'm being repressed..."
nice try