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."
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.
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....
Nothing, as long as Adblock catches the ads before I have to see them.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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)
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".
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.
I get the feeling, most bloggers would be pretty open about this. "Hey guys, look. Microsoft wants to pay for me to come up with a 30 word comment on how I feel about __________. What an awesome deal! mood: chipper status: lonely music: brittney spears"
Looks like we'll need to modify Adblock's settings to filter out entire blogs. Then we'll have a true, dependable People-Ready Browser.