I completely disagree with Marshall Kirkpatrick. “Disclosure & outreach all needing to be played out”? Who is he kidding? All anyone’s doing in the blogosphere is writing whatever they want into an online equivalent of a diary and if we happen to have some folks reading our blather, god bless the reader. If they click on a GoogleAd – better yet! Hell – a lot of us are just typing “stream of thought”. In fact, Marshall seems to just vent his cranium when he types.

Credibility? Since when do we need these supposed “rules of conduct”? Hell, why don’t we just setup a government division to regulate blog sponsorship while we’re at it? Whatever happened to just letting people make up their own mind – regardless of whether or not a blogger “discloses” their sponsorship?

I don’t even find this immoral. If someone gets free product and decides they want to be a frickin’ shill and sell their credibility to the highest bidder WITHOUT TELLING READERS, that’s their prerogative. Online publishers do this all the time by hocking some company’s wares and don’t disclose jack. Certain research groups that crank out free “research papers” for download have been doing this for years. Readers in turn can judge for themselves whether the site has any ulterior motivations and frankly “caveat reader”.

Why? They’re not paying a damned thing to read a blogger’s content. And that’s the difference: If I’m coughing up $99 a year for someone’s opinion, THEN I have a problem with them suddenly turning into a shill because there’s an agreement, a contract if you will, around a lack of bias, between myself and the service. But even then, I simply vote with my wallet: I halt my subscription. I might get a little upset if they chose to hide their affliation with said “sponsor”, but again… this is all predicated on the fact that I’m paying for someone’s product and that’s their “honest opinion”.

These bloggers that are complaining about this “credibility, disclosure, and influence” crock are just a little too self-important. They think their online scribblings are the equivalent of the Associated Press: Gospel, globally influencial, and literary gold and it’s just not. The moment that people start dropping the almighty dollar for said blogger’s opinion… that’s the day they can put a hard value on their contributions.

Also by writing a review based on a known configured 64 bit high end system you will have a much better experience than if you just upgraded your PC at home thus causing a blogger to (perhaps) mistakenly communicate that this will be the experience for anyone who upgrades to Vista.

I turned down a laptop from Intel about 3 months ago. It just didn’t feel right. I’ve taken less expensive gear though and maybe I shouldn’t even have done that. Like Marshall says it’s kind of all being figured out in the blogosphere (especially right now).