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March 07, 2006
Ghostblogging
Wal-Mart is ghostwriting for some bloggers. That's taking astroturfing to a whole new level, n'est-ce pas?
Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit.com, one of the oldest blogs on the Web, said that even in the blogosphere, which is renowned for its lack of rules, a basic tenet applies: "If I reprint something, I say where it came from. A blog is about your voice, it seems to me, not somebody else's."And what do the bloggers get out of it? Yep, you guessed it:
One blog, Iowa Voice, run by Mr. Pickrell, pleads for advertisers to buy space on the blog in anticipation of more traffic because of the article.
I usually try to refrain from moralizing on this blog about authorship topics, not because I don't have opinions nor because I want to hide them, but simply because I think the issue gets more than its fair share of moralizing, and not nearly enough analysis. So when I blog about authorship, I often have that meta-purpose of promoting authorship as a worthy topic of analysis. That said, I will weigh in clearly on the question of corporate ghostblogging:
That.
Is.
Disgusting.
Atrios, incidentally, goes at this story from a different angle:
Unless I'm missing something this New York Times article is just another stab at holding bloggers to ethical standards and practices which don't apply anywhere else in the universe.Well, yes. That's a fair and important issue. But let's don't lose sight of the fact that posing as a private blogger when you're actually a corporate mouthpiece, especially when you go to the extent of having that corporation ghost your material for you, is—disgusting. And that's my answer to the question Matt Stoller asks: "So what if bloggers reiterate what Walmart wants them to say?" It's a question of whether the blogger is what s/he says s/he is.
Posted by senioritis at March 7, 2006 03:03 PM
Comments
I *wondered* how long it would take you to post on this...let's see, a total of what? 3 or 4 hours? since I first heard the story today (I'm binging on NPR today...)
Posted by: susansinclair at March 7, 2006 05:24 PM
Haw. Everybody knew I'd be on this one, both feet first.
Posted by: senioritis at March 7, 2006 06:18 PM