A ruckus on the World Wide Web (or is it the Wild Wild West) over the Pay Per Post concept is still kicking up dust around the blogosphere. Adding to that dustup is a disturbance in the force caused by PR Agency Edelman supposedly hiring professionals to create a blog for their client, the evil Walmart. The skinny is the pseudo-blog was a completely fictious effort about folks driving their Winnebagos around the country and spending the night in Walmart parking lots. Even more disturbing to the locals is that Edelman, which preaches transparency and disclosure, hasn't blogged back about the charges.
Yes, there are integrity issues, when interests aren't disclosed. I buy that. But golly gee, what did folks expect. Anyone could have sniffed these kind of developments long ago.
Parallel to that conversation is one about the future of journalism as impacted by blogging. You know, readers become writers and all that stuff, newspapers will die off or not, media empires will crumble or not. The little guy will rule. That is until the little guy comes up with a method of commercializing what others don't want commercialized.
In a sphere, or scape, or whatever it is, where a good portion of time is spent talking about monetizing blogging through advertising, isn't it just a tiny bit hypocritical to kvetch over different approaches on how to make a buck? Sure there's some altruism here and there, but give me a break.
Call it evolution (not intelligent design, please.) I just see these kind of things as the natural course of human events. The Blogosphere is a carnival after all.
