An Open Letter to Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch

“PayPerPost.com [is] a marketplace for companies to connect with bloggers who are willing to blog about a product - for a price … Is this a bad joke designed to torpedo the blogosphere’s credibility in general? … If we’re all trying to negotiate a space between Hollywood and mainstream journalism, this is taking things way too far towards the most insipid parts of Hollywood.” - Marshall Kirkpatrick in TechCrunch’s “PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul“

Marshall,

The idea of PayPerPost really shouldn’t be so shocking to you. I see this as coming down to two core issues:

Issue #1: Free Enterprise

Companies looking to promote their products and services pay for ads in newspapers, radio spots, and TV commercials. They pay for ads at movie theaters. They pay celebrities to endorse their products. They pay event staffing companies to hire pretty college girls to hand out freebies at shopping malls. They pay grocery stores to print coupons on the back of your receipt, and pay the post office to deliver junk mail to your mailbox. Some of them even pay spammers and spyware companies.

So my question back to you is: Why wouldn’t companies hire bloggers? (Not why shouldn’t.) In the world of free enterprise, you pay to get your name out among the people who will buy your stuff. The blogosphere is a logical, cheap way to generate name recognition and build a network of “reliable” references. I’m not saying this is a good thing for society or for bloggers, just that it seems to be a logical extension of marketplace penetration.

Issue #2: A-Listers Have Unique Concerns

This discussion goes to a deeper issue, I believe, about the credibility of bloggers in general. I think you’re looking at this from an “A-List” perspective. Your readership and the revenues generated from traffic to TechCrunch depend on how people perceive your impartiality. Getting paid to do reviews would severely damage your credibility in the blogosphere. You’re on top, and with that status comes the traffic you need to generate revenue. (I counted 7 ads on the page surrounding your post.) Be honest: you get paid to write.

The little guys, in the meantime, don’t enjoy your status, your traffic, or your revenue streams. They blog because they want to express themselves, they aspire to get where you are, or they are passionate about something. (Or they want to talk about their cat… sigh.) I’m willing to bet the average no-name blogger would love to get paid to write. Nothing validates self-expression quite so well as fame or fortune. PayPerPost may be a temptation for some. So, the D-listers and the Z-listers will get paid to post, and they audience they reach in a lifetime will be less than the number of people who just read your article.

Personally, my own reputation is worth more to me than PayToPost, so I wouldn’t bother it.

The Bad News

The blogosphere doesn’t have “general credibility” to be torpedoed. The mainstream media doesn’t take you, as a blogger, seriously, regardless of what list you are on. Try as you might, you will always be lumped in with the unwashed masses of B- through Z-list bloggers. PayPerPost is just further “proof” to the mainstream media that blogging is no different than airing opinions around the water cooler.

The Good News

Pay-per-posters aren’t going to indirectly destroy your personal credibility within the blogosphere. All you have to do is declare you don’t take money for reviews, and you are protected. Express outrage at the idea, and you’re even better protected. You’ve done that, so the problem is solved.

- Mark

I decided a mashup of Google Maps and Colorado Springs traffic cameras would be a nice way to try out the GMap API. My goal was to make it so visitors could click on a map marker and see a live camera feed in the popup balloon. The result: SpringsCam.

The trickiest bit of the endeavor was tracking down where the cameras actually are, but after that the whole project took only a few hours. I spent more time on look-n-feel stuff than I did on the programmatic side, which goes to show what a great API the GMap stuff has. (I created the graphics in Inkscape, a sweet open-source vector graphics tool.)

In the off-chance my experiment generates some (web) traffic, I added a weather banner and links for local transportation sites, bus schedules, road conditions, etc. Enjoy!

6/29/2006 Update:

My hosting provider has had some server issues related to disk space. If you visited the site today and had problems, give it a try again. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I learned an interesting lesson over the last year: The world decides what is interesting.

I’ve merrily typed away about RSS and Atom and other arcane trivialities for the last year, but the most popular post on inkBlots hasn’t been about syndication, it was about my bad experience with Lending Tree on May 24, 2005.

Over 30 people have shared their stories on “Cutting down the Lending Tree“, the vast majority of whom either had a bad experience with Lending Tree, or who narrowly avoided one after reading the post and the stories of commenters.

To those of you who have added your horror stories: Thank you. Enough small voices banded together can sometimes be heard over the din of radio and TV ads. To those of you who avoided the Lending Tree trap because of the experiences we have posted, good luck, God speed, and spread the word.

I still get unwanted emails from Lending Tree brokers, despite my attempts to shut down all communications from them a year ago. (Thankfully, no more phone calls.) They will keep my information for a minimum of another year, so I expect more unwanted contact from Lending Tree for quite some time.

Adios Puerto Vallarta, hola snow-covered Denver. I’m back from vacation, sadly. I confess I hoped that while I was gone some small things would have been taken care of in my absence. Like:

- A fabulous completely free online reader (Not: Bloglines, NewsGator, Rojo, GoogleReader)
- An OPML spec that makes sense
- SSAPI adopted by everyone

It would appear, however, that the world slacked off while I frolicked in Mexico. Well, back in to the fray.