Michael Arrington, one of the bloggers whom Microsoft paid to use its "people-ready" catchphrase, is less friendly to conversational marketers when other sites are getting the money. From the archives of Arrington's Techcrunch:
At PayPerPost, bloggers are offered cash to write about products. Disclosure is optional, and often the bloggers are required to only express positive comments... This "virus" seems here to stay... Blurring the lines in this way -- facilitating the pollution of the blogosphere while creating an illusion of doing something good for the public, is a good business move for PayPerPost. But it is a terrible development for the blogsphere and public trust. I hope that very few bloggers are suckered into going along with this. [From PayPerPost is officially absurd, Techcrunch, October 2006]
In the case of the Microsoft ad, we were quoted how we had become "people ready," whatever that means. We do these all the time...generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid. [From I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! -- on Arrington's personal site, Crunchnotes, June 2007]
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