Bloggers for hire

[im10ashus]

By Stephen Armstrong

The days of genuine "citizen-generated" media may be numbered. Suddenly big business is all over the blogosphere, paying armies of willing recruits to praise products.

Towards the end of last month a posting appeared on a website called "Blog Republic - By the Bloggers. For the Bloggers". "Blog Republic is looking for bloggers who are interested in being paid per post," it said. "We're looking for motivated bloggers in the following areas: cellphones, broadband, travel, gadgets, health, stocks and blogging. We're looking for quality bloggers who can make insightful posts. The more you post, the more you earn."

This plea caused quite a flurry in the online world. After all, if blog culture has been about anything, it has been about sticking it to large corporations rather than taking their advertising dollars. Last year, for instance, Dell would not replace a faulty computer owned by the influential blogger Jeff Jarvis. He started chronicling the company's poor service on his blog buzz machine.com under the heading "Dell Hell". His postings hit such a nerve that Jarvis was soon receiving 10,000 visits a day.

Sites attacking McDonald's, Starbucks, Nestlé, Nike and just about every oil company proliferate around the net. With a successful legal action against these vociferous individuals costing more in legal fees and bad publicity than the victory would be worth, blogs have been seen as an extension of consumer activism. A poll conducted by NOP World Consumer in March last year found that 50 per cent of bloggers express opinions about a company or product at least once a week, while another survey, for Hostway, showed that 77 per cent of online consumers viewed blogs as a useful way to get insights into the products they were looking to buy. With all these opinions reaching their customers, companies felt like a boxer attacked by thousands of children - staggering from tiny blow to tiny blow, unable to hit back but sure that, at some point, damage was being done.

This summer, however, something changed.

[rosesaylavee]

1. We've seen a good deal of this here

tho it can't be proven unless the paid bloggers fess up and say, yeah, I got paid X dollars to post on DU about XYZ. The onus remains on a thinking individual to 'figure out the world or the issue of the day or TRUTH'.

Reasoning out a post - not taking it at face value and trusting it because it's source is a blogger on DU or Huffington Post or Daily Kos is becoming more important because of this trend.

[Unbowed]

2. Disgusting.

The neocons are doing it here but I thought they were doing it for their sick ideals. Money talks apparently.