Evangelism, Transparency, and Integrity in the blogosphere
I was just reading a post on Scoblizer where Robert is talking about the iPhone price drop and in the middle of the post I came across this statement:
Seagate, today, just brought out new hard drives. More capacity. More features. Lower price.
Now I know Seagate sponsors the Scoble Show, so it was not really a surprise to me, but it seemed like a square peg getting jammed in a round hole to see that in a totally unrelated blog post. If there was a big badge on his blog saying “this blog is sponsored by Seagate” I think it would be much better, but there is no such disclosure, whereas you go to the Scoble Show and Seagate is all over it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anyone is totally unbiased, and i’ve written about schwag before but I like to see it up front, rather than woven into unrelated blog posts.
The reason I bring this up is not to attack Robert, the Vallywag is there for that, I do it because i think he is a pretty important figure in the blogosphere and I think his conduct in the blogosphere often sets the bar. I mean he just co-authored the Social Media Bill of rights.
Thoughts?
One Comment, Comment or Ping
david
Very interesting. In general, I’m with you that there should to disclosure. There’s nothing explicitly wrong with mentioning a sponsor, but you should say something more like, “Seagate, on of our sponsors, recently lower prices.”
Sep 6th, 2007
Reply to “Evangelism, Transparency, and Integrity in the blogosphere”